Chapter 112: Nothing to Charge
On the twenty-first of May, Vukovich brought in her bureau chief.
A man called Aidan Osei, so that I would hear it from somebody who outranked her.
That is a courtesy they extend when the answer is final. I did not know that then.
They gave me twenty-five minutes and a bad chair.
“You want to know why we will never charge Constance Blackwood,” Osei said. “I’m going to give you six reasons. Any one of them is enough on its own.”
I got the notebook out. The green one had been full since March. This was the fifth.
One.
There is no offense in the Illinois Criminal Code of paying a woman to be available. No offense of choosing your son’s next wife. No offense of being ready.
Two.
The charge you are thinking of is solicitation, or conspiracy. Both require the State to prove an agreement entered into with intent that a specific offense be committed.
“We have timing,” Osei said. “Timing is not intent. A jury may find it disgusting. Disgusting is not an element.”
Three.
The only living witness to any agreement is Serena Montigue. She denies the underlying act, she is a convicted felon with a completed plea, and she has already sworn that Constance never in words asked her to harm anyone.
“Kessler would put that answer up on a screen,” Vukovich said, “and it is her own answer, from her own examination, and she gave it voluntarily.”
Four.
You cannot conspire to commit an offense the State cannot prove occurred.
There is no cause of death for Ana Reyes-Blackwood. There is no substance, no container, no residue and no tank for the episodes. The underlying crime is not weakly proved. It is not proved at all.
Five.
Ashworth would move to dismiss before it ever reached a jury, and he would win, and a failed indictment is not a neutral event.
“It ends careers,” Osei said, “and I do not care about that. What I care about is that a dismissal on the merits closes a door for good. If we go now and lose, then in nine years, when somebody finally talks, we cannot go again.”
Six.
Osei turned his hand over on the table.
“She never touched anything.”
I said, “What does that mean.”
“Exactly what it says. She did not form the company; Ms. Montigue did. She did not sign the invoice; Ms. Montigue did.”
“She did not send the payment instruction; her assistant did. She did not pay it; a controller paid it. She did not open the account; a bank did.”
He counted them off without any relish at all.
“There is not one document in forty-one pages with her signature on it. Not one email from her address.”
“There is a line in somebody else’s email that says Mrs. B says no further documentation is required. And Dorothea Kwan has told us, through counsel, that she cannot now recall whether that was said in person, on the telephone, or inferred.”
“Inferred.”
“Inferred,” he said. “That woman has worked for her for nineteen years.”
I looked at the six lines in the notebook.
“So the answer is that she did it correctly,” I said.
Nobody in the room told me I was wrong.
Vukovich walked me down to the lifts and gave me the one thing they had.
On the fourteenth of April 2027, on her own motion, after reading Dr. Moreno’s letter and the citation record, Dr. Ingrid Sallis had amended the death certificate of Ana Reyes-Blackwood.
Manner of death: previously Natural. Amended to Undetermined.
“That’s it,” Vukovich said. “That’s the whole of it. One word on one line on one form.”
“What does it do?”
“Legally? Nothing today.” She pressed the call button.
“It means the file is not closed. If a human being ever walks into a police station in this city and says a sentence, there is no certificate saying natural causes sitting there to stop them.”
I ordered a certified copy from the county on the second of June and paid seventeen dollars for it.
I still have it. One page.
It is the only paper in this story that says, in the state’s own hand, that nobody knows what happened to that woman.
The estate matter ended more quietly than it began.
Ashworth’s motion to quash was heard on the twenty-eighth of May and Otto granted it in part, and he was right to.
Constance Blackwood’s personal household account was not property of Ana’s estate and never had been. The citation had been aimed sideways and everybody in that courtroom knew it.
But the bank had produced in February. The family office had produced in February. Serena had testified in May.
A motion to quash operates going forward. It cannot un-produce forty-one pages.
Doyle explained that to me in the corridor with her coat over her arm, and then she said the other thing.
“You understand that all of it is public.”
“Public how?”
“Case 2027 P 000414. Anyone may walk into the record room on the eighteenth floor, ask the clerk for the file, and read every page of it for nothing.”
“Has anybody?”
“A man from the Tribune business desk pulled it twice last week,” she said, “and asked the clerk for a copy of the invoice.”