this slipping away.
Judge Gordon shakes his head. “Not good enough. I’ll allow the testimony regarding the background, but in the absence of new factual information, there will be no reference to the witness protection program. Anything else, gentlemen?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” I say. “We are in the process of determining Ms. Harriman’s real identity right now. My intention would be to have Mr. Blalock review this new information tonight and then present it to the court tomorrow.”
Hawpe starts to object, but the judge cuts him off so that he can question me about how we learned her real identity. I describe the process of getting the fingerprints from the cabin and running them through the national registry. I leave out the actual identities for now; they are not important to the issue we’re arguing, and I don’t want to give Hawpe a heads-up.
Unfortunately, Hawpe doesn’t seem to need one. He argues that none of the fingerprint information should be admissible. There is no chain of custody, no way to be sure that Stacy left the prints there at all. Anyone could have gotten into the cabin in that time, and therefore it is impossible to say how they were left there, or who left them.
I argue the point, but I have no bullets to fire. Hawpe is right; no one can say with certainty that the woman we know as Stacy Harriman left those prints.
Judge Gordon rules the identity inadmissible unless and until further information is brought forth that could demonstrate its reliability. It has not been a good hearing for us; all we got out of it is the right to argue that Stacy’s background was faked. Any second-year law student could have won that point.
The amount of information we’re gathering is starting to take off, and I can feel us getting closer to the truth. It would have been nice to convey that truth to the people deciding Richard’s fate, but his lawyer couldn’t quite pull that off.
At least my client will have a great story to tell his cell mates.
KEVIN HAS SPOKEN to Captain Reid about Diana Carmichael, the woman who became Stacy Harriman.
The army lists her as deceased, but they are not referring to her death in the water off New Jersey. Her death is recorded as having taken place just three weeks after the helicopter crash in Afghanistan that supposedly killed Durelle, Banks, and the others. I suspect that they created this fake death as a way to ease her into the witness protection system.
Unfortunately, that’s all the records show. The rest of her file is listed as classified, and not even Captain Reid or his boss has access to it. Reid considers this very unusual but is powerless to do anything about it.
Kevin and I struggle to come up with a theory, but what we wind up with is vague and only loosely based on facts. Our thought is that Stacy, which is how I can’t help referring to her even though her real name was Diana, was likely stationed in Afghanistan. She was probably a witness to wrongdoing, and witnesses very often need protection.
The wrongdoing could have been misconduct by American soldiers, perhaps mistreating the enemy, or it could have been financial. There have been a number of stories written over the past couple of years about the chaos that existed just after the Taliban was defeated, and the corruption that was part of the reconstruction efforts. Billions of dollars were alleged to have been lost.
Billions. People have killed for a lot less.
It’s possible that the government itself didn’t believe that lives were really lost in that helicopter crash, or perhaps it knew of other bad guys that got away and would pose a threat to Stacy. In any event, those in charge obviously felt it necessary to tuck her away where she wouldn’t be harmed.
Pete comes over and joins the discussion, mainly to report once again that no progress has been made toward finding Reggie, and that he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. I’m going crazy about it and getting more and more pessimistic that we’ll never get a ransom demand. If we were going to get one, it would have come already.
We bring Pete up to date on what we know and what we suspect about Stacy’s real identity and why she was a protected witness. He has a slightly different take on this. “If it’s money that was stolen, maybe they put her in the program