Judgement Calls

  Judgement Calls

  Alafair Burke

  Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid walks into her office in Portland's Drug and Vice Division one Monday morning to find three police officers waiting for her. A thirteen-year-old girl has been brutally attacked and left for dead on the city's outskirts. Given the lack of evidence, most lawyers would settle for an assault charge; Samantha, unnerved by the viciousness of the crime, decides to go for attempted murder. As Sam prepares for the trial, she uncovers a dangerous trail leading to an earlier high-profile death penalty case, a prostitution ring of underage girls, and a possible serial killer. And she finds her judgement - not only in matters of the law but in her personal life - called into question...

  Review

  'Debut novel by daughter of the great James Lee Burke and one that he can proudly applaud. Quite unlike JLB's own work, but exciting, individual and unreservedly excellent. ... An absorbing, enjoyable first outing. Safe to assume they'll be many more.' -- Philip Oakes LITERARY REVIEW

  'Burke is a born storyteller and has created an attractive heroine whom I look forward to meeting again.' -- Susanna Yager SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

  'A legal thriller with a twist that is stuffed with authentic detail.' YORK EVENING PRESS

  'Burke's entry into the world of crime fiction was never going to be easy. The daughter of possibly the genre's greatest exponant - James Lee Burke - the dagers were bound to be drawn from the start. But to her credit, the former Assistant DA manages to hold her own. Judgment Calls is a smart and savvy legal thriller. ... A chip off the old block.' IRISH EXAMINER

  'Burke...handles the various threads of the story with aplomb, her characters are believable, her plotting is right on the buton, and in Kincaid she has created a sympathetic protagonist that I'm sure we'll hear about again.' IRISH TIMES

  About the Author

  A former deputy district attorney in Portland, Alafair Burke now teaches criminal law at Hofstra School of Law and lives in New York City. She is the daughter of acclaimed crime writer James Lee Burke.

  JUDGMENT CALLS

  Alafair Burke

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Orion, an imprint of the

  Orion Publishing Group Ltd.

  Copyright 2003 by Alafair Burke

  For my loving parents, James Lee and Pearl Chu Pai Burke

  One.

  A February morning in Portland, Oregon, and it was still dark outside

  when I walked into the courthouse, the air thick with the annoying

  drops of humidity that pass for rain in the Pacific Northwest. No

  surprises there. What did surprise me was finding a Police Bureau

  sergeant waiting in my office.

  I'm a deputy district attorney for Multnomah County, making me about

  one percent of the office that prosecutes state crimes committed in the

  Portland area. Since I took this job three years ago, I've gotten used

  to having voice mail and e-mail messages waiting for me on Monday

  mornings. People just don't seem to realize that government law

  offices aren't open on weekends. It's unusual, though, and rarely a

  good sign, to find a cop waiting for you first thing in the morning.

  At least I knew this one.

  "Hey, Garcia, who let you in?" I said. "I thought we had some

  security around here."

  Sergeant Tommy Garcia looked up from the Oregon State Bar magazine he

  had lifted out of my in-box. He smiled at me with those bright white,

  perfectly straight teeth that contrasted beautifully with his smooth

  olive skin. That smile had led me to believe he was a nice guy when I

  met him for the first time three years ago, and I had been right.

  "Hey, Sammie, what can I say? I love reading the part at the back that

  tells about all the bad lawyers and what they did to get disbarred or

  suspended. Gives me a sense of justice. You should be careful about

  giving me such a hard time, though. I might start to think you're like

  the rest of the DAs around here, with a stick up your ass."

  Tommy's in charge of the bureau's vice unit, so I know him well. As a

  member of the eight-lawyer team known as the Drug and Vice Division, I

  talk to Tommy almost weekly about pending cases and see him at least

  once a month at team meetings.

  "You must want something from me big and bad, Garcia, to be buttering

  me up like that. What is it," I asked, "a warrant?" The local judges

  won't even read an officer's application for a search warrant unless it

  is reviewed and approved first by a deputy DA. In a close case, the

  cops tend to "DA shop."

  Garcia laughed. "You're too smart, Kincaid. Nope, no warrant. I do

  need your help on something, but it's a little more complicated." He

  reached behind him to shut the door, looking at me first to make sure I

  didn't mind.

  "MCT picked a case up over the weekend, thinking it would be an attempt

  murder. The suspects are bad, bad guys,

  Sammie. Two of them grabbed a girl out of Old Town. One of them

  started to rape her, but couldn't get it up, so he beat her instead,

  and then the second guy finished what the first couldn't. When they

  were done, they left her for dead out in the Columbia Gorge.

  "I don't know all the details, but apparently the initial investigation

  was a bit of a cluster fuck. It sounds like everything's on track now,

  but O'Donnell was the riding DA and got pissed off at some of the early

  mistakes. So he's planning on kicking it into the general felony unit

  for prosecution. You can pretty much figure out what's gonna happen to

  it."

  The general felony trial unit is a dumping ground for cases that aren't

  seen as serious. The trial DDAs often have extremely limited time to

  spend on them, and the overwhelming majority plead out to reduced

  charges and stipulated sentences during a fast-paced court calendar

  referred to as "morning call." It's the criminal justice system's ugly

  side. Tim O'Donnell was a senior DDA in the major crimes unit. If he

  bumped a Major Crimes Team case down to general, he knew it was gone.

  "Sounds bad, but it also sounds like MCT's beef is with O'Donnell."

  "Yeah, well, O'Donnell's mind's not an easy one to change, and I think

  there's another way to go here because of a vice angle. The victim's a

  thirteen-year-old prostitute named Ken-dra Martin. Unlike most of 'em,

  she doesn't try to look any older. Wears schoolgirl outfits like that

  one girl used to wear on MTV before she got implants and started

  running around naked. What's her name? My daughter likes her. Anyway,

  she looks her age, is my point.

  "Turns out her injuries weren't as bad as they first looked,

  so the MCT guys know it'll be hard to get attempted murder to stick.

  But they kept working the case, even after they realized that they

  could've handed it off to precinct detectives. This case is under

  their skin."

  Any reluctance on the part of the Major Crimes Team to hand over a case

  to precinct detectives was understandable. In theory, regular shift

  detectives are perfectly good investigators, but in reality,

  disappointed precinct detectives who were passed over for the elite MCT

  frequently drop the b
all, deciding their cases must not be sufficiently

  "major" to warrant good investigations.

  "I don't doubt their earnestness, but I still don't see why they'd come

  to DVD with this, let alone to me. I've never even handled an MCT

  case."

  "They figured because of the vice connection that someone in DVD might

  take the case from O'Donnell and run with it on something more serious

  than a general felony. And I've been watching you since you got here,

  Kincaid. You're good, and this could be a case for you to show what

  you can do when given the chance."

  "Don't think you can play me like that, Garcia. I know an ego stroke

  when I see it." Of course, recognizing the stroke for what it was

  didn't prevent me from succumbing to it. The truth was, he was right.

  I'd been eager to get my hands on a major trial. It's a no-win

  situation: DVD cases aren't sexy enough to prove yourself to the guys

  running this place, yet you're supposed to prove yourself before you

  can try victim cases. Garcia was dangling a way for me to beat the

  system.

  I wasn't about to sign on for this, though, without knowing the

  details.

  "I don't think there's much I can do about it, but I'm willing to talk.

  Have someone call me?" I asked.

  "I can do better than that," he said. "I got two MCT detectives

  waiting for you down the street."

  Garcia must've known he'd be able to work me. He had told Detectives

  Jack Walker and Raymond Johnson to wait for us at the cafeteria in the

  basement of the federal building. Created to provide subsidized meals

  to low-level government workers, the cafeteria had found a cultlike

  following among the city's law enforcement crowd. A three-dollar tray

  of grease dished out by lunch ladies in hair nets had a certain retro

  appeal.

  I exercised some moderation and got a bowl of oatmeal while Garcia

  waited for his plate to be loaded up with bacon and home fries. After

  he'd paid for our meals, he led me to a corner table.

  "Jack Walker, Raymond Johnson, this is Samantha Kincaid."

  I shook their hands. Jack Walker was a beefy man in his fifties,

  starting to lose his hair, with a full mustache. His short-sleeved

  dress shirt stretched tight across his belly, the buttons pulling in

  front. His grip was almost painfully firm, and his palms were rough.

  He looked like a cop, through and through.

  Johnson was a different story altogether. A tall well-built African

  American in his mid-thirties, Raymond Johnson looked and dressed like a

  GQ model. He wore a collarless shirt with a three-button charcoal

  suit. His hair was close-cropped, and he wore a diamond stud in his

  left ear. He shook my hand and held it just a little longer than

  necessary, which was fine with me.

  "It's nice to meet you both," I said. "I've seen you around the

  courthouse, but I don't think we've ever actually met."

  Jack Walker spoke first. "Yeah, likewise. I've been hearing a lot of

  good things about you from Tommy, here, and Chuck Forbes says you guys

  go way back."

  Suddenly, Johnson's handshake made a little more sense. To say that

  Chuck Forbes and I go way back is to sanitize the situation

  considerably. I didn't think Chuck would tell all to his cop buddies,

  but I wouldn't be surprised if he had said something in a certain way

  with that grin of his that would clue a guy like Raymond Johnson in to

  the gist of his reminiscing.

  I hoped I wasn't blushing. "Well, I don't want to disappoint you, but

  it's a long shot that I'll be able to help." I asked them to tell me

  about the case from the beginning, and Johnson took over.

  "We got the call around three on Sunday morning. A group of high

  school kids went out near Multnomah Falls to party. They were all

  pretty drunk, and a couple of them hiked into the forest to get it on.

  The girl tripped over what she thought was a log. Turns out the log

  was Kendra Martin."

  He explained the facts in detail; I could see why he enjoyed a

  reputation among the DDAs as one of the bureau's best witnesses. "She

  was wearing a bra and a skirt pulled up over her hips, nothing else. No

  purse, no ID. Real beat up, finger marks on her neck, blood coming out

  of her bottom." I looked down, trying to hide my discomfort. Johnson

  continued. "The kids called police and medical. Looking at her,

  everyone assumed the worst. Her pulse was slow, she wasn't moving or

  talking, her face and body were covered with blood. The med techs took

  her straight to Emanuel Legacy, and patrol cops called in MCT. We page

  O'Donnell and tell him what we have, and he says we don't need a DA to

  come out. We don't have a suspect in custody yet, and the scene where

  we found the vie, even if it turns out to be the crime scene, is

  already fucked up by the high school kids. He tells us to keep working

  and to page him if we get a suspect or if anything big comes up over

  the weekend."

  This was promising to be a long meeting if Johnson didn't speed it up,

  so I broke in. "How'd you guys split up the investigation?"

  "Chuck and his partner, Mike Calabrese, supervised patrol in securing

  the scene, and Jack and I went to Emanuel to follow up with the vie. By

  the time we arrive, she's been there almost an hour and doing a lot

  better. The ER doc told us that most of the blood was from the anal

  tearing and a single large laceration on her face. She was out of it

  and had a slow pulse because she was on heroin. To be on the safe

  side, the doctor gave her Narcan to knock the heroin out of her system

  and keep her from ODing. She was bruised up pretty bad, but she was

  basically OK by the time we got to the hospital."

  "So that's when you realized it wasn't a Major Crimes Team case after

  all," I said, letting them know that Garcia had already filled me in on

  the jurisdictional problems.

  Jack Walker responded. As the senior detective he probably felt the

  need to justify the decision to keep the case with MCT. "Depends on

  how you look at it. Yeah, if patrol had known at the scene what the

  vicactual injuries were, they probably wouldn't have called us out. But

  once we got involved, we had a teenage vie saying that a couple guys

  pulled her into their car and raped and beat her. She told the doc she

  didn't know how heroin wound up in her system; that they must have

  injected her during the assault without her realizing it. It looked

  like a straight stranger-to-stranger kidnap, doping, rape, and sod of a

  little girl. It didn't seem right to bump the case down to shift

  detectives."

  "What charge did you use to hang on to the case, attempted murder?" I

  asked.

  Walker nodded. "Yeah, we decided we had enough. Actually, it's an

  attempted agg, since the girl's under fourteen."

  Intentionally killing a person under fourteen is aggravated murder,

  which can carry a death sentence. Luckily, Kendra Martin didn't die,

  so the defendants would at most be charged with Attempted Aggravated

  Murder.

  "So what did you do after you decided to keep the case?" I aske
d.

  Johnson answered. "We go in to talk to her, and I'm telling you the

  girl was a real piece of work, cussing us out, calling us every name in

  the book. Accusing us of keeping her there against her will when there

  was nothing wrong with her so SCF would make her go home." Runaways

  were notoriously distrustful of the state's Services for Children and

  Families department.

  "She wasn't making a lot of sense, so we had to explain to her that we

  were there to investigate her statement to the doctor. That calmed her

  down a little. Still pretty bitchy, though." Johnson caught himself

  and looked over at Garcia for a read on his choice of words. I assured

  him his candor was fine and asked him to continue as I pulled a legal

  pad from my briefcase.

  "Anyway, the vie initially said she was walking in Old Town around ten

  on Saturday night, on her way to Powell's Books, when Suspect One comes

  up from behind and pushes her into the backseat of what she called a"

  he looked down at his notebook " 'some big, seventies, four-door, loser

  shit box." Said it was a dark color. Suspect One gets in back with

  her while Suspect Two drives to a parking lot somewhere in southeast

  Portland.

  "She says Suspect One acted like the one in charge. He starts getting

  real rough with her in the backseat, saying a lot of dirty stuff and

  pulling her clothes off. Thing is, right when she thinks he's about to

  rape her, she realizes there's nothing there. The guy can't get it up.

  So he just goes off and starts beating the shit out of her, then