Corpus Delicti (David Brunelle Legal Thriller Book 6) Page 4

  Do as I say, not as I do.

  “You don’t know shit about my relationship with Robyn,” Brunelle growled. As much as he’d tried not to think about Kat’s feelings for him, he’d been trying even harder not to think about his feelings for Robyn. He redirected that pain into aggression at his friend. “Or my relationship with Kat, for that matter. You went out to dinner with us once or twice. Fine. Great. I’ll call you if I need to remember her favorite dish. But you weren’t around for all of it and you, of all people, should know people aren’t always what they seem.”

  “You sure aren’t,” Chen chided. “I thought you were a good man.”

  Brunelle ignored the ad hominem attack. Instead, he countered with, “And I thought you cared about the people you’re supposed to protect.”

  “Like Linda Prescott?” Chen asked. “You want me to protect her? Dave, you don’t have the first idea how to protect her. You think she’s safer if some cop comes around to talk to her and doesn’t arrest her? Pulls her aside to whisper in her ear while all the other girls watch? You think that will make her safer? Don’t be an idiot, Dave. They’ll rat her out to her pimp faster than they make a nervous john cum.”

  Brunelle hesitated. He hadn’t thought of that.

  “Leave the police work to the police, Dave,” Chen admonished. “I don’t tell you how to try a case. Don’t tell me how to serve and protect.”

  Brunelle nodded, but, again, only for himself. “Fine.”

  “But let me ask you a question,” Chen said.

  Brunelle paused, clenching his jaw. He wasn’t in the mood for questions, or the advice that usually followed that kind of set up. “Sure,” he growled.

  “Why do you care so much about some stranger, but not about someone who actually cares about you too?”

  Brunelle didn’t say anything for several moments. His expression, had Chen been able to see it, was a stony poker face.

  “Goodbye, Larry.”

  He hung up before Chen could echo the sentiment.

  Chapter 9

  Brunelle sat at his desk and stewed for way too long after hanging up with Chen. But he couldn’t escape the fact that the detective had a point. Not about Kat—Chen could stay the hell out of Brunelle’s love life. About Linda. She wouldn’t be safer if some uniformed cop came and visited her on her street corner. But Brunelle wasn’t a cop and his uniform made him look like every other businessman looking for a quick lay.

  Like most of his knowledge about the criminal underworld, Brunelle had to rely on the police reports to tell him where to find Linda. He’d never even considered going to a prostitute. Apart from the moral repugnance of perpetuating the victimization of women so desperate they sell their bodies to strangers to fund their pimps’ lavish lifestyles, he just never found it appealing. If he was going to have sex with someone, he wanted it be with someone who wanted to have sex with him too, not just someone who got paid to pretend. He didn’t understand how any man could find that arousing enough to actually perform.

  But looking at the foot traffic on Aurora Avenue, there was no shortage of men looking to spend their money on women like Linda Prescott.

  Brunelle shook his head and felt renewed irritation at Chen. There he was, cruising a strip of motels that everyone in Seattle knew was a hotbed of prostitution activity. Why couldn’t the cops clean it up? Any given night, they could make two dozen arrests without breaking a sweat. Why not try to make a dent in it?

  But he knew the answer. Working as a prostitute was only a misdemeanor; so was going to a prostitute. The johns might get embarrassed, but they weren’t going to get any jail time. The women weren’t going to get any jail time, either—not more than a few days, which was probably better than living on the streets anyway—so they weren’t about to testify against their pimps, the only people worth going after. Since the pimps were never directly involved in the transaction, there was no way to prosecute them without the women’s cooperation. So it all falls down like a house of cards and the good people of the world just look away as they drive over the Aurora Bridge toward downtown with their dinner reservations and opera tickets.

  Luckily, Brunelle didn’t have anybody to take to the opera.

  But he was looking for a ‘date.’

  Aurora Avenue was the name the city fathers put on the part of the old Pacific Highway that ran north of downtown. It was three lanes in each direction, with a concrete barrier down the middle and no stoplights for miles. Not exactly the best place for slowing down to chat up a prostitute, but there were a half-dozen cheap, no-questions-asked motels clustered there; so what it lacked in accommodation for the front half of the transaction, it more than made up for on the back end.

  For Brunelle, though, it made it difficult to just scan for Linda Prescott. It was already going to be difficult to find a woman he’d seen one time, weeks ago, in the dark and streetlights of late-night Seattle. But to make matters worse, he couldn’t just slow down and take a look at who might be walking the streets. Instead, he had to do what the other perverts were doing: pulling into parking lots and waiting for the girls to approach their cars, offering a ‘date’ and, quite literally, a pricelist.

  He sped past the area his first time through, so he had to turn around a few miles north and head back. When he got back, he slowed and pulled into the parking lot of the Aurora Motel, the one with the biggest sign on the strip.

  “Size doesn’t matter,” he quipped to himself—but only to fight off the anxiety rising in his chest as he waded into what was going to look increasingly like criminal activity, and embarrassing criminal activity at that.

  There were several women—and, Brunelle knew, girls—milling about near the driveway. None of them looked like Linda. Then again, none of them probably looked like themselves at all. Thick eyeliner, excessive lipstick, and overdone hair disguised each of them from whoever they really were. A safety mechanism for themselves and the johns. It wasn’t about people; it was just about sex.

  “Hey, there,” said a woman who’d broken from the herd and was walking up to Brunelle’s car. His hands suddenly started sweating. “Looking for a date?”

  It wasn’t Linda. He could tell that much even when she was a few feet away. Wrong hair color, wrong skin color, wrong height.

  “Uh, maybe,” he stammered. “I’m kinda looking for someone in particular.”

  The prostitute leaned onto his car door, her perfume assaulting him through the open window. It was floral and sickening at the same time. ”Tell me who you’re looking for, honey. I bet I can be her.”

  Brunelle shook his head. “No. It’s not like that. I mean…”

  But he stopped himself. He looked again at the woman leaning on his car. He had no idea who she was. He didn’t know who her pimp was. He didn’t know if she’d help Linda or turn her in. He craned his neck and looked at the other prostitutes still milling about at the driveway entrance. He didn’t know any of them. He didn’t know what any of them would do.

  And, he realized, he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, either.

  “What’s it like, honey?” the woman asked. “You somebody’s regular?” She stepped back to look more carefully at him. “I ain’t seen you before.”

  And now he was drawing attention to himself.

  He could hear Chen’s voice. You think she’s safer if some cop comes around to talk to her and doesn’t arrest her? Don’t be an idiot, Dave. They’ll rat her out to her pimp faster than they make a nervous john cum.

  “Uh, yeah, well…” Brunelle spluttered.

  “You a cop or something?” the woman asked, taking a step back.

  Worse, Brunelle thought. Prosecutor.

  But before he could figure out a polite way to end the conversation and get the hell out of there—and with a faint awareness of how ridiculous it was that he cared about being polite—one of the other women shouted over to them.

  “Hey, Kelly! Watch out! The cops are here!”

  At first Brunelle tho
ught he was being further pegged as a cop, but when he turned around to look at the group, he could see two Seattle PD patrol cars on the other side of Aurora, pulling into another motel parking lot, their lights flashing red and blue across the highway.

  Kelly—if that was even her real name—didn’t give a shit about being polite and bolted from Brunelle’s car window. He watched, almost detached, as she and the other women scurried into the three or four motel rooms Brunelle knew their pimp had rented—with the money they’d earned.

  Brunelle relaxed in the presence of law enforcement and decided it was time he got the heck out of there. As he pulled back onto Aurora and headed for the Space Needle, Brunelle had to smile despite the abject failure of his mission. Maybe Chen and Company were trying to make a dent in the problem after all.

  But the smile faded as he reached the south end of the Aurora Bridge, the patrol cars’ lights long gone behind him. Maybe those cops were spontaneously arresting a handful of johns and prostitutes. Maybe.

  Or maybe they’d been called out to a report of another murdered prostitute.

  Chapter 10

  Brunelle decided not to call Chen. Not because he didn’t want Chen’s help. He just didn’t want to hear him say, ‘Told you so.’

  But he still needed information.

  “Montero. Major Crimes.” It was a simple way to answer a phone, but very impressive. He might have to try that. ‘Brunelle. Homicides.’ Yeah, that sounded good.

  “Hey, Detective Montero,” Brunelle greeted. “It’s Dave Brunelle from the prosecutor’s office. Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Sure thing,” Montero replied. “I’m just doing paperwork. Any break from that is a good thing. What can I do for you?”

  Brunelle smiled. It was nice to talk to a friendly cop again. He was going to have to figure out some way to bury the hatchet with Chen.

  Or maybe he could just start calling Julia Montero for help.

  “It’s about the Amy Corrigan murder,” Brunelle started. “I had a question about Linda Prescott.”

  “Corrigan… Corrigan…” Montero repeated. “Oh, yeah. You mean the Kenny Brown case, right?”

  Brunelle sighed. “Right.”

  “So what do you need?” Montero asked. “And who’s Linda Prescott?”

  Brunelle was surprised for a moment, then remembered Montero had been in on their interrogation of Kenny Brown, but not the interview of Linda Prescott.

  “Uh…” Brunelle hesitated. The whole point of calling Montero was to avoid involving Chen. But if Montero didn’t even know who Linda was, she’d just end up walking down the hall to relay any of Brunelle’s questions anyway.

  So, different tack. “Uh, were there any murders on Aurora Ave last night?”

  Montero thought for a moment. “We didn’t have any homicides at all last night.”

  That was good news. Brunelle was quiet for a moment as he considered the implications. Why were those cop cars there? Was it really just a bust of a few johns and hookers?

  “What’s going on, Mr. Brunelle?” Montero asked. “Does somebody need our help?”

  Brunelle thought for a moment before replying. Someone did need help. But Chen was right too: Brunelle couldn’t protect Linda Prescott on the mean streets of Seattle. He wasn’t a cop; he was a lawyer.

  He couldn’t protect her on the streets. But maybe he could do it the courtroom.

  Chapter 11

  Brunelle walked up to his legal assistant’s desk. “Have you sent out the police reports on the Amy Corrigan case yet, Nicole?”

  Nicole looked up from the stack of paper she was collating. “Which case?”

  Brunelle suppressed an eye roll. “Kenneth Brown. The Kenneth Brown case. Did you send the police report to defense counsel yet?”

  “Oh, that case,” Nicole replied. She patted the two-inch thick stack of paper on her desk. “I was just about to.”

  “Good,” Brunelle said. Then he extended a hand. “I need to go through it first.”

  Nicole’s expression betrayed some curiosity, but it was overcome by the opportunity to get some work off her desk. She handed the reports to Brunelle. “Need to add something?” she asked.

  Brunelle tucked the reports under his arm and plucked a Sharpie off Nicole’s desk. “Just the opposite.”

  *

  “You have one witness who saw the victim with my client just before she disappeared,” Jessica Edwards said as Brunelle walked up to her in the Pit, the place where the attorneys negotiated cases at the pretrial conference, “and you blacked out her name.”

  Brunelle smiled smugly as he sat down next to her. “How do you know it’s a ‘her’?”

  Edwards tapped her binder of police reports. “Because it’s pretty obvious from the interview that it’s one of his prostitutes.”

  “There are male prostitutes,” Brunelle pointed out.

  “Not that work for my client,” Edwards retorted.

  “So he admits he’s a pimp?” Brunelle asked.

  “Of course he’s a pimp,” Edwards snapped. “But he’s not a murderer. And anyway, you can’t prove either crime without your mystery witness, so you can’t hide her identity from me.”

  Brunelle crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Ever heard of a confidential informant?”

  Edwards uncrossed hers and leaned forward. “Ever heard of the Confrontation Clause?”

  Brunelle waved the comment away. “That’s a trial right. If this goes to trial, then you can confront her on the stand.” He thought for a moment, then grinned, “or him.”

  “Of course it’s going to trial,” Edwards replied. “He’s charged with murder. and you don’t have a body. You don’t expect me to plead him out to that, do you?”

  “Why not?” Brunelle replied. “He’s guilty.”

  “Not if you can’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  There were several dozen attorneys in the Pit, a roughly 50/50 split of prosecutors and defense attorneys. They all had their own cases and conversations to have, but heads were starting to turn as Brunelle and Edwards’ conversation heated up.

  “Whether I can prove something beyond a reasonable doubt,” Brunelle posited, “is pretty much irrelevant to whether it actually happened. He either did it or he didn’t.”

  “Whether he actually did it or not,” Edwards replied, “is a separate question from whether you can prove it. And equally irrelevant. You shouldn’t be able to prove it if he didn’t do it, but even if he did, you still might not be able to prove it. And that’s all that matters.”

  “It doesn’t matter if he’s guilty?” Brunelle scoffed.

  “It matters if you can prove he’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” was Edwards reply. “I don’t give a shit if he did it or not. I care if you have the evidence to prove it in a court of law.”

  “Wait. You don’t care that he murdered someone?” Brunelle clarified. “You don’t care at all that a woman is dead now because your client killed her?”

  “What I care about is defending my client against the charges filed against him.” Edwards sat up straight in her chair, like an affronted mother. “I have an absolute ethical duty to defend him to the best of my ability. If that means an acquittal because you don’t have the evidence to convict him, then so be it.”

  Brunelle shook his head. “That’s wrong.”

  “No.” Edwards pointed a finger at him. “That’s justice.”

  Pretty much every other attorney had stopped their own conversation to listen in on Brunelle and Edwards. The two of them had almost fifty years of combined experience in criminal law and had tried some of the biggest cases of the last decade. Clash of the Titans.

  “So you’re telling me,” Brunelle challenged, “that you would defend the case exactly the same regardless of whether your client told you he was with his sick grandma all night or he drew you a map of where he buried the body.”

  “What my client tells me is absolutely privileged.” Edwards s
omehow managed to appear even more offended.

  “Right.” Brunelle rolled his eyes. “I remember learning something about that in law school. But that’s not really my point. My point is that you already have better information than me. Your client knows he killed Amy Corrigan and he knows where he dumped the body. He probably also knows which of his girls is most likely to rat him out. So just because I black out a name to try to protect someone from your obviously murderous client doesn’t really impact your ability to defend him because you already know more than me anyway.”

  Edwards took a deep breath, then a smile cracked her visage. “First of all, nice try. But I’m not going to tell you what my client said to me. Second, what he said is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what I know. It matters what you can prove, and how. And if you’re going to call ‘confidential hooker number one’ as a witness, then I get her name and contact information before trial and I get to interview her before trial. The Confrontation Clause is meaningless if I’m not fully prepared to cross examine her when she takes the stand at trial.”

  Brunelle wasn’t completely convinced Edwards had the moral high ground, but he knew the case law supported her. Still, he wasn’t about to just throw Linda Prescott under the pimp-mobile.

  “So file a motion to compel,” he challenged. “And we’ll see if the judge agrees with you.”

  Edwards smile hardened but didn’t fade. “Don’t worry, Dave. I will.”

  Chapter 12

  Edwards’ brief was excellent. Of course. Brunelle hadn’t really expected any less. There was a reason she was one of the top attorneys at the public defender’s office. It still pissed Brunelle off that a pimp could bail himself out of jail with $10,000 cash, then claim poverty and get a public defender, because all of his money was illegal and therefore unreportable. But that was how the system worked.

  The other way the system worked was that Brunelle was tasked with representing the public and upholding justice, but it was the damn defense attorneys who always got to cite the Constitution in their briefs.