Free The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly

anybody—no grandmother, no lawyer, nobody—well, then, eventually he’s going to give you what you want if he thinks it will finally get him out of the closet. And secondly, it’s a question of what exactly he confessed to that concerns me. The police point of view is definitely different from mine on that.”
    I stared at him a moment. The conversation was intriguing but too cryptic. I needed to get Meyer to a place where he could speak freely.
    “Do you want to go get a cup of coffee?”
    “No, I don’t have time. And as I said, I can’t get into specifics of the case. We have our rules here and we are dealing with a juvenile—despite the state’s efforts to the contrary. And, ironically, the same District Attorney’s Office that wants to prosecute this child as an adult will happily come down on me and on my boss if I give you any case documents relating to a juvenile. This is not in adult court yet, so rules of privacy designed to protect the juvenile are still in place. But I’m sure you have sources in the police department who can give you what you need.”
    “I do.”
    “Good. Then, if you want a statement from me, I would say that I believe that my client—and, by the way, I am not at liberty to identify him by name—is almost as much a victim here as Denise Babbit. It is true that she is the ultimate victim because she lost her life in a horrible manner. But my client’s freedom has been taken from him and he is not guilty of this crime. I will be able to prove that once we get into court. Whether that will be in adult or juvenile court doesn’t really matter. I will vigorously defend my client because he is not guilty of this crime.”
    It had been a carefully worded statement and nothing short of what I expected. But, still, it gave me pause. Meyer was crossing a line in giving me the flash drive and I had to ask myself why. I didn’t know Meyer. I had never written a story involving him and there was none of the trust that builds between reporter and source as stories are written and published. So if Meyer wasn’t crossing the line for me, who was he doing it for? Alonzo Winslow? Could this public defender with the briefcase bursting with his guilty clients’ files actually believe his own statement? Did he really think Alonzo was a victim here, that he was actually innocent?
    It dawned on me that I was wasting time. I had to get back to the office and see what was on the stick. From the digital information I held hidden in my hand I would find my direction.
    I reached over and turned my digital recorder off.
    “Thanks for your help.”
    I said it sarcastically for the benefit of the other lawyer in the room. I nodded and winked at Meyer, then I left.

 
    A s soon as I got to the newsroom I went to my cubicle without checking in at the raft or with Angela Cook. I plugged the data stick into the slot on my laptop computer and opened its contents. There were three files on it. They were labeled summary.doc, arrest.doc and confess.doc. The third file was largest by far. I briefly opened it to find that the transcript of Alonzo Winslow’s confession was 928 pages long. I closed it, saving it for last, and suspected that because it was labeled confess instead of, say, interrogation, it was a file that had been transmitted to Meyer from the prosecutor. It was a digital world and it was not surprising to me that the transcript from nine hours of questioning a murder suspect would be transmitted from police to prosecutor and from prosecutor to defense in electronic format. With a page count of 928 the costs of printing and reprinting such a document would be high, especially considering it was the product of just one case in a system that carries thousands of cases on any given day. If Meyer wanted to print it out on the public defender’s budget, then that was up to him.
    After loading the files onto my computer, I e-mailed them to the in-house copy center so that I would have hard copies of