Leigh didn’ t tell him he was relaying knowledge that anyone with a Netflix account could access. She had thought the same thing when she’d seen the photos from Tammy Karlsen’s rape kit. Andrew’s attack had been savage, just short of killing the woman. It wasn’t a leap to say that sometime, maybe next time, the knife would cut open the artery and the victim would bleed out in a pool of her own blood.
She told Bradley, “The three other cases. Someone went to a lot of trouble to connect them to Andrew. I wonder if there’s more going on behind the scenes.”
“Such as?”
“Some officer or a detective who worked one of the earlier attacks. Maybe she wanted to charge Andrew, but the DA or her boss told her to drop it.”
“She?” he asked.
“You ever tell a woman to drop something?” Leigh watched Bradley’s ears twitch in his version of a smile. “There’s no way any boss approved all the man hours it must’ve taken to tie together these three other cases. The department can barely keep gas in their squad cars right now.”
Bradley was listening intently. “Extrapolate.”
“Somehow, maybe from credit card receipts or video footage or something we haven’t thought of yet, the police already had Andrew’s name on their list. They didn’t have enough probable cause to bring him in. Considering his financial resources, they knew they would only get one chance to question him.”
Bradley leapt to the obvious conclusion. “There might be even more attacks that we have yet to learn of, which means that everything rests on winning the Karlsen case.”
Leigh kept up her rah-rah attitude. “I only need to persuade one juror to break the case. Dante has to persuade twelve.”
Bradley leaned farther back in his chair. He folded his hands behind his head. “I met Andrew’s father once. Gregory Senior tried to pay him off, but of course Waleski reneged. Terrible human being. Linda was little more than a child when she married him. The best thing that ever happened to her was his disappearance.”
Leigh could’ve told him that Buddy Waleski’s disappearance had been good for a lot of people.
He asked, “ Would you put Andrew on the stand?”
“I could shoot him in the chest and save the jury a verdict.” Leigh reminded herself that she was speaking to her boss, and that she needed to provide herself a framework of legitimacy. “I can’t stop Andrew if he wants to testify, but I’ll tell him he’ll lose the case if he does.”
“Let me ask you a question,” Bradley said, as if he hadn’t been doing just that. “Assuming Andrew is guilty of the assaults, how are you going to feel if you get him off scot-free and he does it again? Or he does something even worse the next time?”
Leigh knew the answer he was looking for. It was the answer that made people hate defense attorneys—until they needed one. “If Andrew walks, I’m going to feel like Dante Carmichael didn’t do his job. The burden is on the state to prove guilt.”
“Good.” Bradley nodded. “Reginald Paltz. What do you think about him?”
Leigh hesitated. After the conversation with Liz, she had wiped Reggie from her mind. “He’s good. I think his background work on Andrew is excellent. We won’t be surprised at trial by anything the prosecution digs up. I’m putting him on one of my divorce cases.”
“Delay that,” Bradley ordered. “Mr. Paltz is on exclusive retainer for the duration of the trial. He’s waiting in the conference room with Andrew. I won’t be joining you, but I think you’ll find he has some interesting things to say.”
8
Leigh braced herself as she walked toward the conference room. Instead of trying to anticipate the interesting things that Reggie Paltz had to say, she silently recited her Andrew Hypothesis: when Andrew was a kid, he had found Buddy’s camera behind the bar. After his father had disappeared, he’d seen Callie worrying the femoral artery diagram in the textbook. For some unknown reason, at some point, the two memories had collided, and now he was out there copying his own sick interpretation of his father’s murder.
A bead of sweat rolled down the back of Leigh’s neck. The hypothesis didn’t seem as strong with Andrew less than twenty feet away. She was giving him a lot of credit for making the connection. There was no such thing as a criminal mastermind. Leigh was missing a detail, a B that connected the A and C.
Bradley’s UGA handmaiden cleared her throat.
Leigh was standing like a statue in front of the closed conference room door. She gave the woman a nod before going inside.