The Black Book Read online

  She turns and looks at me.

  “Same way he responded to Amy,” she says. “He seduced her. He started a romantic relationship. Also a very intense relationship. You will see and hear evidence that, at least to Katherine, the relationship grew very intense.”

  Smart. Taking our defense and flipping it, shoving it down our throats.

  “But ultimately his charms weren’t enough,” she says. “Amy Lentini was a good prosecutor who kept investigating. Katherine Fenton was a good detective who kept investigating. As much as each of them cared for the defendant, the evidence against him was lining up. And finally Detective Fenton confronted the defendant at Amy’s apartment. You will see the last exchange of text messages between Katherine and the defendant, only minutes before the defendant killed both women.”

  Olson uses a fourth easel, next to the photographs of the three victims of my crimes, to post a blowup of the message Kate had sent me.

  Fenton: Need to talk to u

  Harney: Not now

  Fenton: I’m right outside her door open up

  Harney: You’re outside Amy’s apt?

  Fenton: Yes open door right now

  Harney: Why would I do that

  Fenton: Bc she knows u idiot. She knows about u and so do I

  State’s attorney Margaret Olson lets it all sink in, gives the jurors time to read the exchange on that poster board, watching their eyebrows arch and their mouths drop open as it all comes together for them.

  “‘She knows,’” says Olson, drawing out the last words on that poster board. “‘She knows about you . . . and so do I.’

  “The defendant was cornered by the two women he tried to distract, the two women he tried to charm into turning a blind eye to his crimes. He was cornered, and he had no other choice. He killed them both, within minutes of each other.

  “Now let’s talk about the physical evidence we will show you,” she says.

  And there is plenty of it. But it’s simply the icing on a delicious cake Margaret Olson has just baked. I can see from the way the jurors react to her words, from the nasty glances they shoot in my direction, that I already have one foot in the grave. And each juror is holding a shovelful of dirt.

  Eighty-Eight

  THE NEXT morning, my lawyer, Stilson Tomita, gives our opening statement, just as he previewed it in his office. Kate was the classic “woman scorned.” There are seven women on our jury, and my biggest concern is how it will play with them. Patti insists—and my wife once said the same thing to me—that nobody is more critical of women than other women. Maybe. But when the criticism comes from a man? I’m not so sure. Stilson uses the evidence he has—the sexy photos and the messages, including the implicit threat “You had your chance; remember that I gave you the chance.”

  But they don’t look convinced. They spent all last night thinking about what Margaret Olson said to them—that I was devious, manipulative, that I seduced Kate to keep an eye on her, to keep my enemy close. And every piece of evidence Stilson shows them, solidifying our claim that Kate had become irrational and desperate in her pursuit of me, is likewise more proof that my manipulation had worked.

  And then it’s back to the prosecution. Margaret Olson parades in witnesses over the next three days, carefully building her case.

  Ngozi MacNamara, an assistant state’s attorney, a smartly dressed young African American woman originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, who with that last name probably married an Irishman here in town.

  “I assisted in preparing the complaint for the search warrant for the brownstone,” she says. “I did so at Amy Lentini’s direction.”

  Margaret Olson nods. “And the first sentence of the third paragraph of that document. Could you please read that into the record, Ms. MacNamara?”

  MacNamara looks at her copy. “‘The undersigned has been advised by a CI that handwritten records of the prostitution activity and the extortion payments made to Chicago police are contained within that residence.”

  “And what does ‘CI’ mean?”

  “It means confidential informant.”

  “And under whose signature was this complaint going to be filed?”

  “Under Amy Lentini’s,” MacNamara says.

  “So Amy had a confidential informant?”

  “She did. Her informant told her that Ramona Dillavou was keeping a handwritten record book inside that brownstone. We were particularly interested in records of payoffs to the Chicago Police Department.”

  “Did Amy tell you the identity of her confidential informant?”

  MacNamara smiles at the memory, shakes her head. “You couldn’t have pried it out of her with the Jaws of Life.”

  “No?”

  “I mean, eventually she would’ve had to reveal the source to the judge issuing the search warrant. But until that moment? Amy would take it to her grave.”

  Olson casts a look at the jury. “And as far as you know, she did take it to her grave, didn’t she?”

  Police superintendent Tristan Driscoll, my old pal, in full-dress uniform—as if he’s ever spent a day on the streets of this city, getting his hands dirty—his chin raised, clearly and coherently explaining that Amy Lentini had become convinced that I had stolen the little black book after raiding the brownstone.

  “Ms. Lentini made the obvious point that a homicide detective had no reason to be making an arrest for prostitution,” he says. “And I agreed. It made no sense.”

  “And how did the defendant respond?”

  “He became very agitated. Near the end of the conversation, he stormed out of his chair and got within inches of her. At first I thought he was going to physically attack her.”

  “Objection,” says Stilson, justifying his fat hourly rate. “Move to strike.”

  The judge strikes that last jab Tristan threw in, but how do you unring that bell? Pretend you didn’t hear that, members of the jury—wink, wink: even though we all know you did!

  Mary Ann Lentini, Amy’s mother, with many of those same dark features, tearfully recounting that her daughter came for a visit to Appleton, Wisconsin, and confided that she had met someone. “Amy said that for the first time in her life, she found someone she could imagine a future with,” says her mother. “She said she was in love with a cop named Billy Harney.”

  Mark Madison, an evidence technician for CPD, squat and thick, an unfortunate attempt at a dye job coloring the little bit of hair remaining on his head. I’ve known Mark for years. The last place he wants to be is on a witness stand testifying against me. He can’t even bring himself to look in my direction.

  “Yes,” he says. “I was present in the basement during the search of Billy’s home. I did not personally find the weapon—or weapons.”

  “But as one of the evidence technicians, was the discovery of the weapon called to your attention?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I was first called to a room in the basement that looked like a storage room. A firearm was found in a cigar box on one of the shelves.”

  “Is this the weapon you’ve just described?” Olson says, showing him the gun in a clear bag.

  “Yes, it is,” says Mark. “I bagged it and tagged it.”

  “You—”

  “I inventoried it,” he says.

  Olson nods. “What about other weapons?”

  “There was a knife, a regular old kitchen knife, discovered underneath the lid of the basement toilet,” he says. “I inventoried that, too.”

  “Is this the kitchen knife?” Another bag, holding the knife.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “As far as you know, did you receive these weapons from the individual who discovered them?”

  “As far as I know, yes.”

  “And who was that?” Olson asks. “Who discovered the firearm and the kitchen knife in the defendant’s basement? Was it the same person?”

  “It was the same person,” says Mark. “It was Lieutenant Paul Wizniewski.”

  Eighty-Nine

 
; DR. JACQUELINE Collins-Lightford, a forensic scientist with the Chicago police crime laboratory, a number of initials after her name, even more initials of the peer groups with which she is affiliated, fancy words and acronyms flying from all directions. By the time she explains all her credentials, we’ve covered the entire alphabet several times over.

  This witness is being handled by one of Olson’s assistants, a prosecutor named Loretta Scopes, whom I’ve seen around the courthouse but never met. She looks the part—serious, strident, no frills, just the facts.

  “Doctor, how do you determine if there’s blood on an item of evidence?”

  “Two separate tests,” she says. “The first, a screening test—a preliminary test, if you will—is called the Ouchterlony test, or OT for short. That test tells us whether the stain is blood. And if that test is positive, I’ll do a Hematrace test to confirm that the sample is blood and that its species origin is human.”

  The prosecutor nods. “Did you perform those tests on people’s exhibit 4, this knife?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what were the results?”

  “I did confirm the presence of blood. And the blood was human.”

  (There goes our theory that the knife was used in the ritual sacrifice of a billy goat.)

  “Doctor, did you collect a sample of that blood for DNA testing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you also prepare a blood sample obtained from the victim, Ms. Ramona Dillavou, via search warrant for DNA testing?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you compare these samples?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you do that?”

  That answer, basically, takes up most of an afternoon. Everybody knows what DNA is. But then again, nobody does. Only people in lab coats really get it—the processes, the intertwined sciences, the flaws. So one of these witnesses takes the stand and provides a ninety-minute tutorial on DNA analysis, throws out phrases like short tandem repeats and amplified fragment length polymorphism and polymerase chain reaction, and we pretend that these jurors could possibly understand what the hell is going on. Would we let a juror perform cardiovascular surgery after a two-hour class? Would we let a juror inspect the ears of a dog based on that training? Hell, no. But do we let a juror find someone guilty of murder and send him away for the rest of his life after a crash course in deoxyribonucleic acid fingerprinting? Sure! No problem!

  The punch line from Dr. Collins-Lightford: the blood on the knife found in my basement was consistent with that of Ramona Dillavou and would be consistent with only one in 3.6 quadrillion white females.

  Since there aren’t 3.6 quadrillion white females living on this planet, it sounds like a match for Ramona Dillavou’s blood.

  The juror in the far left corner, a retired physics professor, seems to be thinking the same thing as he shoots a frosty look in my direction.

  Ballistics comes next, a forensic scientist with the Illinois State Police named Spencer Lipscomb.

  “Grooves are the spiral cuts made in the barrel of the firearm at the time of manufacture,” says Lipscomb. “Grooves are cut into the barrel with a spiral direction either to the left or right. The purpose is to put a spin on the bullet and aid its stability in flight. The uncut surface inside the barrel is called the land. When a bullet is discharged through the barrel, the lands and grooves will impress themselves on the bullet. So a bullet exhibiting five lands and grooves with a left twist couldn’t be fired from a weapon, for example, that has six lands and grooves and a right twist.”

  “Sure.”

  “We call these rifling characteristics.”

  “Okay. Did you find that the bullets recovered in the shooting of Amy Lentini and Katherine Fenton contained rifling characteristics consistent with the service weapon registered to and owned by the defendant?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what did you do next?”

  “I examined the striations on the surface of the projectile. Scratches, basically. If you look at the surface of a barrel under high magnification, you see that it resembles the edge of a saw. These microscopic protrusions make contact with the bullet and cause microscopic scratches. So if you have the weapon, as we do, you test-fire a bullet and compare its striations under high magnification to the bullets found at the scene of the crime. Basically, you compare the bullets to see if they have the same scratches.”

  “And did they?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what did you conclude?”

  He concludes that my gun was used to shoot Amy and Kate. We retained an expert to do his own test, and he came to the same conclusion.

  “And what about the bullet that killed Detective Joe Washington, Doctor? Did you test that bullet to determine whether it was fired from the weapon found in the defendant’s basement?”

  He did, of course, and he reached the same conclusion: the gun discovered in my basement was used to kill Camel Coat.

  Again, our expert doesn’t disagree. So we won’t fight it.

  So my gun killed Kate and Amy. We already know that.

  The knife found in my basement killed Ramona Dillavou, and the gun found in my basement killed Camel Coat. But that doesn’t mean I was the one who used those weapons. We could offer up more than one person who might have done so and then stashed the weapons in my basement.

  One of them is Kate, who is dead.

  Another is the person who discovered those weapons in my basement. And he is very much alive.

  “The people call Lieutenant Paul Wizniewski,” says Margaret Olson.

  Ninety

  “PLEASE STATE your name and spell your last name for the record.”

  “That’s W-i-z…” He should stop there. Everybody calls me the Wiz, he should say. But it’s not meant as a compliment. Most people think I’m a self-righteous dick.

  The first topic: the raid of the brownstone. Olson gets to it quickly.

  “I tried to impress on Detective Harney,” Wizniewski says, “that it was very odd for a homicide detective to bust up a house of prostitution. We have Vice for that. I told him he should call in Vice. He shouldn’t do it himself.”

  Bullshit. Wizniewski’s only objection was that the people inside were major players like the mayor and the archbishop—meaning that there could be political blowback for me and, more important, for him.

  “And how did the defendant respond?” asks Margaret Olson.

  The Wiz takes a breath and turns to the jury. “He made it very clear that it had to be him who did it, and it had to be that night.”

  “Did the defendant say why it was so important that he personally conduct the raid? Or why it was so important that he do so that night?”

  “No, he did not. It made no sense.”

  Olson nods, pauses, looks at her shoes.

  “This brownstone he was talking about raiding,” she says. “Was this the first time this brownstone had come to your attention?”

  “No, it was not,” he says.

  I sit forward in my seat, something catching in my throat.

  “I believed that this brownstone was being protected,” he says. “I was investigating the possibility that Chicago police officers were engaged in a protection racket.”

  I look at Stilson. First I’ve heard of this. Stilson sees my look and writes on a piece of paper, taps the words with his pencil. No emotion.

  “And the target of my investigation was Detective Billy Harney,” he says.

  I bite down on my lip, turn my head away. So I was investigating my boss while he was investigating me while the Cook County state’s attorney’s office was investigating all of us? You need a Venn diagram to keep track.

  “For the last eighteen months,” he says, “Detective Harney had been pulling old arrest reports. It wasn’t part of any active investigation. It certainly had nothing to do with homicide.”

  Right, because I was investigating you, Wiz. I was pulling all the arrest reports in cases where people seemed to magic
ally escape prosecution, many times finding that the chain of command ended with you. And I was doing it surreptitiously, you prick, because I was undercover for Internal Affairs.

  “I believe these were records of people he was protecting,” says Wizniewski. “People arrested for various offenses who were released before referral to the state’s attorney. People who got sprung right away for no apparent reason.”

  They were records of people you were protecting, Wizniewski.

  Feeling my blood boil, my legs bouncing under the table.

  My lawyer tapping those words on the page again. No emotion.

  “I’m confused, Lieutenant,” says Margaret Olson, who is anything but confused. “Why would he pull arrest records that show his corruption?”

  The Wiz nods. “See, when you pull old arrest reports, it generates a record. You have to sign them in and out. It’s right there on the jacket of the file. You have to put your name and star number next to each request. And you can see who else has made a request.”

  “You can see all previous requests?”

  “Yeah, of course. You can see the entire list of people who have requested these records before you.”

  Olson nods. So do several jurors, for whom the picture is becoming clearer.

  “I believe Detective Harney was pulling these reports to see if anybody else had been pulling those reports,” says the Wiz. “He wanted to know if anybody was on to him.”

  Brilliant. I can’t deny it. My teeth grinding together, my hands in fists, sitting in a courtroom having to stay composed while fireworks go off inside me.

  But—brilliant. Wizniewski is using my undercover investigation against me, to make me look like the guilty party.

  Stilson leans in to me, out of character for him. “You have got to keep a lid on yourself,” he whispers, each word like a dart.

  “Did you report your suspicions to the higher-ups?” Olson asks.

  “I did, sort of,” he says. “I had a conversation with the head of Internal Affairs, Lieutenant Michael Goldberger.”