The Fifth Witness - Michael Connelly [115]
“Put it this way, would it have been good for you to have those letters in hand on the first day of the murder investigation?”
“Sure, why not? I’d take all evidence and information on the first day anytime. But that never happens.”
“Hypothetically speaking, if you knew that your victim, Mitchell Bondurant, had sent a letter threatening to expose another man’s criminal behavior just eight days before that man learned he was the target of a criminal investigation, wouldn’t that be a significant avenue of investigation for you?”
“It is hard to say.”
Now I looked at the jury. Kurlen was waffling, refusing to acknowledge what common sense dictated he should own up to. You didn’t need to be a detective to understand that.
“Hard to say? Are you saying that if you had this information and these letters on the day of the murder it would be hard to say if you would follow up on them as a significant lead?”
“I’m saying that we don’t have all the details so it is hard to say how significant it was or wasn’t. But as a general answer, all leads are followed up. It’s as simple as that.”
“As simple as that, yet you never pursued this angle of investigation, did you?”
“I didn’t have this letter. How could I have followed it up?”
“You had the victim’s letter and you did nothing with it, did you?”
“Not true at all. I checked it out and determined it had nothing to do with the murder.”
“But isn’t it true that by that time you already had your supposed murderer and you weren’t going to let anything change your mind or make you deviate from that path?”
“No, not true. Not true at all.”
I stared at Kurlen for a long time, hoping that my face showed my disgust.
“No further questions at this time,” I finally said.
Thirty-three
Freeman kept Kurlen on the stand for another fifteen minutes of redirect and did her best to resculpt his account of the investigation into a sterling effort of crime fighting. When she was through I passed on another crack at him because I was convinced that I was already ahead on Kurlen. My effort had been to sell the investigation as an exercise in tunnel vision and I believed I had succeeded.
Freeman apparently felt that the need to address the federal target letter was urgent. Her next witness was the Secret Service agent, Charles Vasquez. He had not even been known to her twenty-four hours earlier but had now been interjected into her carefully orchestrated lineup of witnesses and evidence. I could have objected to his testimony on the grounds that I had not had the opportunity to question or prepare for Vasquez but I thought that would be pushing it with Judge Perry. I decided to at least see what the agent had to say on direct before I’d go that far.
Vasquez was about forty, with a dark complexion and hair to match. During the preliminaries he said he had formerly been a DEA agent before shifting to the Secret Service. He went from chasing drug dealers to chasing counterfeiters until the opportunity came to join the foreclosure task force. He said the task force had a supervisor and ten agents coming from the Secret Service, FBI, the Postal Service and the IRS. An assistant U.S. attorney oversaw their work but the agents, assigned to pairs, largely worked autonomously, with freedom to pursue targets of their choice.
“Agent Vasquez, on January eighteenth of this year you authored a so-called target letter to a man named Louis Opparizio and it was signed by U.S. Attorney Reginald Lattimore. Do you recall that?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Before we get into that specific letter, can you tell the jury exactly what a target letter is?”
“It’s a tool we use to smoke out suspects and offenders.”
“How so?”
“We basically inform them that we are looking into their affairs, their business practices and actions they have taken. A target letter always invites the recipient to come in to discuss the situation with the agents. A high percentage of the time the recipients do just that. Sometimes it leads to cases, sometimes it leads to other investigations. It’s become a useful tool because investigations cost a lot.