The gunman was placed in Stallworth’s squad car and transported to the Malibu substation and jailed.
Other documents in the file continued the Eli Wyms saga. At his arraignment the morning after his arrest, Wyms was declared indigent and assigned a public defender. The case moved slowly in the system, with Wyms being held in the Men’s Central Jail. But then Vincent stepped in and offered his services pro bono. His first order of business was to ask for and receive a competency evaluation of his client. This had the effect of slowing the case down even further as Wyms was carted off to the state hospital in Camarillo for a ninety-day psych evaluation.
That evaluation period was over and the reports were now in. All of the doctors who examined, tested and talked to Wyms in Camarillo had agreed that he was competent and ready to stand trial.
In the hearing scheduled before Judge Mark Friedman at two, a trial date would be set and the case clock would begin to tick again. To me it was all a formality. One read of the case documents and I knew there would be no trial. What the day’s hearing would do was set the time period I would have to negotiate a plea agreement for my client.
It was a cut-and-dried case. Wyms would enter a plea and probably face a year or two of incarceration and mental-health counseling. The only question I got from my survey of the file was why Vincent had taken the case in the first place. It didn’t fall into line with the kinds of cases he usually handled, with paying or higher-profile clients. There didn’t seem to be much of a challenge to the case either. It was routine and Wyms’s crime wasn’t even unusual. Was it simply a case Jerry took on to satisfy a need for pro bono work? It seemed to me if that was the case that Vincent could have found something more interesting, which would pay off in other ways, such as publicity. The Wyms case had initially drawn media attention because of the public spectacle in the park. But when it came to trial or disposition of the case, it would likely fly well below the media radar.
My next thought was to suspect that there was a connection to the Elliot case. Vincent had found some sort of link.
But on first read I couldn’t nail it down. There were two general connections in that the Wyms incident had happened less than twelve hours before the beach house murders and both crimes had occurred in the Sheriff’s Department’s Malibu district. But those connections didn’t hold up to further scrutiny. In terms of topography they weren’t remotely connected. The murders were on the beach and the Wyms shooting spree took place far inland, in the county park on the other side of the mountains. As far as I could recall, none of the names in the Wyms file were mentioned in the Elliot materials I had reviewed. The Wyms incident happened on the night shift; the Elliot murders on the day shift.
I couldn’t nail down any specific connection and in great frustration closed the file with the question unanswered. I checked my watch and saw I had to get back to the CCB if I wanted time to meet my client in lockup before the two o’clock hearing.
I called Patrick to come get me, paid for lunch and stepped out to the curb. I was on my cell, talking with Lorna, when the Lincoln pulled up and I jumped into the back.
“Has Cisco met with Carlin yet?” I asked her.
“No, that’s at two.”
“Have Cisco ask him about the Wyms case, too.”
“Okay, what about it?”
“Ask him why Vincent even took it.”
“You think they’re connected? Elliot and Wyms?”
“I think it but I don’t see it.”
“Okay, I’ll tell him.”
“Anything else going on?”
“Not at the moment. You’re getting a lot of calls from the media. Who’s this guy Jack McEvoy?”
The name rang a bell but I couldn’t place it.
“I don’t know. Who is he?”
“He works at the Times. He called up all huffy about not hearing from you, saying you had an exclusive deal with him.”
Now I remembered. The two-way street.
“Don’t worry about him. I haven’t heard from him either. What else?”
“Court TV wants to sit down and talk about Elliot. They’re going to carry live coverage throughout the trial, making it their feature, and so they’re hoping to get daily commentary from you at the end of