“The Galloway case?”
She obviously and not surprisingly has done some homework on me since getting the call. “Yes. Your husband disappeared around the time of the fire, and the company he worked for, Milgram, has become part of the investigation.”
“Milgram? In what way?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say,” I lie. “It’s covered by attorney-client privilege.”
I need to start asking questions rather than answering them, and Laurie picks up on this. “Have you at any time considered that Steven’s disappearance could in some way have been connected to his work?”
“As you can imagine, I’ve analyzed it from every angle, including that one, but I haven’t come up with anything. Steven seemed mostly happy with what he was doing. In fact, in the days before he left…”
She pauses for a moment. She used the word “left,” but it seems as if she has never really come up with a word that she is comfortable with, or that seems to fit. She continues. “He was particularly upbeat. That’s one of the things that has always seemed so strange…”
“So nothing about his work was bothering him in any way?” I ask. “You said ‘mostly happy.’”
She shrugs. “He wasn’t making as much money as he thought he should, but he felt that was going to change. We were about to have the baby, and earning money had become very important to him.”
“What exactly did he do for Milgram?”
“He was what they call an assayer. He had a master’s in quarrying and extraction, and he went to land that Milgram owned and estimated how much oil and gas, or other resources, were there. You know, so they’d know whether to drill or not, I guess.” She smiles. “Truth is, I never really understood it myself.”
“Is that why he traveled so much?” Laurie asks.
She nods. “It wasn’t so much, just more than I would have liked. I wanted him home as much as possible.” She shakes her head and smiles sadly, “Look how that worked out.”
“Would you have any way of knowing where he traveled in, say, the two months before he disappeared?”
She nods. “Absolutely. I gave the police all of that information, his records, his calendar… and they gave them back about a year later. When they gave up looking.”
“You still have them?” I ask, knowing there is not a chance in hell she threw them out.
“Yes, in case the police ever found a lead. But I want to keep them. I could copy them for you.”
“We would appreciate that,” I say, and Laurie arranges to pick them up tomorrow.
On the way home, Laurie says, “It’s pretty hard to imagine anything worse than someone you love like that just disappearing. And to never find out what happened…”
“I think we’re going to be able to tell her what happened.”
“You think he was in the fire?” she asks.
“Probably. But even more than that, I think he might have been the reason for the fire.”
Judge De Luca calls Dylan and me into chambers prior to the start of court.
He has the court reporter in there to record everything, something he doesn’t always do.
“I’ve decided to grant the defense’s request and admit the evidence as proffered,” he says. Once he does, Dylan formally objects again, for the record, but he knows it’s a lost cause, and De Luca confirms that for him.
De Luca then launches into a speech which, if listened to out of context, would lead one to believe he had ruled against us. He goes on and on about how the ruling is a limited one, capable of being changed or curtailed at any time. He warns me not to take this too far afield, and not to allow witnesses to speculate.
I believe he is covering himself for the record, though the prosecution is unlikely to stop the trial in order to appeal it to a higher court. They also cannot appeal it after the fact, should Noah be acquitted. But if the transcript is later scrutinized for any reason, De Luca wants to look as unbiased and evenhanded as possible.
I’ve given a lot of thought as to how I can introduce the evidence that De Luca has now ruled admissible. Part of it, Camby’s shooting, involves Marcus, but there is no way I’m going to call him to testify.
The jury, not knowing better, would look at Marcus and definitely not consider him one of the “good guys,” and since he is on our side that would not cut to our benefit. It also would not be fair to the court reporter; Marcus is tough enough to listen to; to have to accurately transcribe what he says is covered under the Constitution as “cruel and unusual” punishment.
Instead I call Laurie. She was enough of a participant to get by, or at least I hope so. And it’s something of an understatement to say that the jury will find her more appealing than Marcus.
Laurie describes for the jury how she and I had just come from interviewing a witness, and she noticed that we were being followed. “So we pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot, and while you went inside, I called one of our investigators, Marcus Clark.”
“Why did you do that?”
“So that he could come and follow the man following us. We were confident it had to do with the Galloway case, since that was the only one we were working on. It was important to learn why someone thought they needed to monitor our movements.”
She describes how she signaled me to stay in the store until Marcus was in place, and that when she was certain that he was, it was okay for me to come out. She throws in the information that I brought out a “bread and some bleach,” which brings a few snickers from the jury, and more from the gallery.
“What happened next?” I ask.
“We went to your house and waited for Marcus to call, which he did. He had attempted to question the man, but before he could do so, a sniper fired through the window, killing him.”
Laurie goes on to say that Marcus took the man’s cell phone and that we found out later that it was Camby, and that we were able to trace the phone records, which eventually led us to Loney.
Dylan focuses his cross-examination on the shaky connection between Camby and Galloway, claiming that there is no basis for us to assume that link.
“Mr. Carpenter has been a criminal attorney for a number of years, has he not?” he asks.
“He has.”
“And you were a police officer here in Paterson? And then a police chief in Wisconsin?”
“Correct.”
“Did you arrest a lot of people?” he asks.
“My share.”
“So it’s certainly possible that someone was following you, unrelated to this case?”
“It would have been possible, had not subsequent investigation confirmed our suspicions.”
It was a great answer, nailing Dylan in his tracks, but he quickly recovers. He smiles condescendingly, and says, “We certainly look forward to hearing about that.”
The decision was posted at noon on the Delaware Chancery Court Web site.
It was twenty-one pages, and filled with legalese and rationalizations. But the summary page was all that one needed to read to understand that it represented a sweeping victory for Entech Industries.
The poison pill that Milgram had attempted to adopt was considered by Judge Holland to be a “fraudulent attempt by the board of Milgram to thwart the purchase,” and not in the best interests of the Milgram shareholders.
Savvy legal minds, were they inclined to read and analyze the full opinion, would note that Holland’s ruling relied mostly on fact, rather than law, which would make it even less likely for an appeals court to overturn. Since it was widely known that Milgram did not have the resources nor appetite to mount an appeal, Holland’s approach made such an attempt even less likely.
Sure enough, within an hour of the announcement of the ruling, Milgram’s board indicated reluctant acceptance. Though they disagreed in principle with Judge Holland’s decision, they pledged to work with Entech to insure that the purchase would move immediately to completion.