“You came at the perfect time,” she said. “Brianna just went down for her nap. Kyle, honey,” she added to her son, who was sitting on the floor with a picture book, “would you please go play in your room for a few minutes, while Mommy talks with our friends here?”
Kyle picked up the book and left, giving us a curious look over his shoulder. “I’ll take you guys to the park later, when Bri is awake,” Brittany called after him.
We took our places on the sofa, and Natasha opened a binder and pulled out two copies of the statement we’d printed. “Here’s a declaration we wrote up,” she said to Brittany, “with what you told us this morning. If you could read it and initial each page, and then sign it at the end, if what’s in there is correct. It’s under penalty of perjury, so it’s important to make sure it’s the truth as you remember it.” Brittany nodded, her expression sober. “If you see anything that’s incorrect, let us know. If it’s minor, you can just correct it on the page and initial your correction. If it’s bigger, we’ll prepare a new declaration fixing it.”
“Okay,” she said. “How will you use it?”
“We’ll attach it to the habeas corpus petition we file for your mom,” I said. “It will be like sworn testimony, to let the judge know what evidence we have. If the judge thinks we have enough, we hope he’ll order a hearing, and if that happens, you’ll testify in person.”
“Oh. I see.”
She reached for the declaration, took it from Natasha, and began reading. After the first page, she asked, “Where do I put my initials?”
“At the lower right,” Natasha said, and handed her a pen. Brittany put the declaration down on the end table next to her and wrote her initials. A couple of pages in, she found a typo and asked what she should do. “Print the correction over the top and then initial it.” She did, and continued. When she had read the last page, she put the paper down on the end table again and filled in the date and signed her name, then handed it back to Natasha. “I hope it helps Mom,” she said.
We thanked her and stood up. Natasha gave her the second copy. “This one is for you to keep,” she said.
Brittany took it and folded it in thirds.
“When will you know if Mom will get a trial?” Brittany asked, as we made our way toward the door.
“We’ll file the petition in February,” I said. “After that, we have to wait for the judge to decide.”
“Oh,” she said, a little sadly. “That long? Well, I’ll pray for a good decision.”
She watched us from the door as we drove away, biting her lower lip and turning the paper over and over again in her hands.
19
Thanksgiving gave me a breather from Sunny’s case. Harriet talked me once again into volunteering for her church’s holiday dinner. “We need more people than ever,” she said. “We’ll probably have a lot of people who lost their homes in the fires.” Bill couldn’t go this year, she said. He was under doctor’s orders to stay out near the ocean and rest, because he had emphysema and had struggled with the smoke from the fires in the fall. That summer, he’d had a heart episode that resulted in his being taken by helicopter ambulance to the emergency room.
Around Corbin’s Landing, everyone who could afford it paid an annual premium for helicopter insurance, since the area was over an hour’s drive on winding, narrow roads from the nearest emergency room. The noise of the motors overhead was like sirens in a more populated place; it meant a car accident, a medical emergency, or a fire. When we heard them, the curious went outside and watched the sky overhead, straining to see where the ’copter was circling and whose lives had suddenly been upended.
Harriet hated to talk about health issues. “It’s all some old people do,” she groused now and then; “I don’t want to be like that.” Her brief description of Bill’s condition before we left for the dinner was the longest report by far I’d ever received from her. Bill himself didn’t say much more. “Growing old sucks,” was all he added to what Harriet told me. I was dimly aware that they had skipped their annual visit to Harriet’s hometown in the Sierra foothills to visit the graves of her first husband and son, who had died long ago in a truck accident, but it hadn’t occurred to me before to ask her why they’d changed their plans.
Harriet’s church was not far from one of the neighborhoods that had burned, and dozens of volunteers had gathered to cook and serve food and socialize. I was assigned to the kitchen, where I filled in wherever I was needed: filling and emptying dishwashers, peeling potatoes, cutting pieces of pumpkin pie and dotting them with dollops of whipped cream from a can. Except for Harriet, the men and women there were strangers to me or, at best, people I saw once a year when we volunteered together.
I listened to them talk with each other about children, grandchildren, houses, health issues, politics, and the ongoing misery caused by the fires. I felt like an eavesdropper on their lives, and I didn’t say a lot myself, but nothing was asked of me except to be a smooth link in the network of well-meaning people getting dinner for the crowds in the rec hall.
Back home afterward, there wasn’t a lot to do except continue my work on Sunny’s petition and my other cases. It was too cold to plant in the garden and too early to prune the orchard. I ate stored apples and winter pears, and a lot of chard and bok choy because they were the survivors from the cold-weather vegetables I’d bravely planted at the end of summer.
The two dogs I had been caring for had been reduced by one, after one of them, Peggy, went home to her family. The other, a little copper-colored cocker spaniel named Lizzie, I had ended up adopting after her owners, an elderly couple, decided they needed to go into assisted living instead of trying to find another house. When I took Peggy to the shelter to go home, I got to meet one of her family, a woman in her forties who was almost as ebullient as Peggy herself at their reunion, and who thanked me effusively for caring for her and easing their minds about her well-being while they dealt with the loss of so much else. I never met Lizzie’s owners; it was a woman from the shelter who called and told me they had decided to put Lizzie up for adoption and asked if I wanted to keep her. She gave me as much information as they had about her; she was three years old, and as far as the couple knew, her health was good, and her shots were up to date, but both their house and their vet’s office had burned in the fire, and all her paperwork from before the fire was lost. Lizzie came to me like a refugee, undocumented; and thus we started our new life together.
Our investigation in Sunny’s case was winding down. Natasha was going to Harrison in early December to interview the trial jurors, at least those she’d been able to find alive after a decade and a half. Carey had called before Thanksgiving and suggested we go at around the same time to see the Ferrante family and pay another visit to Sunny.
For defense attorneys, meeting the family of the person your client was convicted of killing is, to say the least, fraught. In the adversary system we have, the police and prosecutors are the first representatives of the justice system to speak to crime victims, or if the victim is dead, for his or her family; and they quickly position themselves as their advocates. They befriend the outraged victim or the bereaved parents, wives, children, and impart their views about the suspect, until they are seen as the champions who will fight to get justice for the victim by ensuring that the defendant is convicted and punished as much as the law will allow. Almost inevitably, the defense attorney, who comes into the picture later, is viewed as an enemy, a hired gun whose goal is to subvert the judicial process for the benefit of his guilty client and rob the family and society of the just result they deserve. How strong the family’s feelings are depends a lot on the intensity of their grief and their susceptibility to persuasive propaganda, and how good a job the prosecutor and the police detectives have done at cultivating them.
As Carey and I prepared to shake the web of the Ferrante family, we knew a few facts, some more helpful than others. Greg’s mother, Costanza Ferrante, had been, by all accounts, obsessed
with avenging Greg’s death and certain that Sunny was guilty. As Craig Newhouse had said, she had used her family’s political clout and enlisted the backing of victims’ rights groups to push the prosecution to seek the death penalty and reject a plea bargain for a more lenient sentence.
Costanza and Robert Ferrante, Greg’s father, had testified at Sunny’s trial as so-called “victim impact” witnesses: people close to the victim, such as family, coworkers, and friends, whom the prosecution presents at death penalty trials to paint a sympathetic portrait of the person killed and show how much pain his murder caused to those around him. Mrs. Ferrante had broken down in tears on the witness stand, and when the district attorney had offered her a tissue, she had thanked her, using her first name.
We also knew that no one else in Greg’s family, including his brothers and sister, his ex-wife, and his children, had been called to testify. All of them had been interviewed by police detectives before Sunny’s trial, but the family had declined to talk with anyone from the defense.
Greg’s father and mother were both dead now, but his brothers were still working in the family business, along with a couple of their children. Carey had called and talked with Robert’s oldest son, Robert Ferrante, Jr., and set up a time to meet with him.
The ranch was a few miles out of town, down a two-lane highway. The land here was gently rolling, rather than flat. Some of it was planted in stone fruit orchards, their branches bare of leaves this time of year, in citrus with bright yellow or orange fruit hanging among dark green foliage, or in orderly rows of wine grapes on their cordons, still bearing their withered red leaves, giving the landscape a feeling of lingering autumn. The rest was pasture, just turning green after the first rains, on which cattle—dark Angus or black-and-white Holsteins—were grazing or lying under oak and pepper trees. On both sides, an occasional private road led to a farmhouse, with its outbuildings and long, low cattle barns.
Bob Ferrante had told Carey to watch for the orchard of olive trees just before the driveway. Nevertheless, we almost missed the discreet wood sign reading “Ferrante Ranch” that marked the long blacktop lane to our left. Beyond the stand of gnarled olives, the lane went up a slight rise, from which we could see an expanse of hillside planted in grapevines and another, much larger stand of olives. The road here forked, and a sign said “Store and Office/Tours,” with an arrow pointing left.
We turned, and after a few minutes’ drive found ourselves at the entrance to a small parking lot. To its right, down a short path, stood a single-story Victorian ranch house, freshly painted pale yellow with white trim. Steps led up to a front porch that ran the length of the house and a generous front door. Behind the house I glimpsed a complex of gray wood and metal sheds and outbuildings, the working heart of the ranch, and behind them on a rise, a couple of cattle barns, some dark green water tanks, and a glimpse of a pasture dotted with white cattle. It had an air of settled prosperity that made me briefly envy farm life.
We walked up the steps into the house. An old-fashioned bell above the door tinkled as we opened it. The front of the house was fitted out as a retail store, its walls painted off-white, with the windows framed in a warm light wood. A few old painted tables held patterned plates, mugs, glasses, tablecloths, and napkins for sale, along with seasonal decorations for Christmas and Hanukkah. Along the walls, hutches and shelves and a glass-doored refrigerator displayed jarred olives, bottles of olive oil, and vinegar, all with the Ferrante Ranch label, and other products such as crackers, cheese, candy, and local honey. A counter at the back held small labeled bowls of olives and oil, with toothpicks and small pieces of bread for sampling. The large old windows at the front of the house were trimmed with dark green and white checked curtains; in one of them stood a lighted and decorated Christmas tree. At the end of the room, the old fireplace had been converted with a gas-burning insert that gently warmed the shop.
A man came out from the depths of the house and greeted us from behind the counter. “Can I help you?” he asked, and then checked himself as if he had just realized something. “Are you Ms. Bergmann and Ms. Moodie?” he asked.
We nodded. “Yes, we are,” Carey said.
“Bob Ferrante,” he said, coming around the counter and extending a rough, tanned hand. He was tall and weatherbeaten, and slightly stooped; his hair, black streaked with iron gray, was coarse and thick, cut short. “Come on in. I hope you don’t mind, but I told my brother Tony you were visiting, and he and my son John wanted to meet you, too. Rob—my oldest—is at a growers’ conference out of town.”
He led us around the end of the counter and into the back part of the house, to an office on the right. It was a plain room, not very big, and there were two other men in it; they stood as we came in, and shook hands with us, introducing themselves in turn. “Tony and I are mostly retired at this point,” Bob said. “John and Rob run the ranch, and Tony’s daughter Melissa handles the business end.”
The Ferrante genes must have been unusually strong, because the family resemblance was visible in all three men, and I was struck by the similarity between them and the photos I’d seen of Greg. That said, there were noticeable differences among them. All of them were tall, with similar dark eyes and dark, stiff, wavy hair—Bob’s and Tony’s black and iron gray, and John’s silver-flecked dark brown. Bob was lean and craggy, the picture of an old-time rancher from his madras plaid shirt and Lee jeans to his well-worn cowboy boots. Tony also wore jeans and boots, with a long-sleeved polo and a fleece vest. He was wider in the face and broader in the shoulders, with a paunch that made him look a bit like a pigeon. John was a younger version of Bob, but with his jeans he wore a dress shirt in a tattersall pattern, without a tie, and a dark-colored quilted vest. The five of us crowded the office. Bob had placed a couple of extra chairs out before we came, and we sat in a circle of sorts, with John behind the desk.
“I’d have found us somewhere more comfortable,” Bob said, “but Alison is taking a group on a tour, and I said I’d stay here in case anyone comes into the store.”
If Carey was awed by this crowd of big men, she didn’t show it. She gave a spiel, of sorts—that we were representing Sunny to file a habeas corpus petition for her, to revisit her conviction and sentence, and that we wanted to talk with Greg Ferrante’s family, to see if they could help us gain some insight into what had happened. Bob nodded, and Tony and John followed her talk attentively. Bob spoke first.
“Well, I guess the whole thing was a real shock, to all of us,” he said. “First, losing Greg like that, and then Sunny getting accused of killing him. I mean, murder’s a horrible crime, and when someone in your own family does it—” He stopped, failing to find the words for how it felt.
Tony and John nodded agreement, and Tony said, “It was like losing two family members at once. Sunny—she was family, too. And we all liked Todd. We didn’t know what to think.”
“At first,” Bob said, “none of us wanted to believe she’d do something like that. But then the district attorney told us Todd had confessed the whole thing to some relative of his before he died. You couldn’t shrug that off.”
“Not to speak ill of the dead,” John said. “But I sometimes thought that if Sunny did it, she had her reasons.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Uncle Greg never treated her well, that I saw,” he answered, and Tony nodded agreement.
“He was always kind of abrupt with her. He’d tell her to be quiet or say she didn’t know what she was talking about, in public, in front of everybody. I’d never talk to my wife like that. You had to wonder what things were like at home.”
“It was the cold-bloodedness of it,” Bob said. “I mean, we all knew what Greg was like. If she’d shot him during an argument, I wouldn’t condone it, but at least I’d have understood, okay, he finally pushed her too far. But to plan and premeditate like that, and to get a nice kid like Todd to do the actual deed—her own daughter’s boyfriend, no less— that was just cold. Todd wa
s no killer. I don’t know what she told him to get him to do something like that.”
“It never made sense to me,” Tony said. “I couldn’t see the Sunny I knew doing that.”
“So you have doubts about whether she was guilty,” I said to Tony.
He hedged. “Yeah, a little. I still wonder.”
“Any particular reason?”
He shrugged. “Not really. I just always thought I was a good judge of character, and I didn’t see Sunny for a minute as someone who’d do something that awful, not in a million years. Nor Todd, either. But the DA must have had something, because the jury convicted her and gave her the death penalty.”
“Well, there was the other woman,” Bob said. “I guess you probably know,” he said to Carey and me. “Greg fooled around on Sunny. We all knew it; I’m sure she did, too. I saw something in the paper about how he was planning to leave her for some other girlfriend when he was killed.”
“I heard that, too,” Tony said. “I don’t know what they said about it at her trial. I didn’t go. Mama did, though. Every day.”
“Yeah, Grandma was obsessed,” John said. “She said she wouldn’t rest until that horrible woman—that’s what she always called her—was dead.”
Bob spoke up. “You have to understand her,” he said. “Greg was her baby.” He turned to Carey and me. “Mama had a baby girl after Tony. She was born with something wrong with her heart, and they knew she wouldn’t live long. I was a little kid myself then, but I remember. It was hard for Mama. My dad was away in the Navy, and he didn’t get to come back until after the war ended, so she was by herself with us kids when everything happened with Rosie. I remember she was sad all the time, and she was always fussing over Rosie. Even as a parent, I can’t imagine what that must be like, taking care of a baby you know is dying. After Rosie died, it seemed Mama never really got over it. When I was older, I heard the doctor had told her she couldn’t have any more children because of something that happened when Rosie was born. Then my dad came home, and she had Greg. So he was like the miracle baby. My dad said she was convinced God sent Greg to her to comfort her. So Greg was more than just her youngest; he was her gift from God.”
Next of Kin Page 18
