Animal Instinct by Rosenfelt, David (novels for students TXT) 📕

I call him and say, “Steven, I had breakfast with you and Andy Carpenter the other day.”

“Right.”

“I wonder if you could help me with something. Can you give me contact information for some close friends of your mother? Maybe she shared information about Lisa Yates with them.”

He hesitates, as if unsure how to respond. Then, “No way. I know who you are; you killed that guy.”

“Actually, I didn’t. But this is for Andy.”

“I don’t care who it’s for. Leave my mother’s friends alone.”

Click.

ANDY warned me that jury selection would be total torture, and he was right.

The worst part, he cautioned me, was that while you make picks, you have no idea until the end of the trial if you chose correctly. He compared it to betting on a basketball game, but forgetting who you bet on. So you watch the game, and as each basket is scored, you have no idea whether it is good news or bad news.

That would be more than enough to stop me from watching the game, but I am forced to sit here and watch the jury selection. The thing that Andy did not tell me, but that I started realizing ten minutes in, is that it is also crushingly boring.

He says that he doesn’t use jury consultants because he doesn’t trust them any more than his own gut, even though he has no confidence in his own gut at all.

One of my problems is that I hate every single potential juror that is called up to the stand to answer questions. For one thing, I keep thinking, Who the hell are you to judge me? And then I picture each of them voting to send me to prison for the rest of my life, after which they go home to tell stories at parties about the cool time they had on jury duty.

I find myself wanting to strangle them with my bare hands, but that would mean another arrest for murder, another trial, and another awful session of jury selection to sit through.

That I cannot be out in the world, working the investigation and trying to prove my innocence, seems likely to cause my head to explode. Andy can tell what I’m going through, and a few minutes ago he leaned over and whispered a question: “Having fun?”

At the defense table with Andy and me is Eddie Dowd. Eddie played for the football Giants for a couple of years, then went to law school and is Andy’s second-in-command when he has a case. Andy says that Eddie is an excellent lawyer and better than Andy when it comes to writing briefs and motions.

Dani is not here; I told her not to come. She reluctantly agreed, but insisted that she’ll be here for the actual trial and has already notified her company that she’s going to be taking her vacation days soon.

What I need to do is pretend to be interested in the voir dire, while instead thinking about the case and what I can do when I get out of here. I’ve brought a lot of documents with me, which I can go over during breaks. But I’ve committed so much of it to memory that I almost don’t need to look at them.

During the first break, which will last a whopping ten minutes, I check my cell phone. There is a message from Dani asking me how it’s going, and another from Don Crystal. He says that he’s checked the Ardmore office phone directory that he has, and an Enrique Lopez is listed. Maybe his nickname is Rico?

Lopez is listed as working in the client management department, which means he keeps Ardmore’s clients happy with their service. Crystal says he called one of his few remaining friends at Ardmore, who says that Lopez left the company two months ago, though the person did not know why.

“Might be worth checking out,” Crystal says in his message. “If it comes to anything, you owe me a slab of ribs. If it doesn’t, you still owe me a slab of ribs.”

If it turned out to be meaningful, I would buy Crystal a herd of cows. But even though I doubt that it will go anywhere, I call Laurie and give her the information to check out. She says that she will get on it and asks me how it’s going in court. “Jury selection can get boring,” she says.

“I noticed.”

When court resumes, I use the opportunity to reflect on my last meeting with Don Crystal. He offered two possibilities when I pressed him on what could be going on at Ardmore. One possibility was blackmail, that people at Ardmore were using sensitive and possibly embarrassing information on wealthy people as a threat to get them to pay.

It seems unlikely to me; whatever is being done is happening on a large scale. To pull off such a huge operation, it would require the blackmailing of a large group of people. At least some potential victims would balk and go public with what was going on.

The other possibility that Crystal mentioned seems even more unlikely. He said that someone at Ardmore could be adjusting the records to help people get insurance at a lower rate. If insurance companies see a potential client as a significant health risk, the premium would be higher.

I just don’t see how the change in premiums could in any way pay off in the way the people running the conspiracy would need. They could charge people for adjusting the records, but the potential savings for those people would not be enormous. To pay the Ardmore conspirators a mere percentage of those savings is not nearly big enough to justify these murders.

I’ve been thinking that life insurance might be more interesting, if only because more money would be at stake. Life insurance policies can run to a million dollars, and sometimes more. A person’s health history can be crucial in determining the premium one would pay, and even in getting insurance