Tommy, June 25, 2009
Estoy embarazada.' As he walked toward the office on Thursday morning from the parking structure, the words and the shy pride with which his wife had spoken them were still cascading through Tommy. ' Estoy embarazada,' Dominga had said when Tommy had picked up the phone yesterday after he'd left Brand's office. Her periods had always been flaky, and Tommy and she had been trying for a while, believing Tomaso shouldn't be an only child. But it hadn't seemed to be taking. Which was fine. Tommy had been blessed beyond imagining already. But now she was embarazada, six weeks along, with life again within her.
So this was how Tommy had always known there was a God. You could call it a coincidence that his wife would find out she was pregnant at the very moment he learned his long pursuit of Rusty Sabich had failed again. But did that really make sense, that things just fall out like that, with joy enough to offset any sorrow?
He had gone home early yesterday, in relative peace, and celebrated by sharing the company of his wife and son until they went to sleep, then he awoke at three a.m. to ponder. Sitting in the dark in their house, which was probably going to be too small now, he was swarmed by the doubts he had pushed aside when the prospect of the new baby remained remote. Should a man his age really be having another child-a girl, Tommy hoped for his wife's sake-who was likely to bury her father in her teens, or her twenties at the latest? Tommy did not know. He loved Dominga, he had fallen desperately in love, and all the rest of this followed, inevitably, even if the life he ended up living bore scant resemblance to anything he had expected for the nearly sixty years before. You follow your heart toward goodness and accept what comes.
With Rusty, too, he had done the right thing. Given nearly a day to reflect, Tommy realized that ending the case now was going to suit everybody. The PAs had been duped, by the victim, no less. No one could ever point any fingers at them. Rusty would walk away, but what he'd gone through was a consequence not of any bad faith by Tommy, but of the fucked-up mess Rusty had made in his own fucked-up house. If you really thought about it, Sabich was the one who should be apologizing. Not that he would.
The problem was going to be Brand, who had begun making a case after court. Even though the card was real, he said, there was no way to prove Rusty wasn't the one who had created it last September. It was on his computer, after all. He had planned to kill Barbara, hoping it would be taken as a death by natural causes, but if anybody saw through that, Sabich would haul out this suicide/frame-up stuff in stages.
And given the realities, Jimmy might even be right. After all, who killed herself to set up somebody else? But Tommy had made the essential point to Brand a long time ago: Rusty Sabich was too smart, and too wary of Tommy, to kill his wife, except in a way that would virtually prohibit conviction. Even if Sabich had orchestrated it all this way, he had the better argument. Could he have planted that card and left his prints on the phenelzine or the Web searches on his computer? Tommy and Brand were screwed. If they tried to account for the new evidence, they would be stuck trying to add a third floor to their theory, when they'd already built the house and taken the jury on a tour. Sure, if they had been allowed to prove that Rusty already got away with killing one woman, then the jurors might believe he'd schemed so elaborately to murder another. But Yee was not going back on those rulings at this stage. And as far as the record was concerned, it was Barbara, not Rusty, who was the computer geek and knew how to seed that card in September to bloom at year end.
If the PAs hung tough on their case, then Yee would probably dismiss them out. You could see that on the judge's face yesterday. They could try now to persuade him to let the case go to verdict, arguing that it was the jury's right exclusively to decide what witnesses to believe. But Yee would never buy that. The issue wasn't credibility. The prosecutors' evidence provided no way to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that this was murder rather than suicide. It was a null set, as the math guys say-the proof came to nothing.
So they were where they were. If they stood down on the case now, they would be good guys who just did their jobs and followed the evidence where it seemed to lead. If they pressed on, as Brand would want, they would be embittered crusaders who couldn't face the truth.
By now, having again thought through everything he had pondered the night before, Tommy had arrived in the marble lobby of the old County Building, acknowledging the familiar faces arriving to start the workday. Nobody came over to chat, which was a sign of how deeply the news coverage last night before had cut. Goldy, the elevator operator, who'd looked old when Tommy started here thirty years ago, took him up and he passed through the office door.
Down the long dim hall, Tommy could see Brand waiting for him. It was going to be a hard conversation, and as Molto approached he was looking for words, wishing he had spent some time thinking about what to tell a man who was not simply his most loyal deputy, but also his best friend. When Tommy was about fifty feet away, Brand started dancing.
Too astonished to move any farther, Tommy watched as Jim did the kind of hip-hop juke that NFL players performed in the end zone. He knew Brand well enough to realize that Jim, who'd run back several interceptions for TDs in his time, had practiced these steps in front of the bathroom mirror, wishing he hadn't been born a generation too soon.
Brand's gyrations were taking him Tommy's way, and when he got closer, Molto could hear him singing, although you wouldn't call it much of a tune. He belted out a word or two each time he hopped from one foot to the other.
"Rus-ty.
"Gone down.
"Rus-ty.
"Gone down.
"Rus-ty.
"Gone away.
"Rus-ty.
"Gone away.
"Rus-ty.
"Gone to the Big House."
Despite being well off meter, he sang the last line like a Broadway performer with his arms thrown wide and at booming volume. Several secretaries and cops and other deputies had stopped to witness the performance.
"You go, girl," one of them remarked, which filled the hallway with laughter.
"What?" Molto asked.
Brand was too exultant to talk. Smiling hugely, he came up to Tommy and bent down to clutch the boss, a good eight inches shorter, in a fierce embrace. Then he walked the PA into his own office, where someone was waiting. It turned out to be Gorvetich, who resembled a scraggly version of Edward G. Robinson in his latter days.
"Tell him," said Brand. "Milo had an amazing idea last night."
Gorvetich scratched for a second at his yellowish goatee. "It was really Jim's idea," he said.
"Not even close," said Brand.
"Whoever," said Tommy. "You can share the Nobel Prize. What's the scoop?"
Gorvetich shrugged. "You remember when I met you, Tom, you were catching hell from the appellate judges."
Tommy nodded. "They didn't want us looking at the internal court documents on Rusty's computer."
"Right. And so we imaged the hard drive-"
"Made a copy," said Molto.
"An exact copy. And we turned the actual computer over to the chief judge there."
"Mason."
"Judge Mason. Well, Jim and I were talking last night, and we decided that just to be sure about this Christmas card, we should go back and look at the image of Sabich's hard drive we made last November, when you first seized the computer. And we did. And that object, the card? It's not there."
Tommy sat down in his big chair and looked at both of them. His first reaction was to distrust Gorvetich. The old man was no match for Brand and must have been pushed into a critical mistake by his former student.
"I thought the card was made up last September before Barbara died?" Molto asked.
"As did I," said Gorvetich. "It gives every appearance. But it wasn't. Because it's not on the image. It was placed on the computer after we first seized it."
"When?"
"Well, I don't know. Because the.pst file now bears yesterday's date."
"Because the defense opened that file in court when they turned on the computer," Brand said. He was too happy right now to remind Tommy that he'd warned against letting the Sterns do that.
"Exactly," said Gorvetich. "But the card had to have been added during the month the PC was over at Judge Mason's. It was shrink-wrapped and sealed right in Judge Mason's chambers the day Judge Yee ordered it returned to our custody."
Tommy thought. Somehow it was Stern's words yesterday that came back to him: 'Interesting case.'
"Where was the image?"
"The imaged copy of the hard drive was preserved on an external drive in your evidence room. Jim got it out and burned a copy for me last night."
Tommy didn't like that at all. "Sandy's guys weren't with you?"
Brand broke in. "If you're worried that they'll claim we screwed with the image, we gave them a copy when we made it. They can look at this themselves on their copy. The card won't be there."
Gorvetich explained that the image had been made with a program called Evidence Tool Kit. The software's algorithms were proprietary and the image could be deciphered only with the same software, which by design was read-only to ensure that no one could attempt to alter an image after it was made.
"I guarantee you, Tommy," Gorvetich said, "Rusty found a way to put this on there."
Molto asked how Rusty could have done that. Gorvetich was not positive, but after thinking on it all night, he had a working theory. There was a piece of software called Office Spy, a hacker's invention now available as Internet shareware, that allowed someone to go into a calendar program and recast the objects stored there. You could roll back the date on a reminder, erase an incriminating entry from the calendar, or omit-or add-the names of people who had been at a critical meeting. Once the new object-the Christmas card, in this case-had been inserted on Sabich's computer, Office Spy had to be removed from the hard drive with shredding software, and then that software itself also had to be deleted, which required manual changes to registry files. Not only was the object-the card-missing on the image from last fall, but now that Gorvetich had made the comparison, he'd noticed subtle differences in the debris remnants of the shredding software held in various empty sectors of the drive. The implication was that shredding software had been added and removed from the computer twice, once before Barbara's death and once after the computer had first been seized.
"I thought Mason had the computer completely secure."
"He did. Or he thought he did," said Gorvetich.
"I mean, Jesus, Boss. Rusty ran that court for thirteen years. You think he didn't have the keys to everything? It would have been better to examine the fucking drive again when we got it back, but Mason said he made a log of everything Rusty's people looked at, and Yee just ordered the computer sealed as a condition of returning it to our custody. We couldn't start arguing with him about that."
Tommy explained it to himself again. Barbara didn't create the Christmas card, because Barbara was dead when that happened. And the only person who had anything to gain from placing the card on the calendar was Rusty Sabich. So much for the crap that Rusty didn't know about computers.
Tommy finally laughed out loud. It wasn't glee he felt so much as amazement.
"Boy, am I going to enjoy my conversation with that arrogant little Argentinian," said Molto. "Boy," he repeated.
Across the room, Brand, who'd never sat down, lifted his hands.
"Wanna dance?" he asked.