An Erin McCabe Legal Thriller

Chapter 3-1

10

When Erin got back to the office, she asked Duane if he had time to review the discovery for a potential new client. She didn’t tell him anything about the meeting with Kluska to avoid raising any red flags before he even looked at the file.

It was a little after five p.m. when Duane walked into her office and dropped the file on her desk.

‘You want to tell me what’s really going on here?’ he asked accusingly.

‘What do you mean?’ she said with an innocent grin.

‘Why are we looking at this case? It’s not like I don’t know who Ann Parsons is – the murder occurred in Westfield, all of five miles from my house. She’s already pled guilty to aggravated manslaughter of her father, and the sentencing takes place in about four weeks.’ He paused to frown. ‘Let’s add to the equation that, as a result of pleading guilty to killing her father, she’ll lose any inheritance. Which means she probably has no money for a lawyer. And from what I see from a quick look at this file, she doesn’t need a new lawyer; she needs a magician to make the evidence against her disappear.’

All Erin could do was nod. She had read only Detective Chris Burke’s summary report, but based on that, it was hard to disagree with Duane’s initial analysis.

‘Don’t stand there glaring at me,’ she said. ‘Have a seat and let me give you a little background.’ She gestured toward a chair. ‘But this has to stay between us, for reasons that will be obvious.’

Once he sat, she proceeded to tell Duane about her strange meeting with Kluska and the information he had given her. When she was done, his expression matched the way she felt about the whole thing: dumbfounded.

‘How well do you know Kluska?’ Duane asked.

‘Not well at all,’ Erin replied. ‘He was the lead detective in two homicide cases I tried when I was at the PD’s office. Always came across as a straight shooter. I cross-examined him in both cases, which I lost, but other than that, I really had no other dealings with him. He was a detective, I was a PD, so we didn’t run in the same social circles.’

Duane leaned back in his chair, deep in thought. ‘I have to tell you, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a detective go out on a limb like this for a defendant, especially after there’s been a guilty plea.’

‘I don’t disagree,’ Erin replied. ‘And even if we wanted to do something, it’s not like we can waltz into the jail and say we want to meet with her. When I tried to explain all of that to Kluska, he just told me to come up with a reason and he’d get me one visit.’

‘You don’t think he’s trying to set you up to do something stupid, do you?’

‘What do you mean?’ Erin asked in reply.

‘Well, we have managed to piss off a few people in high places, including one gubernatorial candidate. Maybe they’re using Kluska to try and get us to do something unethical.’

There certainly was more than a kernel of truth to what Duane was saying – they had made some enemies in high places. But, like Kluska, she trusted her instincts, and hers told her that Kluska was sincere in wanting to help Parsons.

‘I’ll go through the file tonight,’ she said. ‘I saw two CDs in there. Did you get a chance to look at those?’

Duane shook his head. ‘Didn’t get a chance, but it looks like one’s a DVR with the video of her confession and the other is a CD with the audio recording of the murder.’

‘Okay. Kluska emphasized that he doesn’t think the voice on the recording is Ann Parsons’s. Seems like a good place to start.’

‘What do you make of the trans thing?’ Duane asked.

Erin shrugged. ‘I’m not sure it has anything to do with anything, other than Kluska playing on my sympathies.’

Duane stood, his look betraying a certain caution. ‘According to the investigative reports, Ann was a graduate of Westfield High School. We both know someone who’s a teacher there. Do you want me to ask him if he knew her back then?’

The thought had already crossed Erin’s mind, that Mark was a teacher at Westfield High, and had been for the last eight years. If Ann Parsons had gone there when he was a teacher there, Mark might have some insights.

She was momentarily lost. ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘No, I got it.’

Erin’s apartment in Cranford was a small one-bedroom, so the table in her dining area doubled as a desk whenever she worked from home. The documents Kluska had given her were spread out on the table, and she had already spent time poring through them, looking for any threads of evidence that might support Kluska’s belief that Parsons didn’t kill her father. So far, she hadn’t come across anything that seemed to offer a way out for Ann.

One thing confused her, though: the results of the search warrant on Ann’s home. All the usual things you’d expect an affluent twenty-five-year-old to have were seized: a laptop, a desktop, bank statements, and a cell phone. But Erin had noticed that Ann’s cell phone had been seized when she had been arrested at the prosecutor’s office. These reports showed that the phone seized from Ann’s condo was a prepaid cell phone – a burner phone. According to the report from the detective who ran the analytics on the phone, it was purchased three days after the murder and only two numbers had been called, both of which came up as unknown numbers. Meaning Ann had only made calls to two other burner phones. Why in the world was a paralegal using a burner phone, unless she was involved in the murder of her father? But that didn’t make sense either. If you were conspiring to kill someone, you’d get the burner phones ahead of the murder, not after. Unless she had used a burner phone before and ‘burned’ it.

Putting those reports aside, she decided to move on to the recordings.

She popped the DVR of the interrogation of Ann Parsons into her player and watched Ann’s confession play out. Two detectives, one male and one female, had brought her in, explaining that they had some new evidence they wanted to discuss. When they immediately read her her Miranda rights, she seemed taken aback. She asked if she was a suspect, and they responded that, at this point, everyone associated with her father was a suspect. Ann was there without a lawyer, and Erin found herself almost screaming at the video for Ann to tell them she wanted a lawyer present, but she didn’t.

The detectives bounced around for the next thirty minutes, talking about Ann’s career and her relationship with her father before turning to the murder itself. For over twenty minutes, Ann denied any involvement, explaining that she’d been at a bar in Hoboken waiting to meet someone. Unfortunately, that person had to work late, and Ann left and went home. She provided the only phone number she had for her date but told them she had tried the number and it was no longer in service. She also told them that, after that night, she had never heard from the person again. In classic good cop/bad cop fashion, the male detective said they knew she was lying because there was a video of her coming out of her father’s house the night he was murdered. The male detective then played the audio recording of the murder. Ann sat in stunned silence and then asked to hear it again. After they played it a second time, she rocked back and forth in her chair, chewing on her lower lip, until finally whispering, ‘I did it.’ The female detective leaned across the table and said softly, ‘Ann, did you just say you shot your father?’ Ann’s head went up and down, indicating yes. Finally, she asked for a lawyer.

After watching the interrogation, Erin listened to the audio. It was a short clip, and she listened to it repeatedly, sometimes with headphones, sometimes without. She understood why Kluska felt the voice at the murder scene wasn’t Ann’s. Not only did the pitch seem different, but the tonal quality was also off. When Ann was being interrogated, she sounded hesitant and taciturn, while the voice from the murder audio sounded forceful and in command, someone unafraid.

Erin tried to flip her mind into trial mode, wondering how a jury might perceive the recording. The prosecutor would bring someone in to testify it was Ann’s voice, and even if they could find a defense witness to say it wasn’t, the quality of the recording was so bad that a jury might still come to the conclusion it was Ann. Perhaps they could find an expert witness to analyze the voices and speech patterns and opine it wasn’t Ann. Even then, it wouldn’t be easy.

It was just before eight p.m. when she finally took a break, admitting that it was looking pretty bleak for Ann. She looked down at her phone, wishing she had taken Duane up on his offer to reach out to Mark. Get it over with.

He picked up on the fourth ring.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘Good,’ he responded. ‘You?’

‘I’m good.’

‘I heard from Swish about your mom – how’s she doing?’

‘She’s holding up. The surgery went well. She might need some more chemo and then radiation, but fingers crossed. I’m having breakfast with her tomorrow. Thanks for asking.’

‘Glad to hear that. Please give her my best.’

‘I will.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘Listen, do you have a minute to talk?’

‘Sure, I’m just driving home from the gym.’

‘Okay. Um, well the reason I called is to see if you knew a potential client of mine. Her dad had a home in Westfield.’

‘Who we talking about?’ he asked.

‘Ann Parsons.’

There was silence on the other end. Finally, he said, ‘I saw in the Star Ledger a week or so ago that she’d pled guilty to killing her dad.’

‘Yeah, she did. You know her?’

‘No, not personally. She was supposed to be in my class her senior year, which was my first year teaching, but I was told at the beginning of the year she had a medical issue and would be homeschooled from then on. I know she graduated, but I never saw her.’

‘I presume they never told you what the medical issue was, or if they did, you couldn’t tell me.’

‘You’re right, I couldn’t, but fortunately for me, they never told me.’ He hesitated. ‘I have no idea if there’s any truth to it, but the rumor around school was that she attempted suicide.’

Now it was Erin’s turn to be quiet, wondering if it might be related to Ann being trans.

‘You said she was a potential client, but she’s already pled guilty,’ Mark said. ‘How are you involved?’

‘Long story. Let’s just say some people think she’s innocent despite her plea,’ she offered, keeping it purposely vague for Kluska’s sake. ‘Based on that, and the fact that she’s trans, they asked me to take a look.’

There was a long pause. ‘Erin, Ann Parsons isn’t transgender.’

‘According to my sources, she is,’ Erin replied. ‘Why are you so sure she isn’t?’

‘Because I saw a picture of her when she was about five years old, and she was definitely a little girl.’