26

Chris didn’t go home. Having him in the house overnight allowed me to get a good night’s sleep. Knowing how much he hated being away from Amanda and the girls made it even more moving that he had made the trip. The next morning, I took Justice out for a run and struggled to complete my short three-mile course. The emotional trauma of the last few weeks had caught up with me.

After the run, Chris and I ate breakfast together, and he told me about his trip to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. Although I wished he had filled me in before going, I was proud of my brother for standing up to Mace James and Antoine Marshall.

After breakfast, I put on my black pin-striped skirt and jacket that I’d always considered my best power suit and went a little heavier than normal on the makeup. I used some concealer to get rid of the dark circles under both eyes and strapped on a stylish new watch I had bought last Christmas. On the way out the door, I hugged Chris and thanked him for coming.

“Do you need anything?” he asked. I knew he needed to get back to Rabun.

“I’ll be all right.”

At work, I went about my normal business of handling the morning docket, which consisted mostly of motions to suppress and bond revocations. Though nobody said anything about the prior night’s news report, I could tell that most of the defense attorneys were happy I was getting my turn in the hot seat. By eleven thirty I was back in my office, working on a memorandum to Bill Masterson on the issue of Caleb Tate’s polygraph test. I knew that Masterson wouldn’t be worried about the admissibility of the test into evidence—the law was clear on that. But I was concerned that he might give it too much weight in his evaluation of the case.

Because most law enforcement agencies rely on polygraph tests as one of their investigative techniques, the reliability of the test tends to be greatly overestimated by cops and prosecutors. I knew better, based in part on my experience with Antoine Marshall’s appeal, where the admissibility and reliability of the test had been major issues.

In my memo to Masterson, I cited a National Academy of Sciences report showing that fifty-seven of the eighty research studies supporting the reliability of polygraphs came to their conclusions using flawed data. The NAS study concluded that the level of a polygraph’s reliability was “greater than chance, yet short of perfection.” There was a high percentage of false positives, and at the same time some famous criminals had beaten polygraph tests on more than one occasion. Aldrich Ames, for example, a notorious Soviet spy working for the CIA, passed with flying colors—not once but twice.

I also explained how people could defeat the test by manufacturing a crisis during the control questions. Some suspects would force themselves to think about their most painful real-life experience while others would bite the insides of their cheeks so the pain would increase their breathing and heart rate. These same persons would calm themselves when facing the relevant questions and make sure they kept their breathing under control. I thought Tate had probably taken the test a few times off air, mastered these techniques, and then subjected himself to the televised test we had watched.

I proofread the memo a couple of times and added a final paragraph stating that I knew I was no longer on the case but hoped this might help whoever took over.

That afternoon, I took the memo to court so I could personally deliver it to Masterson. I had to give the guy credit—while other DAs delegated all of the cases to their top assistants, Masterson insisted on trying some of the more-serious felonies. On this day, he was handling a murder charge against a man accused of killing a prostitute. Granted, he was probably getting some political mileage out of the case, but at least he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. In fact, Masterson looked like he was rather enjoying himself.

The defense attorney used a lot of electronic exhibits and relied heavily on PowerPoint during his closing argument. But Masterson just paced around the courtroom and thundered against the defendant—old school and very effective. It was the kind of dominating performance that I hoped to be able to replicate one day. I found myself studying his style as I had done so many times before. When and why does he pause? How does he use voice inflections? How does he incorporate the testimony and exhibits into what he’s saying? I knew I had to maintain my own style in the courtroom, but I was humble enough to realize that I could learn a lot from an old pro like Bill Masterson.

When the jury retired to deliberate, Masterson came back to where I was seated and greeted me warmly. I was always a bundle of nerves while the jury was out deliberating, but Masterson appeared ready to move on to the next thing as if the verdict was a foregone conclusion.

“I did a little memo on the reliability of polygraph tests,” I said, handing him the paper.

He glanced at it and gave it back to me. “Can you e-mail me an electronic copy?”

“Sure,” I said, a bit disappointed. I’d been hoping we could at least discuss it.

“You got a minute?” Masterson asked.

“Yeah.”

He led me out of the courtroom and down the hallway to a small conference room. We talked for a few minutes about his closing argument. I was sitting up straight in my chair while Masterson slouched back, draped over his chair, legs crossed at the ankles. He loved it when other attorneys came to watch him in court, and he was eager to get my evaluation. “What did you think of my closing? Anything you would have done differently? What’s your take on the jury?”

I answered his questions, and then he abruptly changed direction.

“What did Caleb Tate say to you before you told him you wanted to lynch him?”

“Well . . . again, I don’t think I used that particular word. But he basically told me that if we tried to indict him for the murder of his wife, it would get ugly for him and for us. I took it as a threat.”

Masterson grunted and I got his message—prosecutors need to have thick skin. “You sure he didn’t call you some kind of name?”

“I’m sure.”

“It would help if he cussed you out.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Okay, have you ever used the N-word or made any racial slurs against anybody?”

“You know me better than that.”

“Just answer the question.”

“No. Never.”

“This guy Isaiah Haywood did a nice job for you last night.”

“I saw.”

Masterson stretched a little. “You think they’ll find him guilty?”

“Caleb Tate?”

Masterson laughed. “No, the defendant in the case I just tried.”

I shrugged. “I’ve never seen you lose one yet. Some would say you cherry-pick ’em.”

This made Masterson smile. “You get to be DA, you can cherry-pick ’em too.”

“No thanks. I hate politics.”

Masterson checked his watch and apparently decided he needed to get back to the courtroom. “I guess that wraps it up,” he said.

I furrowed my brow. I was having a hard time keeping up with him today. “Wraps what up?”

“My investigation. I’ll probably wait a few days before I issue an official report.”

“That’s it?” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly. “That’s your whole investigation?”

He gave me a sly look. “Are you saying I shouldn’t trust you?”

“No, it’s just—”

“Seems to me that you’re still the best prosecutor for the job. If I let defense attorneys disqualify every prosecutor who stood up to them, it’d be impossible to run this office.”

It felt like somebody had lifted a hundred pounds from my shoulders. “Are you saying—?”

“You’ll get my report in a few days,” he interrupted. “I’m just giving you fair warning that you shouldn’t close your file out.”

I wanted to give the guy a hug, but I decided to play it professional. Though I stayed calm on the outside, the party had started inside. “You won’t be sorry.”

He shrugged it off. “Next time, Jamie, keep your mouth shut.”

“Yes, sir.”

Later that week, LA called with results from the fingernail tests. The levels of oxycodone and codeine in the fingernail segments that represented the last six months of Rikki’s life were high, matching the hair results. But the levels from the fingernail segments that represented the year before that were barely detectable. Taken as a whole, the results indicated that she had probably started taking the drugs in earnest about six months or so prior to her death. “It might have been seven months,” LA said, “which would explain the trace amounts in the older segments of her fingernails. Or she might have taken a few pills off and on during those earlier months. But nothing serious until the last six months of her life.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Baby, that’s way past good.”

I smiled. It was our first major break.

“And one more thing. The older fingernail extracts also contained trace amounts of morphine.”

“Morphine?” I asked.

“Could be a result of heroin use,” LA said. “But O’Leary doubts it. When heroin breaks down in the body, it turns into morphine and some other metabolite. The lab didn’t find that other metabolite. Makes O’Leary think that somebody slipped her morphine.”

“But not recently? More than six months ago?”

“That’s the way it looks.”