Pro Bono

Chapter 8

8

D etective Sergeant McHargue arrived at the house in about twenty minutes. He pulled up at the curb behind Warren’s car and walked toward the driveway. As Warren joined him, he said, “What made you look in the windows a second time?”

Warren said, “I’ve never had a paying client with a legitimate need for my help drop out of sight before, and I’ve never gotten shot at. She was eager to get my call, but then she didn’t answer any calls. Her doors were locked, but the alarm wasn’t armed. Officer Porter, who did the welfare check, was thorough, but I just didn’t feel satisfied, so I took another look.”

“You didn’t go inside or anything, right?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Not exactly an answer.”

He had to lie. “The answer is no.”

They reached the dining room window, and Warren said, “There’s a big piece of furniture along the wall on the other side of the dining table. There’s a metallic object on the top left side of it. When I looked the second time the sun was low and shining straight inside, and I could see a reflection. I think it’s a cell phone.”

McHargue stepped up, shaded his eyes and looked in. He stepped to the left side, then the right. “There’s no sun shining on it now.”

“I know, but there was at 5:18 P.M. ”

McHargue turned to look at him for a second. Then he walked back down the driveway to his unmarked car and came back with a large black flashlight and a black object that looked like a small suitcase. He stepped in front of the window again, set the case on the pavement, and stepped up on it. He pushed the lens of the flashlight against the glass and switched on the light. The dining room was lit up with a glare that made Warren squint.

After a few seconds McHargue switched the light off and stepped down. “Bad news.” He picked up the case he’d been standing on.

“Wait,” Warren said. “I’m sure I saw the phone, and—”

“Yeah, me too,” McHargue said. “That’s what I meant by bad news. People who take off voluntarily seldom leave their phones behind. I’m going to request a warrant to search the house, and to have the tech people take a look at what’s in the phone. I’ll also get a search going for her car. I’ll be in touch.”

“Thanks,” Warren said. He resisted the impulse to say anything else. He watched McHargue get into his car and drive off fast. Police departments were big and ponderous machines, but he could tell McHargue was determined to get the machine moving, and that was all Warren could hope for.

When he arrived at the office, business hours were over, and the parking levels were nearly empty. He parked in a visitor’s space on the level above the Warren & Associates spaces, hoping that if criminals were watching for him, they wouldn’t identify the rental car. He took the elevator up to his office’s floor and found that Martha was still at her desk.

“Hi,” he said. “Why are you still here?”

“Or you could say, ‘Martha, once again, you’re employee of the month. You stayed fifteen whole minutes to help me freeze Vesper Ellis’s accounts.’ ”

“You anticipated that I was going to freeze her accounts?”

“She still hasn’t called back. What else can you do? So I’ve gotten a start on it. I copied some of the letters you used during the Bagler divorce, and some others from Rice v. Scorton . Where there was an overlap, I copied both, so you’d have a choice. I haven’t dug up the requests for court orders. I figured it was too soon for that.”

“That’s terrific, Martha. Thank you. Take Alan home, and you and Sophia and have a nice evening.”

“We will,” she said. “The letters to all the banks and financial corporations to freeze the accounts are in the Vesper Ellis file.” She took her purse out of the deep drawer of her desk and went to the door, with the dog following her. “Don’t stay too late. Tired people get stupid.”

“I won’t. Goodbye.”

He walked into his office and went to work. The letters in the file were his first priority. As he read each one and found it free of errors and appropriate to this case, he would print it and leave it in the tray while he went on to the next. Each demanded that a company freeze all its Vesper Ellis accounts immediately, not make any trades in equity accounts or transfers of funds, even from one of her accounts to another. He demanded that no records concerning the accounts be in any way altered or made unavailable. Any previous agreement to allow anyone else access to her funds, records, history, or business affairs was hereby revoked. Any dividends, interest, or other income should be left in the accounts to await her personal decision regarding its disposition. Any deviation or delay would be met with legal action.

He was identified in the documents as Vesper Ellis’s attorney. These companies did not need to know how recently that had become true. He was hoping that the companies’ legal departments would decide to ask for proof of his status as soon as tomorrow morning. When they received photocopies of the hiring documents she had signed and saw the date, they would realize that he had been hired to solve a specific problem, and that the problem was the kind a client would characterize as an emergency. To them, that would mean she thought waiting would cause her financial harm. That, in turn, might cause their company financial harm too.

Legal departments in large companies tended to exist outside the normal chain of command. Lawyers were in charge of nothing but their own offices. All they did most of the time was give advice, but the people they gave advice to were at the top—CEOs, CFOs, the board of directors. If they were any good, they would spend tomorrow morning looking very closely at the accounts of Vesper Ellis. As soon as they did, some of them would see what Warren had seen. Somebody in at least two of these companies was stealing.

He was aware that there were demands in these documents that were open to dispute, and he couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t at some point be having those disputes. He wasn’t going to give that much thought for now. The purpose of what he was doing was to shorten the process of isolating and identifying the person or people who had been meddling with Vesper Ellis’s accounts.

He could not be sure that the thefts had anything to do with the disappearance of Mrs. Ellis, but he knew they were the problem he’d been hired to fix, and stopping them was something he knew how to do. He was worried about her. Missing woman cases that had already gone more than forty-eight hours before anybody started searching had a dismal, heartbreaking history. The only way to operate under these circumstances was to assume that she hadn’t driven off for a week at a spa or something, but that something had happened to her. He could only act on the unproven theory that her absence might have some connection with the thefts from her accounts.

He had to abandon his career-long practice of thoroughly investigating every question and collecting all the facts before he acted. This time he had to try to freeze the legal and financial landscape of Vesper Ellis’s life exactly as it was right now. He turned back to his computer and began converting each of his letters into emails and sending them to the companies. As soon as he had finished, he went through the pile of printed letters, signed them, printed the envelopes, and got them ready to go out in the morning.

He called the messenger service that his firm used for serving subpoenas and other legal documents, and made arrangements for an early pickup and delivery of the letters.

He had to make up for lost time. He began working on the papers that would be necessary to obtain a court order to force the companies to accede to his demands. A court order might not be necessary for all the companies, but the ones for which it was necessary were most likely to be the ones that had some wrongdoing to conceal. He was going to find out.

His cell phone startled him. He answered, “Charles Warren.”

“This is Douglas McHargue. The judge granted the warrant, and we’re going over there now. I’d like to have somebody to serve with the warrant. Are you able to accept it?”

“I’m on my way,” Warren said.

When Warren got out of his car at the Ellis house, he saw Officer Porter, the cop who had performed the welfare check in the early afternoon. She was leaning against the hood of her patrol car, and she came forward when she saw him. She said, “I hear you found something I missed.”

“I missed it too.”

“But then you remembered you could see through walls.”

“I didn’t need to. All that happened was that the sun got lower in late afternoon, which it does every day, and a strong beam of sunlight went in through the dining room window and lit up the top of that big sideboard.”

She didn’t take her eyes off him. “I know you think this could be life and death, but I hope you didn’t find the phone another way.”

“I’m far too selfish to do anything that would get me sent to jail and disbarred.”

“Do you think I would arrest you for taking a personal risk to save a client’s life?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you would.”

“You’re right. But I would admire your courage and compassion while I was putting the cuffs on you.”

“That would have been comforting,” he said. “But of course, that’s not the case.”

At that moment McHargue walked up to Warren and handed him the folded warrant. “As her attorney, you get this.”

“Thank you, Detective.” He opened it and looked to be sure it was perfect. Then he folded it and slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket. Sometime soon he was going to have the responsibility of telling Vesper Ellis what had been done and why. He hoped he would, anyway.

McHargue, Porter, and two male uniformed cops went around to the rear door of the house. One of the cops produced a ring of keys, selected one and tried it on the lock, bent over and looked closely at the doorknob, selected another and tried it, then withdrew that one too. The third key opened the lock and he pushed the door inward, then stepped off the small porch while his partner went back around to the driveway and disappeared.

A minute later four crime scene people arrived, put on coveralls, covered their shoes with plastic booties, and pulled on gloves and head coverings, then stepped inside through the kitchen doorway. Through the open door, Warren saw flashlight beams sweeping the room, then disappearing as they went into the next room.

Warren waited. After only a couple minutes one of the crime scene people came out carrying the cell phone in a plastic evidence bag.

McHargue saw it and turned to Warren. “There’s the phone, as the warrant specified. You might as well go. You’ll hear from me.”