A Trace of Hope

“Good to see you too, Red,” he said as he tossed the sandwiches on the table.

“Well, I do declare,” she replied huffily.

Keri wasn’t sure when Ray had started calling Margaret Merrywether “Red” but she got a kick out of it. And despite her reaction now, Keri was pretty sure Mags didn’t mind either.

“I brought the guy’s financials and property records,” Ray said. “But I don’t think they’re going to be the answer. I reviewed them with Edgerton and he couldn’t find anything hinky. But for a guy with that kind of money and power, that alone is actually kind of hinky.”

“I agree,” Keri said. “But hinky isn’t enough to act on.”

“He wanted to bring in Patterson but I told him to hold off for now.”

Detective Garrett Patterson went by the nickname “Grunt Work,” and for good reason. He was the second best tech guy in the unit behind Edgerton, and while he lacked Edgerton’s intuitive gifts for finding unseen connections within complex information, he had another skill. He loved to pore over the minutiae of records to find that small but crucial detail that others missed.

“That was the right call,” Keri said after a moment. “He might uncover something with the property records. But I worry that he couldn’t help but tell Hillman or accidentally cast too wide a net and set off warning lights. I don’t want to involve him unless we have no other choice.”

“It may come to that,” Ray said. “That is, unless you’ve cracked the Cave code in the last few hours.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Keri admitted. “But we have uncovered some surprising stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for starters,” Mags piped in, “Jackson Cave wasn’t always a complete asshole.”

“That is a surprise,” Ray said, unwrapping a sandwich and taking a big bite. “How so?”

“He used to work in the D.A.’s office,” Mags replied.

“He was a prosecutor?” Ray asked, nearly choking on his food. “The defender of rapists and child molesters?”

“It was a long time ago,” Keri said. “He joined the D.A. right out of law school at USC – worked there for two years.”

“Couldn’t hack it?” Ray wondered.

“Actually, his conviction rate was pretty amazing. He apparently didn’t like to plead down often so he took most cases to trial. He got nineteen convictions and two hung juries. Not one acquittal.”

“That is good,” Ray acknowledged. “So why did he switch teams?”

“That took some digging,” Keri said. “It was actually Mags who figured it out. You want to explain?”

“It would be my great pleasure,” she said, looking up from the sea of pages in front of her. “I suppose a lifetime of doing tedious research pays off from time to time. Jackson Cave had a half-brother named Coy Trembley. They had different fathers but grew up together. Coy was three years older than Jackson.”

“Was Coy a lawyer too?” Ray asked.

“Hardly,” Mags said. “Coy was in trouble with the law throughout his teens and twenties – mostly petty stuff. But when he was thirty-one, he was arrested for sexual assault. Basically he was accused of forcing himself on a nine-year-old girl who lived down the street.”

“And Cave defended him?”

“Not officially. But he took a nine-month leave of absence from the prosecutor’s office right after the arrest. He wasn’t Trembley’s attorney of record and his name isn’t on any of the legal documents filed with the court in the case.”

“I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Ray said.

“You hear correctly, dear,” Mags declared. “But for tax purposes, his declared job during that time was ‘legal consultant.’ And I’ve compared the language in the briefs in Trembley’s case. Some of the phrasing and logic are very similar to more recent Cave cases. I think it’s fair to assume he was secretly assisting his brother.”

“How’d he do?” Ray asked.

“Quite well. Coy Trembley’s case ended in a hung jury. Prosecutors were debating whether to retry him when the little girl’s father showed up at Trembley’s apartment and shot him five times, including once in the face. He didn’t make it.”

“Jeez,” Ray muttered.

“Yeah,” Keri agreed. “It was around that time that Cave gave his notice to the D.A.’s office. He was off the grid for three months after that. Then he suddenly reemerged with a new firm that dealt mostly with corporate clients. But he also did a little white collar defense stuff and increasingly as the years went by, pro-bono work for folks like his half brother.”

“Wait,” Ray demanded incredulously. “Am I supposed to believe this guy became a defense lawyer to honor the memory of his dead brother or something, to defend the rights of the morally grotesque?”

Keri shook her head.

“I don’t know, Ray,” she said. “Cave almost never spoke about his brother over the years. But when he did, he always maintained that Coy was falsely accused. He was pretty adamant about it. I think it’s possible that he started his practice with noble intentions.”

“Okay. Let’s say I give him the benefit of the doubt on that. What the hell happened to him then?”

Mags picked up from there.

“Well, it’s pretty clear that the guilt of most of his early pro-bono clients was highly dubious. Some of them seem to have just been picked out of lineups or pulled off the street. Occasionally he got them off; usually he didn’t. Meanwhile, he was going around making speeches at civil liberties conferences – good speeches actually, very passionate. There was even talk that he might run for office someday.”

“Sounds like an American success story so far,” Ray said.

“It was,” Keri agreed. “That is, until about ten years ago. That’s when he took on the case of a guy who didn’t fit the profile. He was a serial child abductor who apparently did it professionally. And he paid Cave handsomely to represent him.”

“Why did he all of a sudden take on that case?” Ray asked.

“Not a hundred percent clear,” Keri said. “His corporate work hadn’t really taken off yet. So it could have been a financial decision. Maybe he didn’t view this guy as being as objectionable as others. The charges against him were for abduction for hire, not assault or molestation. The guy basically kidnapped kids and sold them to the highest bidder. He was, to use a generous description, a ‘professional.’ Whatever the reason, Cave took this guy on, got him acquitted, and then the floodgates opened. He started taking all manner of similar clients, many of whom were less…professional.”

“Around the same time,” Mags added,” the corporate work picked up. He moved from a storefront in Echo Park to the downtown high-rise office he has now. And he’s never looked back.”

“I don’t know,” Ray said skeptically. “It’s hard to see the through line from civil libertarian fighting for the least among us to remorseless legal shark representing pedophiles and possibly coordinating a child sex slave ring. I feel like we’re missing a piece.”

“Well, you’re a detective, Raymond,” said Mags snarkily. “By all means, detect.”

Ray opened his mouth, about to fire back, before realizing that he was being teased. All three of them laughed, glad for the chance to break the tension they hadn’t realized had been building up. Keri jumped back in.

“It has to be related to that serial abductor he represented. That’s when everything changed. We should look into that more.”

“What do you have on him?” Ray asked.

“His case just kind of dead ends,” Mags said, frustrated. “Cave represented the man, got him off, and then that guy dropped off the radar. We haven’t been able to find anything on him since.”

“What was the man’s name?” Ray asked.

“John Johnson,” Mags answered.