Chapter 47
Jack’s car screeched to a halt in the parking lot. He jumped out and sprinted past the courthouse to the Graham Building,
his mind racing even faster. His client was deep in enemy territory, surrounded by prosecutors, but Jack had no superhero
delusions of saving Elliott from himself. He couldn’t even get his client to speak to him, much less stop him from confessing.
His only hope was to convince the state attorney that Elliott could deliver only one kind of confession:
A false one.
The young woman at the reception desk directed him to the top floor. The meeting was in a conference room adjacent to the
state attorney’s corner office. Jack was still a bit winded from the run across the parking lot, and he paused to catch his
breath so not to come across as a breathless, desperate man bursting into the room. Elliott was seated on one side of the
rectangular table, alone. Across from him sat Miami-Dade State Attorney Abe Beckham, flanked by Julianna Weller to his right
and MDPD homicide detective Osborne to his left. Behind them was a picture-window view of the jail from which Elliott had
just been released. No introductions were necessary. The state attorney offered Jack the open chair beside his client.
“Now that we’re all here,” said Beckham, “I believe Mr. Stafford has something he would like to tell us.”
Jack interrupted. “Elliott, I’m going to ask you one last time: Will you please step out with me and talk in private?”
The response was as expected, which was no response at all.
Julianna Weller smiled thinly. “You seem to have a quieting effect on your client. He was eager to speak before you arrived.”
“Yes, eager to confess just as the case took a big turn in his direction,” said Jack. “Curious timing, don’t you think?”
“He would have confessed long ago if his lawyer hadn’t been on a mission to blame someone else.”
“I see it differently,” said Jack. “The only reason Elliott wants to confess is to stop me from naming the killer.”
Jack, along with the law enforcement side of the table, waited for a reaction of any kind from Elliott. There was only silence.
Beckham asked, “Are you here to tell us that your client is offering a false confession to protect Helena Pollard?”
“I’d rather not tell you anything,” said Jack. He pushed away from the table, went to the whiteboard on the wall behind him,
and grabbed a marker. “I prefer showing, if you’ll indulge me.”
“Be my guest,” said Beckham.
Jack faced the board and wrote just one word: sebum.
“Who is Sebum?” asked the state attorney.
“Not who. What. It’s the reason the killer’s fingerprints were not on Helena Pollard’s handgun.”
It was lost on no one in the room that Helena’s prints were on the gun.
“A little late for you to start pointing the finger at someone other than Helena Pollard,” said Weller. “What do you expect
us to do, erase all your evidence from our minds?”
“Not all of it,” said Jack. “I’m just asking you to rethink one phone call.”
“Which one?” she asked.
Elliott was sitting with his back to Jack, but the visible tension in his shoulders signaled that he was listening. Jack spoke
principally to the state attorney, as it was obvious that Beckham was the only one on the other side of the table he had any
chance of persuading.
“Elliott’s cell phone records confirm that he received two phone calls from the Pollard landline.
The first was in the morning. We know from Helena’s testimony that her husband called Elliott and warned him to stay away from Austen.
The second was in the evening, while Helena was still at her mother’s house.
We have no way of knowing what was said to Elliott.
But we know from Austen’s testimony that Elliott showed up at the Pollard house after the call. ”
“Yes, and the only thing that matters is that your client showed up,” said Weller. “We don’t care why Owen called a second time.”
“You should,” said Jack. “Because there was no conceivable reason for Owen to make that second call.”
“How can you say that? Maybe he was calling to reinforce what he said that morning.”
“Owen called Elliott a freak and warned him to stay away from Austen. There was no reason to call again and say it a second
time.”
“The point is that he called, Elliott came to the house, things went downhill, and your client ended up shooting Owen with
Helena’s gun.”
“There are two flaws with your argument,” said Jack. “The first is that Owen was already dead by the time Elliott got to the
Pollards’ house. We know that because of the second flaw in your argument: Owen didn’t make the second call to Elliott’s cell
phone. The shooter did.”
“The shooter being who—according to you?”
Jack sensed they weren’t ready to hear it, so he laid more groundwork. “Let me ask you a question: Who is the only person
I’ve mentioned so far who did not have access to a gun destruction facility?”
No one answered.
“Let me ask it another way,” said Jack. “Who would bury the murder weapon under a few inches of dirt in the yard rather than
destroy it or just pitch into ten feet of muck in the Everglades?”
Still no answer, so Jack put an even finer point on it.
“Who . . . but a child?”
Jack could almost see the goose bumps forming on the back of Elliott’s neck, but he did not turn around to face his lawyer.
“That’s it?” asked Weller, incredulous. “The gun was buried in the yard—that’s your proof that a six-year-old boy shot his
father?”
“I’m just getting started,” said Jack, and then he returned to the whiteboard, pointed, and said the word again: “Sebum.”
Jack paused. For years, he and Andie had lived under a hard-and-fast rule that they never spoke to each other about his active
cases or her active investigations. It was like living on opposite sides of the Great Wall of China, to borrow Andie’s metaphor,
and trying to stay happily married. It felt good to be free from that rule—so good that Jack wished he could give credit where
credit was due.
“My wife has worked on many child abduction cases for the FBI. One of the little-known forensic facts I picked up from her
is that there’s an important difference between adult and child fingerprints.”
“Yeah, the size,” said Weller, scoffing.
“I said the important difference,” said Jack. “It’s in the skin oils, called sebum. Adult sebum is made up of stable lipids, which are less likely
to vaporize over time. The sebum of children is higher in cholesterol and free fatty acids—unstable lipids that break down
more quickly.”
“So?”
“Under identical conditions—like a gun buried in the yard—a child’s fingerprint disappears faster than an adult fingerprint.
Which is exactly what your fingerprint analyst found here.”
Weller sat back in her chair, arms folded, unimpressed. “Or he found a smudged adult print left by your client. I suppose now you’re going to tell me that this sebum also explains what Elliott Stafford was doing at the Pollard house
on the night Owen Pollard was murdered.”
“No, that’s the end of the science lesson,” said Jack. “Elliott went to the house because he got a second call from the Pollard
landline.”
“From Owen Pollard.”
“No. From Austen.”
Weller chuckled. “Because every six-year-old boy knows the phone number of a grown trans man by heart.”
Jack needed to marginalize Weller. He switched into closing-argument mode and directed his remarks to the state attorney,
as if Abe Beckham were a “jury of one.”
“Things didn’t go well in the Pollard house after Helena ran out alone,” said Jack.
“Austen wanted his mommy. He cried and carried on so badly that Owen threw in the towel. He called his wife—on his cell phone—and told her to come back and make their son ‘stop acting like a sissy.’ Austen called her too. Or he tried to. Things were so bad at this point that Austen couldn’t even remember his mother’s cell phone number.
So, he picked up the landline. And he hit the redial button.
It redialed the last number dialed from the landline: Owen’s first call to my client, which he made that morning, when he called him a ‘freak.’”
The room was silent. Finally, Elliott turned and faced Jack, but he didn’t direct his lawyer to stop. Jack continued.
“We don’t know what was said. But this was a call for help from a distressed child to the very person who had brought him
into the world. What did Elliott do? What would you do? He went to help.”
“And he shot Owen Pollard,” said Weller, unable to keep quiet.
“No, he didn’t,” said Jack. “Maybe he would have, if he’d had a gun of his own. Or if there had been some way for him to know that there was a gun in the purse Helena Pollard
had left behind. That’s why you were wrong, Julianna, when you say Elliott got there before Owen Pollard called 911 and said he was shot. The timeline is not that clear. Elliott arrived after Owen Pollard was shot. In fact, by the time he got there, Owen Pollard was already dead.”
Elliott was glowering but remained silent.
“Of course, Elliott had no way of knowing that Owen had already called 911. Lucky for him, the call was from Owen’s cell phone,
so it took a while for police to figure out it was from the Pollards’ house. That gave Elliott enough time to make a plan
and implement it.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Weller. “So he proceeded to cover it all up by making it look like suicide. Let’s get to brass tacks
here: If your client wasn’t the killer, he would have called the police himself and told them there was a terrible accident.”
“Really?” asked Jack. “A trans man who gave up a baby for adoption is inside the house with the dead adoptive father who called him a freak and told him to stay away from his son. I’d like to meet the police officer who would believe it was the six-year-old boy who shot Owen Pollard.”
“That wasn’t it,” Elliott said sharply.
Jack froze. It was a logical point for Elliott to speak up, but after so much silence, the sound of his voice hit like a bolt
of lightning.
“Elliott, I can’t believe I’m saying this,” said Jack, “but right now it’s best if you don’t speak.”
He glared and said, “That wasn’t the reason I made it look like suicide.”
“Elliott, I strongly advise you to remain silent.”
“It wasn’t because I thought the police wouldn’t believe Austen shot his father.”
“Elliott, stop,” said Jack.
“I was terrified of what would happen if the police did believe it.”
Jack was confused, and the prosecutors seemed even more puzzled. Elliott looked squarely at Jack as he spoke.
“Austen is not like other boys. Anyone can see that. His father saw it and hated him for it. I can relate. And I could see
his future. Maybe he’s gender-confused, or for all we know he’ll have more girlfriends than George Balanchine and Mikhail
Baryshnikov combined. Either way, dancing is not football or basketball, and he’s going to be teased when he’s young, maybe
even bullied. What chance does he have in middle school and high school if, on top of it, he’s known as the kid who murdered
his father?”
There was silence, and perhaps Jack was the only one in the room who could make sense of it. When Jack was questioning Austen
at the first hearing, Elliott had tried to pass him a Post-It note—Leave my son alone—and shut him down. When Jack had asked if there was truth to Serena’s testimony that Elliott sold Austen to pay for his gender-affirming
treatments, Elliott threatened to fire him. Since the start of his “speech strike,” Elliott’s only communications with Jack
had been to protect Austen.
“This is making me sick,” said Weller. “You’re seriously telling us that you covered up a murder—and then you sat silent and took the blame—out of a mother’s love for a child?”
Elliott didn’t answer. Jack was about to speak on behalf of his client, but the state attorney took the words out of Jack’s
mouth.
“That’s exactly what he’s saying,” said Beckham.
It was music to Jack’s ears. He was not the only one in room who “got it.”
The state attorney continued. “Mr. Stafford, take your lawyer’s advice and stop talking. Julianna, set up a meeting with Helena
Pollard ASAP. I have just one question for her. Mr. Swyteck, I will be in touch with you myself before the end of the day.”
Beckham rose and shook Jack’s hand.
“Let’s go, Elliott,” said Jack.
Together the two men left the meeting and walked to the elevator. Elliott said nothing until they were inside the elevator,
alone, watching the blinking lights above the door on their way to the lobby.
“Thank you,” said Elliott.
The doors opened, and they stepped into the lobby. “You’re more than welcome,” said Jack.