The Rose Conspiracy Page 5

  Tully nodded, gave Blackstone a warm handshake, and after popping his Panama hat on his head he headed out of the courtroom.

  When Blackstone got back to his office he sequestered himself in the law library with the Vinnie Archmont file spread out in front of him.

  Julia, his junior partner, walked in.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “Got her released on bail,” Blackstone said.

  “On a capital murder charge? Nice work.”

  “Henry Hartz was on the other side. I expected more from him. You know, Genghis Khan stuff—slaughtering the livestock, burning the crops.”

  “Don’t underestimate him,” Julia said. “I’ve heard that you never, ever want to turn your back on the guy. He’ll kick you in the kidneys—with steel-tipped shoes.”

  “Yeah, but I can easily outmaneuver him,” Blackstone said, with that twisted smile that signaled a cynical attack of dark humor. “He walks with a cane.”

  Julia shook her head at that one and added, “I know. Some kind of health issue. But he paints a very sympathetic picture to a jury.”

  “I’m trying to formulate our discovery demands,” Blackstone snapped, changing the subject, “now that I’ve reviewed these,” Blackstone said, pointing to the pile of FBI reports that he had already received from the prosecution. “I would appreciate your thoughts on this.”

  Julia sat down and scanned the FBI “302” reports on the federal investigation into the Smithsonian crime. When she was done, one thing had caught her eye.

  “The physical evidence documented at the scene of the murder is interesting,” she said.

  “You’re getting warmer,” Blackstone said, always the law professor.

  “The drinking glass on the desk left on Langley’s desk? I notice it’s mentioned in the 302 report—though I don’t see a lab report on it anywhere.”

  “That’s one thing, right. For some reason they didn’t finish the fingerprint analysis on the glass, I guess. Anything else?”

  “The pen on Langley’s desk?”

  “Oh, no, now you’re getting colder,” Blackstone said, with a mocking tone. “The pen was analyzed, right here,” he said, pointing to a lab report, “and it was found to have only Langley’s fingerprints on it.”

  Julia tossed her hair a little anxiously, took her dark-rimmed glasses off, and wiped her eyes. Then she kept them off, twirling them and resting her chin on her hand.

  “Okay,” she muttered out loud. “We’re talking about physical evidence.” Then a light went on.

  “The notepad on his desk.”

  “Excellent thought!” Blackstone shouted. “Of course, on the other hand, it was a blank pad.”

  “Langley could have written something down,” she replied, “and the shooter could have removed those notes, along with the Booth diary pages?”

  “I’m pretty certain that’s what happened.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s logical,” Blackstone replied. “Langley was the head of America’s most prestigious national institution of science and history. He is a scholar himself. He had custody of the missing diary pages from the hand of John Wilkes Booth, arguably the most notorious political assassin in American history. Do you think Langley wasn’t poring over those pages? And wouldn’t an academic like Horace Langley have taken notes? No, the real question is not about his missing notepad pages. The real question is this: Does the government have evidence of exactly what it was that he was writing, just moments before somebody put two bullets into his chest?”

  Then Blackstone leaned back, with his hands folded behind his head and answered his own question.

  “I am betting they do. And now I am going to force them to share it with me too.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Blackstone and Julia ordered some carry-out Thai food that evening, and then worked late, until almost midnight. When they were finished, Blackstone electronically served their motion for discovery on AUSA Henry Hartz and filed it with the U.S. District Court by e-mail. It was thirty-seven pages long.

  Blackstone loaded a lot of unusual information requests into his written demand. Unlike civil cases, where the discovery rules allow almost unlimited inquiry into every conceivably relevant area, in criminal cases defense counsel has to operate in a legal straitjacket. The government has to disclose evidence to the defense only within certain narrow categories. But Blackstone thought he had found some loopholes.

  He found that the FBI reports previously produced to him by prosecutor Hartz contained numerous redactions: words and sentences blacked out. Those were the bits of information the prosecution didn’t want Blackstone to read, and which Hartz had determined were protected from disclosure. But Blackstone needed as many facts as he could gather to defend his client. He wanted it all.

  One of the blacked-out sentences in an FBI report produced to Blackstone seemed as if, in the grammatical context of the unredacted sentences before and after it, it had revealed some personal information about Horace Langley. In his motion, Blackstone argued for the full release of that information because, in his words, “The defense believes that Mr. Langley’s possible association with any number of ideological groups, including the Freemasons, is material to the defense of this case.” Blackstone had remembered Vinnie’s comment about Lord Dee’s interest in the Booth diary pages. All of that overblown stuff about the “ultimate secret of the Freemasons.”

  But the way that the criminal law professor saw it, the real blockbuster in his motion was his demand, in paragraph 77, for everything the government had, in terms of evidence, investigation, or scientific analysis relating to the notepad that was found lying on Langley’s desk after the murder. More than that, Blackstone was demanding the right to have the notepad examined by his own expert.

  When Julia asked him what he was looking for, Blackstone smiled one of his know-it-all smiles and then proceeded to explain.

  “According to the reports, his pen was a Faber Castell Porsche P3150 ballpoint. One of those heavy, expensive jobs—you know, the kind they don’t call just pens, but writing instruments,” Blackstone explained. “That thing would have left a deep imprint on the page as well on as the pages underneath.”

  “Porsche? I thought they made cars.”

  “They do. And they also have a line of pens for those who love their cars. Not a bad car, the Porsche. But no Maserati,” Blackstone noted with a grin.

  “So,” Julia continued, her brow furrowed, “the pen impresses a mark—all the way down to several pages underneath. And we get a microscopic examination of those pages still left on the pad of paper—to see if we can decipher what Langley wrote as he was examining the Booth diary?”

  “Nice work, Robins,” Blackstone said. “I lead you to water, and you drink—we make a terrific team.”

  Julia paused for a minute and then decided to speak her mind.

  “J.D., just once in a while, you can try not to be so condescending.”

  That is when she got up from the conference table, grabbed her briefcase and her purse, and walked out of the office to go home.

  Blackstone, who was still studying the motion he had just e-mailed out to the opposing attorney and the Court, was trying hard to act like Julia’s comment didn’t bother him.

  The next day, early in the morning, Blackstone traveled over to the federal detention center. He was waiting in the drab lobby of that facility to greet Vinnie when she was released on bail.

  After she gathered her personal effects, Vinnie ran out into the lobby, threw her arms around her attorney, and kissed him on the cheek.

  Blackstone, a bit embarrassed, moved away slightly and took Vinnie’s arms off his neck, as a female jailer behind the glass window glared at him.

  “Easy,” Blackstone said to his client. “This is only step one. We still have a case to win.”

  “And you will do that, I know it,” she gushed. “You are my defender and my deliverer.”

  Blackstone was uncom
fortable with her grandiose accolades. So, as he walked her to his car he changed the subject and quickly launched into a preview of the discovery motion he had filed. He drove her to her apartment in Alexandria, not far from her studio. As they were driving, he glanced several times into his rearview mirror.

  “Why do you keep looking back?” Vinnie asked.

  “Just curious,” was all he said.

  Blackstone could see the tan Ford Taurus behind him.

  And he knew Tully Tullinger well enough to know that somewhere back there, behind that car, was his private investigator, tailing the Taurus.

  CHAPTER 12

  Beneath the mammoth seal of the United States of America that took up half the wall in his courtroom, U.S. District Judge Robert Templeton was seated at the bench, rocking back and forth in his black executive chair. He was listening to the prosecution’s objections to J.D. Blackstone’s discovery motion.

  Judge Templeton had already ruled against Blackstone on most of his requests for the government to turn over various documents and items of potential evidence. So AUSA Henry Hartz was growing more energized and aggressive in his arguments.

  “I can’t begin to understand,” Hartz said in bewilderment, “Mr. Blackstone’s bizarre request for personal information about Horace Langley—including all of his intimate associations. And Mr. Blackstone even wants to know whether the victim had been a member of the Freemasons. I would have thought that a law professor like Mr. Blackstone would have consulted his law books before filing such a frivolous, absurd motion.”

  Judge Templeton interrupted him, directing his question to Blackstone.

  “Counsel, why this business about the Freemasons? Frankly, it strikes me as far-fetched. I have to agree with the government on that one. I don’t see the relevance of that issue anywhere in this case.”

  Blackstone quickly jogged up to the podium where Hartz was standing and shared the microphone with his opponent.

  “Your Honor, I believe it is material to the question of motive.”

  “Whose motive?” the judge shot back. “Your client’s motive?”

  “No, Your Honor. The motive of the true perpetrator, here, which is not my client. She’s innocent.”

  “Innocent?” Judge Templeton retorted. “I wonder if I’ve ever heard that one before.”

  With that, the U.S. marshals leaning against the outer wall of the courtroom chuckled to themselves. The court clerk, a middle-aged black woman seated below the judicial bench at a desk, was grinning.

  “My mistake, Your Honor,” Blackstone fired back, his voice showing a restrained sense of indignation. “I thought we were actually still following that quaint Western tradition of a presumption of innocence.”

  “Because of your considerable competencies in the practice of criminal law, Professor Blackstone,” the judge said, his eyes now narrowed to slits and his torso leaning over the bench, “I will ignore that remark. For now. Suffice it to say that in my courtroom that presumption still holds.”

  Then Judge Templeton straightened up a little in his chair and continued his statement. “But that doesn’t mean,” the judge went on, “that I am going to let you use it to bootstrap your argument for discovery of personal information about a murder victim that, at least right now, appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the charges of conspiracy to commit murder and theft. For the time being, I am going to deny that motion. You can renew it later if you can give me some support for its materiality.”

  “That only leaves us,” Henry Hartz cheerfully announced, “with Mr. Blackstone’s last demand for discovery—located at paragraph 77 of his motion. The request for all of the government’s reports dealing with the blank notepad found at the scene of the crime—and Mr. Blackstone’s demand for the defense’s expert to examine the notepad.”

  “Mr. Blackstone,” the judge said, again addressing the defense attorney who was still standing next to Henry Hartz at the podium, “today you’ve already argued your legal point for that request based on very general Rule 16 considerations. But what’s the factual relevancy of the notepad?”

  “That seems clear,” Blackstone replied. “The pen was lying next to the notepad. The pen had Mr. Langley’s fingerprints on it. Mr. Langley was examining one of the most controversial and historically significant documents in American history. We can logically infer that he was making notes. Those notes may include vital information about motive—why the real culprits wanted those diary pages and why they may have wanted Mr. Langley dead.”

  “There it is—motive again!” Hartz shouted out. “Your Honor, the weakness of Mr. Blackstone’s defense is apparent: He is trying to exonerate his client by merely showing that others may have had some motive to steal the Booth diary. That seems to me to be a flimsy defense if Mr. Blackstone wants to rely on it at trial. But I suppose he has a right to try and argue that to the jury. But at this early stage of the case, it is nothing but a fishing expedition into our confidential investigative reports. Mr. Blackstone’s argument is an insult to this Court’s intelligence.”

  “Well,” the judge replied with a half smile, “I don’t take it too personally when the intelligence of this Court is impugned—the integrity of this Court, however, is a different matter.”

  Hartz could see that Judge Templeton was seriously entertaining Blackstone’s demand. So he redoubled his efforts.

  “But he is impugning your integrity, Your Honor,” Hartz countered. “Blackstone is implying, ridiculously, that the notepad will somehow prove his client’s innocence and that you are blocking that evidence from the defense. I can’t think of a more direct assault on this Court’s integrity.”

  The judge was silent on the bench, staring off into space. Blackstone knew he might lose this paragraph 77 demand as he had all the others. He was not going to let that happen.

  “I have reason to believe,” Blackstone blurted out, “that the underlying note pages on Langley’s notepad may contain microscopic tracings of what he wrote. That we may be able to reconstruct exactly what Langley was writing just moments before he was murdered.”

  “And why do you believe that?” the judge asked.

  “Because of the pen he was using,” Blackstone said with a sigh, reluctant that he was being forced to divulge his conclusions to the prosecution. “A pen that was capable of making a deep imprint several pages down in the notepad.”

  Blackstone was able to see out of the corner of his eye that Henry Hartz was standing motionless at the podium next to him, gripping the head of his cane tightly, and staring straight down onto the wooden shelf of the podium, where a few of his papers were lying.

  More silence.

  “I’ll grant your requests dealing with the notepad,” the judge ruled. “The government will be required to produce copies of any of its reports dealing with the notepad and must provide an opportunity for your defense expert to scientifically examine it.”

  “There is a mountain of physical evidence in this case,” Hartz shot back. “It may take a while for us to locate the notepad in the FBI inventory.”

  “Then I would ask the Court,” Blackstone replied, “to instruct Mr. Hartz that he had better start looking. I need this information immediately.”

  “Mr. Hartz,” the judge said in a conciliatory tone. “Please try to be as expeditious as you can.”

  Then he gaveled the hearing to a close.

  Blackstone tried to catch Hartz’s attention to discuss the timing of when his expert could examine the notepad, but Hartz ignored him.

  “Henry,” Blackstone called out to the prosecutor as he walked with his cane to the end of the courtroom to exit. “Hey, Henry.”

  But AUSA Henry Hartz never turned around. He just kept walking.

  J.D. Blackstone didn’t miss that. And he was already trying to figure out exactly what that meant.

  CHAPTER 13

  Blackstone retained Dr. Ken Coglin, a professor of materials engineering from the University of Maryland, as his expert ex
aminer on the Langley notepad. Coglin had extensive experience as a forensic examiner of document imprint evidence.

  AUSA Hartz immediately threw up roadblocks to the examination, but Blackstone wouldn’t be diverted. Finally, he called an emergency conference call with Judge Templeton and AUSA Hartz in order to press hard for an immediate inspection of the notepad.

  “I’ve given you a few days already,” Judge Templeton said to the federal prosecutor. “Let’s not drag this out. I’m sure you can produce the notepad, Henry. Get it done.”

  Twenty-four hours later Dr. Coglin and J.D. Blackstone were in a spare room in the complex of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The notepad was lying in front of them, sealed in a plastic evidence bag. FBI Special Agent Ralph Johnson, a veteran African-American FBI agent on the case, was in the room, and after snapping on latex gloves, he carefully unsealed the bag and then stepped a few feet away to observe. By agreement with Hartz, Blackstone had conceded that the government could have an agent present in the room during the document examination.

  Coglin set up his high-powered microscope and focused only on the top sheet of the notepad. He set up several angled lights around the base for contrast. His microscope was then linked to a printer.

  After several hours of examination, having powered down to a mere 10-4 m, Coglin printed out several versions of his microscopy view.

  “Done,” he announced casually.

  Agent Johnson placed the notepad back in the plastic bag and sealed it, signing off on the label on the exterior of the bag with the date, time, and his initials. Then, after a polite nod to Blackstone and Coglin, Johnson left for the FBI building, where he said he would be placing the bag containing the notepad back into the evidence room.

  Coglin seemed satisfied with what he saw and explained to Blackstone that his next step would begin as soon as he returned to his University of Maryland lab.