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    The Weatherford Trial
    The Weatherford Trial
    The Weatherford Trial
    Ebook299 pages4 hours

    The Weatherford Trial

    By John Janovy, Jr

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    An execution-style murder, a dashing young prof, competing expert witnesses, and a Big Oil civil lawyer dragged into his first criminal case combine to uncover the power of belief regardless of truth.

    Dr. Charlie Weatherford, dashing young geology prof at Cavanaugh College in Iowa, is arrested for the murder of a colleague, Rebecca Stitcher, reputed to have solved the problem of making major earthquakes occur on purpose, using hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) techniques developed by the petroleum industry. Connecticut “Connie” Bergen, a civil attorney for Stevens Oil, Inc., the company supporting Weatherford for proprietary access to research results, gets on a company jet bound for Des Moines, sent by owner Delmar Stevens himself to defend Weatherford. This is Bergen’s first assignment in a criminal case, and he’s met at the airport by Amber Buchanan, a mysterious woman with various roles in Stevens Oil, Inc., whose job evidently is to guide him through the legal labyrinth surrounding this murder. It’s not obvious that anyone, even Weatherford, cares whether he’s convicted or acquitted.

    The Weatherford Trial leads us through the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation witness protection efforts, Bergen’s handling of forensic geology, competing expert witnesses, and Bergen’s education at the hands of Amber, until the jury adjourns to arrive at a verdict. The Weatherford Trial is the fourth Gideon Marshall Mystery. As with the first three books, this one brings out the deadly potential of seemingly arcane ideas, the phenomenon of scientific illiteracy in high places, and the power of belief regardless of truth.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Janovy, Jr
    Release dateJun 30, 2016
    ISBN9780986388729
    The Weatherford Trial
    Author

    John Janovy, Jr

    About the author:John Janovy, Jr. (PhD, University of Oklahoma, 1965) is the author of seventeen books and over ninety scientific papers and book chapters. These books range from textbooks to science fiction to essays on athletics. He is now retired, but when an active faculty member held the Paula and D. B. Varner Distinguished Professorship in Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interest is parasitology. He has been Director of UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station, Interim Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences, and secretary-treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists.His teaching experiences include large-enrollment freshman biology courses, Field Parasitology at the Cedar Point Biological Station, Invertebrate Zoology, Parasitology, Organismic Biology, and numerous honors seminars. He has supervised thirty-two graduate students, and approximately 50 undergraduate researchers, including ten Howard Hughes scholars.His honors include the University of Nebraska Distinguished Teaching Award, University Honors Program Master Lecturer, American Health Magazine book award (for Fields of Friendly Strife), State of Nebraska Pioneer Award, University of Nebraska Outstanding Research and Creativity Award, The Nature Conservancy Hero recognition, Nebraska Library Association Mari Sandoz Award, UNL Library Friend’s Hartley Burr Alexander Award, and the American Society of Parasitologists Clark P. Read Mentorship Award.

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      Book preview

      The Weatherford Trial - John Janovy, Jr

      THE WEATHERFORD TRIAL

      John Janovy, Jr.

      2016

      **********

      Copyright © 2016 John Janovy, Jr.

      All characters in this book are completely fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, or actual events recorded anywhere, is purely coincidental. I tried to construct characters’ names from various combinations of consonants, vowels, and syllables so that these names matched both the characters and the roles they play in the story. If you’re reading this book, you will also be interested in the three previous Gideon Marshall Mysteries, Be Careful, Dr. Renner, The Stitcher File, and The Earthquake Lady, available on all e-readers and as a print on demand from Amazon. Rebecca Stitcher is The Earthquake Lady.

      Thanks to my wife Karen, Gary Hill, Ted Pardy, Susan Napolitano, and John Potts, all of whom were readers on this book; Karen, Ted, and Gary were also readers on the first three in the Gideon Marshall Mystery Series. Male and female figures on the cover are from Pixabay, free for commercial use without attribution. The Polk County Courthouse, on the cover, is from an original photograph. Thanks also to Sgt. Brandon Bracelin, Polk County Sheriff’s Office, for providing answers to questions about the transfer of prisoners to and from the courthouse.

      ISBN: 978-0-9863887-2-9

      **********

      . . . penetrating gunshot wound through the left eye (Figure 7). Angle of entry approximately 15o above level. Eye fragments embedded in parietal skull interior, zygomatic arch shattered, left temporal missing, most of left posterior skull missing. Left brain hemisphere ragged and missing. . . large caliber weapon. . .

      —Autopsy report, Dr. Aparajita Chatterjee, Polk County Medical Examiner

      **********

      Table of Contents:

      1. Irving

      2. Ottawa

      3. Halliburton Hall

      4. North 51st Place

      5. The Office

      6. Mulberry Street

      7. Cavanaugh College

      8. Client

      9. The Idealist

      10. Deposition

      11. Homework

      12. Boulder

      13. Preliminary

      14. Annabelle

      15. Graduation

      16. Voir Dire

      17. Openers

      18. Direct and Cross

      19. Jorgensen

      20. Naomi

      21. Closings

      22. Charlie

      The Author

      Books by John Janovy, Jr.

      **********

      1. Irving

      Connecticut Bergen has just cleared his calendar for the day, hung up the phone, and started loosening his tie, already envisioning his first drive from the No. 1 tee box at Los Oteros Country Club—a slight draw, 260-yards, leaving him an easy 5-wood to the green—when Norden Jamaison, chief attorney for Stevens Oil, Inc., opens the office door without knocking and lays a legal-sized expandable file folder on his desk. The folder is about six inches thick.

      Cancel it, says Jamaison. He’d looked out his own office window earlier and knew what Bergen’s loosened tie meant.

      Spring’s on the way. Wanna join me? Get ready for summer?

      March temperatures in the Dallas area were unusually comfortable this year. Through his window, Bergen can see bright morning sunshine, with no hint of wind, a perfect 70o day for being outside on a beautifully manicured fairway instead of sweating out another civil action in one of the Tarrant County District Courts. Bergen knows that Jamaison would never join him on the golf course; the offer is Bergen’s only option for jabbing the senior corporate counsel, who evidently ignores any conversation but that involving the law, especially his version of the law as it’s applied to Stevens Oil. Insofar as Connecticut Bergen knows, Norden Jamaison has never been outdoors except to walk from a limo into a courthouse or other venue where his boss, Delmar Stevens, has a need for legal services from his top wolf.

      Jamaison had done quite a bit of this kind of walking over in recent years, usually with Bergen tagging along behind carrying a couple of expandable files similar to the one Jamaison has just dropped on his desk. The fact that Norden Jamaison came to his office and entered without knocking, and without warning him by way of a secretary’s call, however, makes Connie Bergen a little more interested in, and cautious of, that file’s contents.

      Throughout the United States, Stevens Oil had been sued for polluting local water supplies, for drilling rig accidents and lost limbs, for causing property damages from small earthquakes presumed to result from hydraulic fracturing operations, and most recently for deaths and injuries caused by burst hydraulic lines, the latter typically containing chemical mixtures under several thousand pounds of pressure. Bergen’s membership at Los Oteros, his Mercedes parked in the headquarters garage three floors below his corner office, his ultra-modern home with swimming pool in Irving, Texas, and his $10,000 per month alimony payment to an ex-trophy wife were all testimony to his ability to control the damages and negotiate settlements that seemed generous to litigants but in fact were hardly noticeable to Delmar Stevens. It never occurred to Bergen that this file would be any different, or would justify Jamaison’s unusual behavior, until the senior counsel says

      This one’s a murder. Both men look at one another in silence. Plane’s ready for a noon departure.

      To?

      Des Moines, Iowa. Jamaison doesn’t need to hear Bergen’s reaction because he can easily imagine it: what in the living hell is going on in Des Moines? You’re pre-paid for two weeks at the downtown Residence Inn. He lets that sink in for a few seconds before adding if you need more time, just let us know.

      Des Moines, Iowa?

      Rental vehicle from National. Jamaison struggles to keep from smiling at the image of Connecticut Bergen spending two weeks in a Residence Inn and driving a rental car. Pick any one on the lot. With a little luck there’ll be a big black pickup with a gun rack and a bunch of hog manure in the bed.

      Murder? What the hell’s going on, Norden? You’d don’t send a civil lawyer to the boondocks on a criminal case.

      Bergen doesn’t add what he’s thinking: two weeks on site for a murder case? None of the Stevens Oil attorneys were criminal law specialists; most of them handled tax and regulatory problems, but they’d have all reacted the same way: two weeks? Connecticut Connie Bergen led a team of five lawyers who dealt with civil issues, handing out cases to individuals depending on their interests, location around the country, amount of money involved, and knowledge of local culture where litigation was likely to occur. None of them had ever budgeted less than two years for a case involving a potential jury trial.

      Take a look at the file on the plane. The plane was one of Stevens Oil’s three Gulfstream 650ER corporate jets. The pilots were all ex-military. You got Blowout this time. The other two corporate jets were also Gulfstream 650ERs, named Geronimo and Pusher; Delmar liked to name his planes with oilfield terms any roughneck would understand.

      Who got murdered?

      Jamaison’s non-response to his What the hell’s going on? question tells him everything he needs to know about whatever the hell is going on. You didn’t argue with Norden Jamaison, any more than you argued with Delmar Stevens himself, or, for that matter, with his daughter Annabelle, soon to graduate from Cavanaugh College a hundred miles south of Des Moines with a degree in geology, and quickly thereafter, Bergen suspects, to become a junior executive in the company. The only good thing about Annabelle, he’d decided the last time she visited headquarters, was watching her walk down the hall.

      Rebecca Stitcher.

      Oh. That one. He envisions Stitcher’s ghost appearing by the window and bending his favorite putter into a figure eight.

      Bergen remembers very well the name Rebecca Stitcher, the local events associated with it, and the secret meetings in Stevens Oil headquarters that it produced the previous November when her body had been discovered lying across the Union Pacific tracks south of that college town one icy morning. Most of Iowa had been shut down by a vicious early-season storm. A Cavanaugh College staff member, an accountant in the college’s Geology Department, had discovered the body on her way to work, on a morning when nobody in his or her right mind would be out on the highway, or, for that matter, on a gravel road. The accountant, a woman named Elizabeth Bennett, lived on a farm twelve miles south of town. She’d made it to the tracks, sleet blowing sideways, and seen the body. Thinking it was a deer, she got out to pull it off the road, discovered it was a faculty member from her department, and called her immediate supervisor, Geology Department chairman Gideon Marshall, screaming into the phone.

      Everything had gone downhill from there. Regardless of the storm, Jamaison himself had managed to travel the six hundred miles north and tried to gain access to the victim’s office. The attempt was Delmar Stevens’ idea. Like many of his ideas, this one was characterized more by hubris than rationality, although to be honest, hubris is what had gotten Delmar to his current status in life. But it was not the first time Stevens had been unable to bully his way into a situation through his proxy. Up in Iowa, local law enforcement had the geology building, Halliburton Hall, sealed up tight as the International Space Station. Jamaison quickly got back to Dallas without raising too many suspicions.

      That was last fall, says Bergen. Someone arrested?

      He knew by now that the person who’d been arrested had to be someone of interest to Stevens Oil. He also knew, even though he asked, that other than Annabelle Stevens, there was only one person left in Iowa who would be of any interest to Delmar Stevens, and that was the young geologist who might be able to translate Rebecca Stitcher’s theoretical research on plate tectonics into untold power and fortune for Stevens, assuming, of course, not only that a complete set of those equations could actually be obtained, but also that the science behind the equations was valid. Nobody in the Stevens Oil legal branch could confirm or deny either possibility.

      Charles Weatherford.

      When?

      This morning

      Dr. Charles Weatherford, formerly supported by Stevens Oil scholarships through graduate school and also afterwards as a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Oklahoma, and currently the most popular faculty member at Cavanaugh College, winner of numerous teaching awards and recognized annually by the Cavanaugh Parents’ Association, had been taken an hour earlier that morning from in front of his Physical Geology class in Halliburton Hall, with a hundred students watching, by an Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation SWAT team and transported to the Polk County Jail in Des Moines.

      That’s interesting as hell. Connie Bergen’s mind is racing; Weatherford’s name had come up repeatedly during those secret meetings last fall, mainly because Delmar supported his teaching and research with a small annual donation. You need a real lawyer, Norden. You need a real, big time, criminal lawyer.

      Campus is probably still on lockdown, is Jamaison’s response. Mr. Stevens wants you.

      Because?

      I don’t question Mr. Stevens’ decisions unless he actually asks for help or advice, answers Jamaison, reminding one member of the large Stevens Oil legal team of a simple fact that they all knew and lived with daily. And this time he didn’t ask.

      Annabelle?

      I don’t know.

      What Jamaison, along with several of the other corporate attorneys, did know was that Annabelle Stevens had carried on a three-year affair with Charles Weatherford. None of them knew whether Delmar knew of the affair. They were not so sure about Annabelle’s mother. Regardless of the fact that she was a perfectly coiffed and designer-dressed, walking Neiman-Marcus ad, beautiful even at 65, stereotypical rich and privileged-beyond-description wife of an oil industry magnate, she was also extremely savvy and perceptive beneath all that armor.

      This has all the makings of a real mess, says Bergen.

      That’s why we have you, Connie. Jamaison nods toward the file. Arraignment’s tomorrow afternoon. That should give you overnight to digest it.

      Have you read this material?

      Recently? Some of it.

      And?

      You need to come to your own conclusions.

      Jamaison’s not going to be of much help. The decision about which car to take at the National lot outside of Des Moines International is starting to look like about the only thing Connie Bergen will be able to control, completely, in the next couple of days.

      You will remind Mr. Stevens that I have no experience in criminal law, won’t you?

      I would, replies Jamaison, if I thought it would make a difference. To him, a lawyer’s a lawyer.

      That’s Jamaison’s standard line, but he’s wondering whether Stevens might have directed the choice of Bergen for other reasons. Bergen knew, or at least believed, that Jamaison’s To him, a lawyer’s a lawyer. explanation was the case; all the attorneys in the legal branch also believed it; but this was the first time any of them had actually said it to one another, and this time it was head of legal saying it to his top civil attorney.

      So you got any advice, Norden?

      Jamaison shrugs. Bergen picks up his phone and punches a button. The two men stare at one another for a few seconds before someone answers. From across Bergen’s desk, Jamaison can hear the other side of the conversation in the silent room.

      Judith, says Bergen; I’m leaving town for a couple of weeks. I need to be in the limo within an hour. He pauses; both men hear her voice over the phone, a tone of resigned frustration. Thanks. Bergen smiles.

      A good woman, says Jamaison.

      In more ways than one, adds Bergen. They’re hard to find.

      Connecticut Bergen’s private legal secretary, Judith Mitchell—tall, early 40s, well-educated, well-dressed, confident, divorced, with no children to distract her from her duties to the company—held her own with the other Stevens Oil female support staff. Bergen figures it will take her about ten minutes to bring out the traveling bag he keeps packed and ready in an outside closet. He figures it wrong. Five minutes later she opens the door.

      Limo’s on its way. She gives Jamaison what Bergen has come to call the Mitchell look, a mixture of disdain, irritation, and curiosity reserved for those who intrude on her boss’ schedule, especially on one of the few days he’s able to clear his mind out on some fairway. Jamaison ignores her.

      Call if you need help.

      I need help already, Norden; I’m not a criminal defense lawyer.

      Judith’s curiosity is perked with a hint of satisfaction.

      You are now, says Jamaison on his way out the door. He stops, turns, and says give Charlie our regards.

      And Annabelle?

      Unless she’s already a prosecution witness. Jamaison’s only contribution to Bergen’s mission.

      Regardless of her official title, legal secretary to Connecticut Bergen, Judith Mitchell was anything but a secretary. She had access to all of the legal files and information that came into Bergen’s office, and because of that access, she underwent an annual clearance screening by the Stevens Oil security division. With that remark—Give Charlie our regards.—she knows exactly why her boss is off to Iowa.

      Everything, says Bergen, after the outside office door closes behind Jamaison; I want everything we have on Charles Weatherford.

      Want me to deliver it in person? She raises an eyebrow.

      Two weeks in the Des Moines downtown Residence Inn?

      Maybe.

      Scan and pdf is fine.

      There’s a bunch. Judith mentally calculates the full body of information that Stevens Oil has on Charles Weatherford and the murder victim, Rebecca Stitcher. I may have to end up sending it secure overnight on an external hard drive.

      I have two weeks.

      I’ll do what I can. She doesn’t really know how much of this information Bergen will need, or use, or perhaps is not even allowed to see for some reason known only to Jamaison and Delmar Stevens himself.

      Bergen picks up his phone and punches in Jamaison’s private number.

      Okay, Norden, besides what you gave me in this file, how much of the company information on Weatherford and Stitcher can I have?

      All of it, answers Jamaison; Bergen imagines him answering with one of his rare quick smiles.

      Set up a separate account, he says. Judith nods. They’ve done this kind of business before, numerous times. Over the next week she’ll scan over a hundred thousand pages of documents related to Charles Weatherford and Rebecca Stitcher, accused and murder victim respectively, convert those documents into electronic files, and transfer the files to Bergen by way of a secure transfer protocol. Bergen takes out a notepad, removes the top sheet, lays it on his glass-covered desktop, and writes a new password. He shows it to Judith. She stares at it for two or three minutes then nods. This is the password they’ll use for at least the next two or three weeks. Bergen feeds the sheet into a shredder beneath his desk.

      **********

      Return to Table of Contents

      2. Ottawa

      Daylight breaks through the trees in Highlands Cemetery, on the eastern outskirts of Ottawa, Kansas, at exactly 6:52 AM. Tombstones cast long shadows toward the west, almost as if pointing to lawless towns of history, like those trampled by Quantrill’s Raiders in the aftermath of America’s Civil War, veterans of which lie beneath the Highlands Bermuda grass, their names slowly being erased by lichens, rain, and blowing dust. Rebecca Stitcher’s gravestone casts no shadow. Nor does her mother Isabelle’s. Both are rectangular pieces of granite, lying flat as Kansas itself, with names carved into the mottled red igneous rock, almost like shallow streams spelling out their histories of interactions with the prairie storms. The grass has still not established completely over the women’s graves. A dark gray cloud bank blends in with the western horizon. Two miles way, the one remaining Stitcher, Naomi, Rebecca’s sister, lies in her bed, staring at the ceiling, her left arm down along her side under the covers, her right arm bent, her right hand holding a semi-automatic pistol, a .45 caliber Glock 21, lying across her chest.

      She raises the pistol, pointing at the ceiling light—a pink, fluted, upside-down glass shade held with a brass knob—and pulls the trigger. She takes her left hand out from under the covers, works the slide, and pulls the trigger again. She learned how to do that from watching crime shows on television. Over and over, she dry fires, practicing her trigger pressure exactly as she read online that she was supposed to do. In her mind the pink glass shade is someone’s face. She doesn’t know who that person is, but it’s the person who killed her sister. Naomi imagines the face. She aims at the left eye and pulls the trigger. She hears the clink but in her mind it’s really a bam! Her bedroom is silent. She imagines the ceiling splattered with blood and bone fragments.

      Outside the rain patters on her window. The face on her ceiling light is now that man from the college, that geologist. She aims for his eye and pulls the trigger again. Next, the face is that of his wife, that woman with a pistol who slammed into her house last week, barging through the screen door as Naomi answered the bell and put her on the floor, aiming that handgun at her forehead before Naomi could get her own weapon then asking those questions to which she had to answer no—Is it loaded? Have you ever fired a gun? The rain comes down a little bit harder. The faces on her ceiling light go away then return, over and over again, always in the same order. Naomi drops the pistol to her bed covers and cries herself to sleep.

      An hour later she sits up in bed, swings her feet over the edge, and looks at her image in the dresser mirror. She stands up, pulls a robe off the end of her bed, slips it on, and walks barefoot into the kitchen. There’s a box of dry cereal on the kitchen table, just where she left it the day before. She reaches into the cupboard, gets a bowl, pours cereal, sits down, picks up the spoon she used yesterday and left on the table, and starts to eat. Thirty minutes later she walks back into her bedroom, finds the black sweats where she’d dropped them on the floor by her closet, dresses, and retrieves her shoes from under the bed. She picks up her pistol. Her long coat is hanging on a hook behind the front door. It’s still raining, but not quite as hard as earlier. She walks out the front door without locking it, walks up her driveway and turns left. An hour later, she’s at Highlands Cemetery.

      This trek is one Naomi has been making every day for the last four months, after Rebecca’s murder and after Isabelle’s collapse at the funeral home, and ever since her mother and sister were buried. In the bitter cold of Kansas in December and January, she walked the two miles. She stumbled through snow in February. She looked up at the geese overhead in early March and listened to their calls but hearing her mother. At the graves, every day she kneels down and promises that her mother and sister will be avenged somehow. Then she stands back and imagines her sister standing in front of a large scientific meeting, accepting an award, her mother alive and well as she had been years earlier, before the emphysema, alcohol, and liver damage, smiling, clapping, for her daughter Rebecca. In Naomi’s coat pocket here’s an old photograph of her father, before he was killed in a Stevens Oil rig accident, before they moved back to Kansas where her grandparents lived, where the Stitcher brothers had settled after the Civil War. Her father’s standing, a cigarette hanging out of the side of his

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