Winston Patrick Mystery 2-Book Bundle. David Russell W.

Carl was securely tucked away in the back seat of the Crown Victoria, I hopped into my car to follow the two detectives to the pre-trial holding centre, where Carl would be processed and placed into formal custody. Once behind the wheel and in the late Friday evening traffic, my adrenaline began to subside, and I had time to process the events.

      Much was beginning to bother me about Carl’s case. Apart from its inherent unpleasantness, little legal alarm bells were sounding in my head’s attaché case. The first element of concern was the speed at which the investigation had progressed. It was only yesterday morning that Carl and I had been interviewed at the school; a few hours later, he had been picked up for questioning, and within twenty-four hours he was under arrest. Certainly, Furlo and Smythe looked completely haggard, and I had no doubt they had been working around the clock since Tricia’s body had been found early on Wednesday evening. Vancouver doesn’t have a great number of homicides, so every one of them is taken very seriously, but the death of a young person would definitely see all of the stops pulled out to catch her killer. While Furlo and Smythe were the lead detectives—and likely their energy had been focused almost exclusively on Carl over the last thirty-six hours—there must also have been dozens of officers working different angles and gathering evidence for an arrest to happen so quickly.

      Even the evidence itself was troublesome, essentially because there didn’t seem to be a lot of it. On the surface, Carl’s DNA found on Tricia’s undergarments looked extremely bad, but only insofar as it potentially gave Carl a motive for wanting to see Tricia dead—if she was dead, she couldn’t report on their inappropriate and illegal relationship. But motive usually isn’t enough for Crown counsel to advise an arrest be made. The DNA finding only proved Carl had had sex with Tricia, not that he had killed her. Indeed, since the underwear wasn’t even found at the crime scene, as far as I could tell, they had very little to directly suggest his involvement in her death.

      The high profile nature of this particular case would have had any good police chief wanting to see an arrest made quickly, but by the same token, the very fact this case had garnered so much media attention should have made the Crown extra careful to ensure they had a rock-solid case before making an arrest. The justice department would look much worse if they focused their investigative efforts on one suspect, only to have the case against that suspect collapse due to a premature arrest or a lack of solid evidence.

      The DNA sample itself was also troublesome, and not just because it positively identified Carl. How had the police come to make that positive identification in less than twenty-four hours? I had had very little legal experience with homicide, but what I did know was that forensic analysis, apart from being expensive to conduct, was also notoriously slow. Advances in DNA testing and myriad other crime scene technology meant forensic evidence was used not just in murder cases, but in almost any crime where human DNA evidence could be gathered. Consequently, there was always a huge backlog of DNA sampling that prosecutors and defence counsel were anxiously awaiting.

      Carl’s DNA had been collected, tested and reported to the police in what must have been a matter of hours. True, a case like Tricia’s would be considered important, but not that important. Somehow, Furlo and Smythe had pushed the DNA analysis to the very front of the line and had clearly kept technicians working overtime to make the identification of Carl Turbot. For that kind of pressure to be applied to the forensic team, someone much higher up than Furlo and Smythe must have had a hand in speeding up the process.

      That, of course, smelled of politics and pressure that had nothing to do with the fact that the prime suspect was Tricia’s teacher. Even the apparently heinous nature of Carl’s romantic—a term I was forcing myself to use—relationship with Tricia wasn’t enough to justify the kind of pressure that must surely have been exerted to get that kind of speed and commitment from everyone involved. Tricia, or more likely, someone in Tricia’s family, was connected to the powers that be in a way that warranted faster than normal action on everyone’s part. Of course, the police came out winners too: they got to show the world they’d caught the killer, and fast.

      The last key problem that kept tugging at me was that despite Carl’s sleeping with Tricia, despite his trying to use me as his legal protector should that relationship be discovered by administration, despite what looked like a rather obvious motive for wanting Tricia dead, something about him kept bringing me back to a belief in his innocence. I don’t consider myself to be a gullible person by nature, and I admit to having been burned on occasion by trusting people I should not have, but for the most part my experience at determining whom I can and cannot trust has proven pretty successful. And however naïve I hoped I didn’t turn out to be, driving behind Furlo and Smythe as they delivered my client to lockup, I just couldn’t accept that the man who had held my hand through my introduction to high school teaching, the same man who worked tirelessly with students, the very same emotional wreck who broke down sobbing in grief at the death of someone he claimed to love, could have killed her in cold blood. No, I just couldn’t accept that.

      It was clear that I had a considerable amount of work to do. Whether or not I believed wholly in Carl’s version of events was no longer relevant. If Carl was going to get a fair and aggressive defence, I had to believe in his claims, at least to the degree that I could give him the best defence money could buy. Which was the first point I put down on my legal to-do list. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer, I suppose, but Carl and I were going to have to sit down really quickly and start figuring out what kind of fee I was going to be paid. Call me shallow, call me uncaring, but I was not about to undertake the massive amount of work that preparing a murder defence entails completely free of charge, especially considering I had this other fulltime job that was extremely demanding of my time.

      Item number two on my mental checklist was figuring out a way by which I could somehow do both of my jobs simultaneously. I don’t think it’s overstatement, especially to anyone who’s been a teacher, but by the end of a day of working with kids, I had barely enough energy to scrape together some kind of dinner, mark the work the kids did one day, plan something for the next day and get enough sleep to function. Fortunately for me, that last part is a task I have been avoiding for a number of years.

      The larger problem was scheduling court appearances. Not to appear a complainer, but judges are not especially forgiving when it comes to trying to schedule around other commitments. Similarly, I’m pretty sure the school’s management would not be too keen on letting me postpone my classes until evening, when court lets out.

      Being so new to the profession also made it quite unlikely the Vancouver School Board would grant me a temporary leave of absence to fight the case. Given the negative publicity and numerous phone calls from irate parents they were likely already receiving, the school board would not take kindly to another of their teachers seeking time off to defend the one charged with Tricia’s murder. Even once the trial was over, it was pretty much guaranteed that Carl would be fired from teaching and have his credentials removed, if not be prosecuted for having a sexual relationship with a minor in a position of trust, the original charge Carl had come to me about. That was a legal challenge that would have to wait.

      The more I thought about it, the more I realized our best course of action was to make sure Carl never went to trial. It just seemed impossible that I could adequately defend him, and I didn’t really feel I was ready to bail out of the teaching profession just yet. One of the first things we would have to do was make every effort to nail down Tricia’s exact time of death, details of which had not yet been released to me as quickly as Carl’s DNA test results had been. Then Carl and I had to make sure he was able to come up with a very good alibi that proved he couldn’t have done it. On the face of it, it seemed like pretty sloppy police work that the detectives had apparently done very little to confirm Carl’s whereabouts during Tricia’s murder. Of course, that perception of sloppy detecting was based on my growing conviction that Carl had been wrongly arrested.

      The Vancouver pre-trial detention centre is located at the poorest, most drug-addict ridden corner in Canada’s poorest neighbourhood. Hastings Street is considered an arterial route and becomes a highway a little further east, taking the driver who chooses its traffic light-congested lanes from close to Stanley Park in the west to the eastern edge of the suburban city of Burnaby, just east of Vancouver. The entire stretch of roadway