The Fifth Witness - Michael Connelly [9]
I pulled a card out of my pocket and handed it to him.
“You’re talking to a fighter, so that’s my answer. I couldn’t handle her case because of conflict of interest between you and me. But have her call the office and we’ll get her hooked up with somebody good. Make sure she mentions your name.”
Kurlen nodded and picked a DVD case off his desk and handed it to me.
“Might as well give you this now.”
I looked at the disc.
“What’s this?”
“Our interview with your client. You will clearly see that we stopped talking to her as soon as she said the magic words: I want a lawyer.”
“I’ll be sure to check that out, Detective. You want to tell me why she’s your suspect?”
“Sure. She’s our suspect and we’re charging her because she did it and she made admissions about it before asking to call her lawyer. Sorry about that, Counselor, but we played by the rules.”
I held the disc up as if it were my client.
“You’re telling me she admitted killing Bondurant?”
“Not in so many words. But she made admissions and contradictions. I’ll leave it at that.”
“Did she by any chance say in so many words why she did it?”
“She didn’t have to. The victim was in the process of taking away her house. That’s plenty enough motive right there. We’re as good as gold on motive.”
I could’ve told him that he had that wrong, that I was in the process of stopping the foreclosure. But I kept my mouth shut about that. My job was to gather information here, not give it away.
“What else you got, Detective?”
“Nothing that I care to share with you at the moment. You’ll have to wait to get the rest through discovery.”
“I’ll do that. Has a DA been assigned yet?”
“Not that I heard.”
Kurlen nodded toward the back of the room and I turned to see Lisa Trammel being walked toward the door of an interrogation room. She had the classic deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Kurlen said. “And that’s only because I’m being nice. I figure there’s no need to start a war.”
Not yet, at least, I thought as I headed toward the interrogation room.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Kurlen called to my back. “I have to check the briefcase. Rules, you know.”
He was referring to the leather-over-aluminum attaché I was carrying. I could’ve made an argument about the search infringing on attorney-client privilege but I wanted to talk to my client. I stepped back toward him and swung the case up onto a counter, then popped it open. All it contained was the Lisa Trammel file, a fresh legal pad and the new contracts and power-of-attorney form I had printed out while driving up. I figured I needed Lisa to re-sign since my representation was crossing from civil to criminal.
Kurlen gave it a quick once-over and signaled me to close it.
“Hand-tooled Italian leather,” he said. “Looks like a fancy drug dealer’s case. You haven’t been associating with the wrong people, have you, Haller?”
He put on that canary smile again. Cop humor was truly unique in all the world.
“As a matter of fact, it did belong to a courier,” I said. “A client. But where he was going he wasn’t going to need it anymore so I took it in trade. You want to see the secret compartment? It’s kind of a pain to open.”
“I think I’ll pass. You’re good.”
I closed the case and headed back to the interrogation room.
“And it’s Colombian leather,” I said.
Kurlen’s partner was waiting at the room’s door. I didn’t know her but didn’t bother to introduce myself. We were never going to be friendly and I guessed she would be the type to stiff me on the handshake in order to impress Kurlen.
She held the door open and I stopped at the threshold.
“All listening and recording devices in this room are off, correct?”
“You got it.”
“If they’re not that would be a violation of my client’s—”
“We know the drill.”
“Yeah, but sometimes you conveniently forget it, don’t you?”
“You’ve got fourteen