Corpus Delicti (David Brunelle Legal Thriller Book 6) Page 10

  “Did Kenny beat Amy?” Chen continued.

  Tina laughed more heartily this time, but she was laughing at Chen. “Well, yeah. Of course.” She rolled her eyes. “Like I said, she wasn’t the smartest. And Kenny is one mean mother fucker. She kept pissing him off. The girl just never learned.”

  Brunelle felt his face fall. But Chen kept his poker face. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  Tina frowned in thought for a moment. “I dunno. Probably a week before Kenny killed her.”

  Chen’s expression cracked just enough to raise an eyebrow at Brunelle. He turned back to Tina. “How do you know Kenny killed her? Did she say something?”

  “No. But he did.”

  More raised eyebrows, but Chen made no effort to conceal them. “Kenny said he killed her?”

  Tina shrugged. “Well, not exactly. He wasn’t all like, ‘I killed Amy.’ But after she disappeared, he would say shit like, ‘You know what I did to Amy? I can do that to you, too.’ His girls were scared shitless. And I don’t blame them. He’s crazy. Everybody knows he killed her. He wanted everybody to know.”

  Chen leaned back and considered the information. Brunelle considered the rules of evidence and broke his silence. The information wasn’t any good if it got excluded as hearsay.

  “Did you actually hear Kenny say that stuff yourself? Or did you just hear it from other girls?”

  “Both,” Tina answered. “All the girls were talking about it. But I also heard him say it a bunch of times to girls I was next to. He wasn’t shy about it. Like I said, he wanted people to know about it. He liked people being scared of him.”

  Brunelle nodded and leaned back. Most of that would be admissible—at least the times she actually heard it herself. Brunelle would need to nail down the exact number of times she’d heard it, and follow up with the prostitutes he said it to, but there would be time for that. The trip had just proved worth it. He could let Chen wrap it up.

  “How many times did you hear him say that to someone?” Chen followed up.

  Tina shrugged. “I dunno. A few, I guess.”

  “More than three?”

  Tina nodded. “Oh, yeah. Definitely.”

  “More than ten?”

  A frown. “No, probably not that many.”

  “And which girls?” Chen asked. More prostitutes meant more witnesses. Brunelle and Chen both knew that. Unfortunately, Tina could figure it out, too.

  “I don’t think I should say,” she answered. She suddenly seemed very aware of where she was, and who she was talking to—as if awakening from a dream. “Actually, I probably shouldn’t be saying anything at all.” She looked around a bit frantically. “Shit. What time is it?”

  Brunelle looked at his watch. “Ten twenty-three.”

  “Shit,” Tina repeated. She jumped to her feet. “I gotta get back. I’ve been gone for too long.”

  Brunelle and Chen looked to each other. Brunelle nodded. He had what he needed. A confession by Brown. ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you.’ Even if it’s said to a drug-addicted, street-level prostitute. The only trick would be getting the drug-addicted prostitute to the witness stand.

  “Don’t worry, Tina.” Brunelle stood up too. He pulled out his wallet. “I told you we’d pay for your time.”

  “No, it’s not that. I just…” She started pacing in a tight, awkward circle. “I shouldn’t be talking to cops. I’m not a snitch.”

  “Of course not,” Brunelle responded. “You’re a friend. Amy’s friend.”

  That was a bit of a gamble. He didn’t know whether Tina considered Amy a friend, but he supposed there was likely some camaraderie borne of their shared circumstances. It seemed to penetrate, even if only slightly. Tina stopped her crazy circle and looked at Brunelle, her eyes welling. “No. I’m a whore. A stupid whore. And I just admitted it to a couple of cops.”

  “I’m not a cop,” Brunelle corrected. “I’m a prosecutor.”

  Tina sniffled. “Oh, big fucking difference.”

  “There is a difference,” Brunelle offered. “I can give you immunity.”

  Tina’s eyebrows raised. Brunelle wasn’t sure if from curiosity of the offer, or ignorance of its meaning.

  “Full immunity,” he went on. “For the prostitution, the drugs, everything. You could start over.”

  Tina’s wet eyes narrowed slightly. She rubbed the back of her hand across her nose. “You can do that?”

  Brunelle nodded. “Yes.”

  But Tina had lived a hard enough life to know there’s always a catch. “And what do I have to do?”

  Brunelle frowned slightly. “You have to testify.”

  Tina’s eyes flared, sending a tear streaming down one cheek. “Against Kenny Brown? No! No fucking way. You’re crazy. I’m not snitching out Kenny Brown.”

  “You just did,” Chen pointed out.

  Tina resumed the frantic circle. “Oh, man. Oh, man. No. No, you said we were just talking. You didn’t say nothing about testifying. No. Uh-uhn. No way. No fucking way.”

  They were losing her. The last thing they needed was her panicking and telling her pimp about their meeting, or taking off out of state where they’d never find her. Brunelle needed her calm and nearby. At least until the trial.

  “Tina, Tina, relax.” Brunelle pulled out a bunch of twenties from his wallet—way too many—and stuffed them into her hand. “That’s way down the road. I’m hoping there won’t even be a trial. Most cases settle. We could get him dead to rights already on the pimping charges. When I explain to his lawyer that I have a bunch more witnesses about Amy, he’ll probably just take a plea bargain and you’ll never have to testify.”

  Tina stopped her pacing again and looked at Brunelle. She didn’t say anything, but she was listening.

  “If he takes a deal, there’s no trial,” Brunelle explained. “And if there’s no trial, there’s no need for witnesses. You’ll never have to set foot in a courtroom.”

  Tina narrowed her eyes again and crossed her arms. “I’m not testifying.”

  Her need to assert that confirmed for Brunelle that she would do it if compelled. She was trying to stare him down now because she knew she wouldn’t really refuse later. But no reason to call her on it just then.

  “Understood,” Brunelle replied, knowing full well he was going to subpoena her—but not right then. Right then, they needed to get her back to the motel with her hand full of cash, not a subpoena. He nodded toward the money still visible in her hand. “Let’s get you back. Thanks for your time.”

  Tina looked down at the money for several seconds. Then she crumpled the bills and shoved them into her purse. “Thanks for the break,” she said. “I hope I never see you two fuckers ever again.”

  Then she turned and strutted back to Brunelle’s car.

  Chapter 25

  The meeting with Tina had been a success. Chen did some follow up and discovered her real name was Jillian Hammond. Maybe ‘Tina’ sounded sexier—Brunelle didn’t particularly think so—or maybe she just didn’t want people to know her real name and what she was really doing. Chen’s next assignment would be to get the names of at least two other women, maybe three, who had heard Brown make similar statements.

  Confessions, Brunelle reminded himself. Edwards would call them just statements, but ‘confessions’ sounded so much better. Label a statement a confession and the jury won’t even care what was actually said. Confession equals guilt.

  So Chen’s task was to locate those women and lock down their stories. Brunelle’s was to draft the response to Edwards’ motion to dismiss. He still didn’t have a body—a corpus—but he had the admission to the bad act—the delicti. That would probably be enough. It had to be.

  Edwards was a better brief writer than he was. His strength lay in the courtroom, arguing to judges and explaining to juries. He knew he couldn’t out-write Edwards, so he just tried to prepare a competent brief and hoped his oral advocacy would carry the day.

  He
shook his head slightly as he sent his completed brief to the printer. Edwards was a pretty damn good speaker, too.

  *

  The motion hearing wasn’t before Judge Grissom. Good news for Brunelle. He wasn’t sure he could rely on Judge Grissom to rule for him out a second time. The bad news was that the new judge was Andrew Carlisle. Judges are like any other population: varied. Get 100 construction workers, or software programmers, or ballerinas together, and there will be some who are funnier, kinder, smarter, etc. Judges were no different. And if you assembled the nearly 100 superior court, district court, and municipal court judges in King County, Judge Carlisle would stand out as absolutely, assuredly, without question, the dumbest one in the lot.

  He’d been appointed by the governor when a spot opened after an unexpected retirement. He came from a big corporate firm that had donated a lot of money to the governor’s last campaign. At first, it just seemed like he just needed a little time, after a career practicing civil law, to figure out the world of criminal law. But it didn’t take too long to realize he was never going to get it and that he’d likely been suggested to the governor by the partners of the law firm just so they could be rid of him.

  Of course, Brunelle couldn’t say any of that out loud. Not on the record, anyway. It was an ethical violation—and, therefore, potential bar complaint—to disparage the bench. But he’d participated in the hallway conversations, and he accepted it all internally, because regardless of intellectual acumen, Carlisle was the judge. Brunelle had to prepare himself not just to argue his point, but to educate the judge in a way that was both effective and subtle so the judge wouldn’t think everyone in the courtroom knew he hadn’t the first idea about corpus delicti law Even stupid judges hate to be embarrassed. Especially stupid judges.

  Brunelle walked into Carlisle’s courtroom exactly six minutes before 9 o’clock. Enough time to set up his file and notebook and notepad and reference books, but not enough time to sit around wondering if he’d made all the necessary points in his brief, or worse yet, taking out a copy of the brief and rereading it, which would ensure he spotted some egregious typo just as the judge took the bench. It also limited the amount of time for pre-bout small talk with his opponent.

  “Good morning, Dave,” Edwards greeted him as he placed his things on the prosecution table. Brown was already seated, glancing around absently and looking far too relaxed for Brunelle’s liking. The guy ought to be sweating it, at least a little. He was facing a murder charge, for Christ’s sake. But Brunelle supposed anyone who could punch a woman in the face to make her have sex with strangers and then take her money probably wasn’t fazed by a bright, airy courtroom filled with people in suits. Brown actually looked a little bored. And why not? There was no way Edwards was going to put him on the stand; the hearing was about what Brunelle could—or couldn’t—prove, not about what the defense might claim. Brown’s presence was required, but not his participation. So everyone had already forgotten about Amy Corrigan, and for the next few hours, everyone could ignore Kenny Brown, too.

  “Good morning, Jessica,” Brunelle replied. It was a genuinely warm response. Just because they were about to join battle didn’t mean they couldn’t be friends until then. He straightened his materials on the table, centering his notepad in front of his chair. “This should be interesting with Carlisle.”

  Edwards raised a knowing eyebrow. “Yes, indeed. I can’t decide who this helps more, me or you.”

  “Probably you,” Brunelle opined with a thoughtful frown. “‘No body equals no case’ is pretty simple.”

  “So is ‘We wouldn’t charge him if he weren’t guilty,’” Edwards countered, a bit irritably. “You don’t even realize how easy you prosecutors have it. Everybody thinks you’re the heroes and we’re the bad guys. Hell, all you have to do is show up, look pretty, and the judges and juries fall all over themselves to give you whatever you ask for.”

  Brunelle thought for a moment. He cocked his head. “You think I’m pretty?”

  Edwards’ eyes flared at the joke but before she could reply, Judge Carlisle took the bench.

  “All rise!” the bailiff bellowed. The attorneys obliged, of course, and a moment later Carlisle took his seat above them all.

  “Please be seated,” he said as he straightened his robes. The gallery was empty. It was only a preliminary motion, after all, not a trial; but it was a motion to dismiss on a murder case. Normally, that would have attracted at least some of the junior prosecutors or public defenders, but the motion was strictly legal argument, no testimony, and the argument was on an obscure legal doctrine. The crowd would show up for the trial, but, for right then, Brunelle and Edwards had the courtroom to themselves.

  Carlisle looked down at the attorneys. Intellectual ability aside, he looked the part of judge: late 50s, thick head of silver hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and wrinkles starting in all the right, wise-looking places. “Are the parties ready on the matter of the State of Washington versus Kenneth Brown? This is some sort of motion or other, correct?”

  Brunelle nodded, glad he hadn’t wasted too much time on his brief that the judge obviously hadn’t read—or if he had, he hadn’t bothered to remember. Fine with Brunelle; his brief wasn’t exactly a masterpiece of legal advocacy. But Edwards’ was. So she was visibly irritated. Especially since it was her motion.

  “It’s a motion to dismiss, Your Honor,” she said. “For lack of corpus delicti.”

  Carlisle nodded. “Right,” he said, still nodding.

  Edwards forced a smile—to suppress the eye roll, Brunelle knew. “We are asking the court to dismiss the charge because the state cannot establish that a crime even occurred.”

  Carlisle’s brow furrowed. He glanced between the lawyers. “What crime?”

  “Murder, Your Honor,” Brunelle was glad to answer. He lowered his voice a notch to sound more important, and menacing. “Murder in the first degree.”

  Carlisle looked back to Edwards. “You want me to dismiss a murder case?”

  Edwards exhaled audibly through her nose. “Yes, Your Honor. They can’t prove anyone was actually murdered. They don’t have a body.”

  The judge’s furrows deepened. “What do you mean they don’t have a body? They lost it?”

  “They never had it,” Edwards answered. “They’re speculating she’s dead because she went missing.”

  Carlisle looked back at Brunelle. “Is that true?”

  Brunelle knew the honest answer was, ‘Yes,’ maybe followed by a bit of explanation. But he also knew that direct of an answer wouldn’t help his cause. So instead he said, “He confessed to the murder, Your Honor. To several different people.”

  Carlisle’s head swiveled back to Edwards. “Is that true?”

  “Allegedly,” Edwards replied, “although we don’t admit any of those alleged statements. But Your Honor, it wouldn’t matter if he’d confessed a dozen times, all on videotape. Under Washington law, a confession alone cannot support a conviction absent some evidence corroborating the confession. For example,” she threw her hands open in front of her, “a body.”

  Carlisle frowned and pushed himself back in his tall leather chair, crossing his arms as he did so. He looked like a cross between a petulant child and a lost traveler. After several seconds of contemplation, he leaned forward. “So let me get this straight. You,” he pointed at Brunelle, “want to prosecute someone for murder even though you don’t have a body.”

  Brunelle simply nodded, in a way he hoped appeared confident.

  “And you,” Carlisle turned his gaze and finger to Edwards, “want me to dismiss it even though your client confessed to it.”

  “Allegedly confessed,” Edwards felt compelled to reply. “And yes, Your Honor, that’s exactly what we want.”

  Carlisle leaned back again, his arms uncrossed this time. “Well, to be entirely honest, counsel, I don’t really like either of those options.”

  Brunelle had to nod in agreement. Those were two bad choices. B
ut he knew how to use that to his advantage. Unfortunately, before he could offer Judge Carlisle a way out of his conundrum, Edwards jumped in.

  “I know it may seem strange, Your Honor, but there is a long line of case law in Washington regarding confessions and the prima facie evidence necessary to establish corpus delicti.”

  Brunelle smiled. Edwards had used two Latin phrases in the same sentence. She was definitely going to lose Carlisle if she kept that up. The only thing worse would be a string of case cites.

  “In the case of State versus Hamrick,” Edwards began, “Division Two of the Court of Appeals affirmed Washington’s corpus delicti rule even in cases of driving under the influence, holding that mere opportunity to commit a crime was insufficient to corroborate an extrinsic confession.”

  Brunelle watched Carlisle’s face intently. The judge frowned at the case cite, then more so at the idea that Edwards was citing DUI law, then raised a confused eyebrow at the phrase ‘corroborate an extrinsic confession.’

  “In State versus Aten,” Edwards continued, “again a Division Two case, the Court of Appeals….”

  Edwards went on to explain how these cases supported her argument that, in Washington anyway, the mere fact that someone confesses to a crime isn’t necessarily enough to prosecute them for it. The problem for Edwards was that there was a reason Carlisle hadn’t read their briefs: he didn’t like the law. Not the academic subtleties of case law, and not the intellectual gymnastics involved in reasoning that finding a crashed car with a drunk guy standing next to it who admits he was drunk driving is somehow insufficient to prove said drunk guy was actually guilty of DUI. That was stupid. It was the law, but it was stupid. And Carlisle knew stupid.

  “Now, in the case of State versus DuBois, Division One acknowledged the distinction between the evidence necessary to establish prima facie the elements of a crime as opposed to—“

  “Ms. Edwards,” Carlisle interrupted. “I’m familiar with the law.”

  That wasn’t true, Brunelle knew. What he really meant was, ‘Don’t bother me with the law.’