prosecution knows that I don’t. Tucker will find out if Daniel had a connection to Linda Padilla, so I must know as well.
“I knew her,” he says, his voice an octave lower. Actually, it could be a bunch of octaves lower, since he’s barely whispering and I have no idea what an octave is.
“How well?” I ask.
“I met her a couple of times, maybe three. The last time I interviewed her.”
“About what?”
“I was working on a story about organized crime in North Jersey, how it had evolved, how strong it is today . . . that was the main thrust. She kept coming up in my research, so I approached her.”
I’m not surprised to hear him say this: Linda Padilla’s name has often been linked to the mob, albeit always through unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo. There are those who believe organized crime supplied her with much of the information she used to rock the establishment. Of course, those believers consist mainly of those she has attacked and/or her future opponents, but the talk has never been completely eliminated.
“In what context did her name come up?” I ask.
“I couldn’t be sure, but my sense was that she was somehow beholden to them. I asked her about it, but she completely froze me out. Denied it, then wouldn’t talk about it.”
If Daniel is telling the truth, and if his information tying Padilla to organized crime is correct, it could be a link to the chalk outline of her body in a pavilion in Eastside Park. Of course, it doesn’t explain the other murders, none of which bear the markings of mob hits, but at least it’s something.
“How are you coming on your whereabouts at the time of the murders?”
He frowns, which is an answer as clear as any words he can say. He says them anyway. “I was home in bed. I’m up every morning at five-thirty, so I go to bed early. All the murders happened after midnight, except Padilla, and . . .”
He doesn’t finish his sentence and he doesn’t have to. He wasn’t home in bed the night Linda Padilla was killed; he was in Eastside Park with her body.
I ask Daniel how his prints could have been on the phone in the park. He doesn’t know, but his theory is that the blow he took to the head knocked him unconscious, and the killer took advantage of that to screw off the phone and place it in his hand. The killer then screwed it back on, with Daniel’s fingerprints on it. It is a theory that would have little if any chance of holding up; there is not even any conclusive evidence that Daniel lost consciousness. Yet it is a measure of our plight that I file the idea away for further consideration and possible use later.
Daniel is sticking to his story about being miles away from the park when receiving the cell phone call from the killer. I’m going to have to get experts to question the technology, if such experts exist.
Daniel’s theory about how the other scarves got into his house is less sophisticated, but he’s very vocal about it. “It’s a setup, Andy, don’t you see? Would I leave things like that around to be found? I’ve covered criminal cases for ten years! I know how these things work.”
While I’m at the prison, I get a message from Edna. We have been informed that the grand jury has returned an indictment, not exactly a major surprise, and that there will be a hearing on Monday in front of the trial judge. That judge has not been appointed yet, but it’s expected to be announced no later than tomorrow. While judges are assigned randomly, I would suspect this will be slightly less random than most, since this trial is a political hot potato.
I leave Daniel after about a half hour, promising to keep him regularly informed of developments. I drive to the Haledon office of Dr. Carlotta Abbruzze, a shrink whom I had about five sessions with three or four years ago. It was at a time when my then wife, Nicole, and I were having some problems, and I was trying to determine if I was the cause.
Basically, I wanted to sit and talk about my marriage, but Carlotta, as she encouraged me to call her, wanted me to lie on the couch and relive my childhood. Since I can’t remember a single problem in my childhood, this seemed a waste of time. Besides, I