the statement the reason that I was there in the first place; it will serve me well if I can ever get evidence of all this into the trial.
The statement is verbal and taped, and I promise to sign a transcript of it when they have it ready. I request that I see it before court tomorrow, and Corvallis says that will not be a problem. Then I renew my question to Corvallis. “What happened to Robinson?”
“It looks like iridium.”
That’s a little cryptic for me, so I ask him to elaborate.
“It’s a poison, a favorite in international circles. The KGB had a particular preference for it, but others have used it as well. You don’t want to know the details of what it does; you’ve gotten a firsthand look.”
“How long was he dead?”
“We don’t have a firm time on that yet. He was eating a meal, I assume the poison was in the food. The amount that would fit on the head of a pin would kill someone in forty-five seconds.”
“Not a pleasant forty-five seconds,” I say.
“Yeah. You guys okay getting home?” he says.
“Yes. You know I’m going to try to use all this at trial.”
He smiles. “And the relevance?” He is pointing out that I’m going to have a tough time connecting Robinson’s death to Steven’s trial in a way to get Hatchet to admit it.
“I’m working on it, but it’ll come in.”
“We may be on different pages on that,” he says, and then walks off.
He’s probably right, but I’d know better if I knew what the hell page I was on.
ON THE WAY HOME I call Kevin and ask him to come over. That way, he, Laurie, and I can discuss at length the impact of tonight’s events on our case, and the strategy we should employ to make the most of it.
The potential benefits are obvious. Walter Timmerman’s work involved him with very rough people, so rough that the person he was in a form of partnership with was poisoned to death. This couldn’t help but create the credible thought in a jury’s mind that the perpetrator might have killed Walter as well.
Diana’s death is more problematic, in that we have no evidence she was involved with Walter’s work. However, the manner in which she died helps us. It also blew up Walter’s lab, and could easily have killed Waggy, both of which fit into our theory.
Unfortunately, while this all makes sense to us, it is unlikely to impress the jury, because the jury is very unlikely to ever hear about it. We have no real way to connect Robinson to Walter’s DNA work except our theory. We can’t even factually prove that Walter was working in the weeks before his death, no less on something momentous.
We are going to have to try to get Corvallis to testify. He’ll refuse; he already as much as said so tonight. But Hatchet can compel his testimony, albeit with assurances that he does not have to reveal classified, national security information. It’s by no means definite that we can get Hatchet to go along, since we have little to advance as an offer of proof.
But we’ll certainly try, and Kevin goes off to prepare a legal brief to present. Kevin is far better at this aspect of the law than I am, which is damning him with faint praise. The truth is, he’s pretty much the best at it of anyone I’ve ever been around.
Among the things about this that bother me, and one that has bothered me from the beginning, is why such a great effort was made to frame Steven. These were murders that seem to have been committed from a distance by powerful entities, and it’s hard to picture them as having been solved. For example, I would strongly doubt that an arrest will be made in the Robinson murder; nor do I believe that anyone will be framed for it. Why pick on Steven?
I also can’t quite pin down Robinson’s role in all this. It seems logical that he was Timmerman’s way to connect to the type of people who would pay huge dollars for the right to use the synthetic DNA, probably to make biofuels. But Robinson would have made a fortune as well, so it seems unlikely he would have killed Walter.
More to the point, why would anybody have murdered Walter? If his work was the golden goose, why kill it? The only thing that comes to mind is an entity that was threatened