Twenty

by James Grippando

  “I don’t think that’s what he meant.”

  “He could have meant he was watching porn the night before, right?”

  “Or he could also have meant he did the school shooting.”

  “Yes, he could have,” said Jack. “And he could have thought that a confession was the only way to stop you and three other officers from shooting him and his mother.”

  “Objection!” shouted Beckham.

  “Sustained,” said the judge.

  Beckham stepped forward. “Your Honor, this charade has gone far enough. Mr. Swyteck knows the law as well as I do. To suppress Mr. Khoury’s statement, this court is required to find that the police said something that was likely to elicit an incriminating response before advising him of his Miranda rights. Here, all they said was ‘Freeze!’”

  Jack had to concede the point—but only half of it. “Judge, I’m not accusing the police of having done anything wrong. This is not a situation where the police said something they shouldn’t have said, or did something they shouldn’t have done. It’s simply a statement that has zero probative value of anything. Xavier said ‘I did it,’ having no idea what crime he was confessing to.”

  “I agree with Mr. Beckham,” the judge said. “This does not meet the legal standard for suppression.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” said the prosecutor.

  “Not so fast,” said the judge. “I also take Mr. Swyteck’s point. This is a high-profile case, and I intend to give this defendant, like every defendant in my courtroom, a fair trial. From day one, we’ve been hearing from the state attorney and from other sources in law enforcement about a so-called confession. If this is the ‘confession’ you’re talking about . . .” The judge shook his head, measuring his words. “Well, I’m not making an evidentiary ruling today, but let me say this. You need to tone down the rhetoric, Mr. Beckham.”

  “Understood,” said the prosecutor.

  “Anything else, Counsel?”

  A public admonition from the court was more than Jack could have hoped for. “Nothing from the defense, Your Honor.”

  “Then we’re adjourned,” the judge said, with the crack of his gavel.

  “All rise!”

  Behind Jack, in the packed galley, the bumps and thuds of a rising crowd thumped like a ragtag army on the march. The judge disappeared behind the paneled door to his chambers, and members of the media rushed to the rail, peppering the lawyers with questions.

  “Are you saying he didn’t do it, Swyteck?”

  “Mr. Beckham, is there another confession?”

  Jack didn’t answer. It was his job to argue his client’s position before the judge. It was not his job to vouch for his client’s innocence before the media.

  “Swyteck, you got a minute?” asked Beckham.

  Jack followed him to the far end of the jury box, where they were out of earshot from the media.

  “I don’t care how many holes you try to poke in my case. I’m not going to lose, and I’ll never back away from the death penalty.”

  “Killing Xavier won’t deter other eighteen-year-old boys,” said Jack.

  “I’m a big believer in specific deterrence. Your client will never shoot up a school again.”

  “He won’t do it again if he’s in jail the rest of his life. This is a case in which life means life.”

  Beckham glanced toward the gallery, toward the sullen expressions of parents and teachers still in shock from the shooting. “When I hear you defense lawyers say that—life means life—it really bugs me.”

  “Bugs you? Why?”

  “You ever read Vladimir Nabokov?”

  Jack had read Lolita in high school. The story of pedophilia and serial rape was not his cup of tea. “Not a fan.”

  “Neither am I,” said Beckham. “But there’s one thing he may have gotten right. Nabokov said, ‘Life is the brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’”

  “That’s pretty grim, Abe. I’m not following your point.”

  “What your client took away from those thirteen children is unforgivable. Why should his brief crack of light be any longer than theirs?”

  “I don’t have an answer to that.”

  “I think you know the answer,” said Beckham. “And I’m absolutely certain you know how this is going to end. With or without a confession.”

  Beckham slung his computer bag over his shoulder and walked away. All Jack could do was watch as the prosecutor stood at the rail, confidence unshaken, and reassured some very concerned parents about the strength of his case.

  Chapter 12

  It was a short walk from the justice center to his office, and Abe Beckham made it in record time. Anger propelled him.

  The official name for the main facility of the Office of the State Attorney for Miami-Dade County was the Graham Building, but Abe called it the Boomerang. The building had two wings, and the footprint was angled like a boomerang, but the appellation had more to do with the fact that it seemed he could never leave without coming right back. Ten-to-twelve-hour days were normal. Longer when the lawyer on the other side was as good as Jack Swyteck.

  “Mary, I want the whole team in the twelfth-floor conference room,” he told his assistant as he hurried by her in the hallway.

  “When, Mr. Beckham?”

  “Now.”

  Abe went back to his office to make a phone call. The State Attorney’s Office had a victims’ relations unit, but Abe had always considered it part of his job to keep families informed. That was especially true in the case of Elena Hernandez, a woman he’d met minutes after rushing over to Riverside on the morning of the shooting. The victims had yet to be identified, but Elena couldn’t find her son, and she was convinced that she’d lost him. He was a senior, brave, strong, and with dreams of joining the US Marine Corps, the type of young man who would do everything in his power to save his friends before himself. Sadly, her instincts had been spot-on. The tributes posted on the fence outside the school included dozens of thank-you notes from students who’d survived only because her son, Carlos, had held the classroom door shut.

  “Call me anytime,” Abe said into the phone. “Be well.”

  He hung up, took a breath, and walked down the hall to the conference room. The team was waiting for him: Liz Kaplan, who would sit beside him at trial, and two junior prosecutors who were relatively new to the adult felony division. Abe grabbed an erasable marker from the table and wrote on the whiteboard in big red letters: no confession.

  “That’s how we have to try this case,” said Abe.

  One of the junior lawyers spoke up. “Didn’t Judge Martinez reserve ruling?”

  Abe underlined the word No on the whiteboard. “I’m not talking about the rules of evidence. And your instincts are right. The judge won’t exclude this statement. But we have to be prepared to deal with Swyteck’s spin to the jury. Our best strategy is to move forward as if there’s no confession. There’s a hole in our case. How do we fill it?”

  Silence.

  “Jessica, let’s start with the search of the Khoury residence. What can we pull from that?”

  The junior prosecutor checked her notes. “Well . . .”

  “Go item by item,” said Abe, as he wrote the word Evidence on the whiteboard. “Start with the digital evidence.”

  Jessica flipped the pages ahead to the forensic report. “The parental control filters on the family computer were set very high—keep in mind their youngest daughter is in elementary school—so that hard drive was squeaky clean, PG-13 at worst.”

  “How about Xavier’s cell phone?”

  “Just as clean. No texts or emails of concern. No suspicious content in any of the files he created.”

  “No manifesto? No diary?”

  “Nope. And his Internet search history shows no visits to the dark web, terrorist websites, or so-called radicalizing elements.”

  “What kind of music did he listen to?”

  “Apparently he was a big fan of B
angtan Sonyeondan.”

  “Sounds promising. Is that connected to al-Qaeda?”

  “No, it’s a South Korean boy band. Very popular in the United States. Totally mainstream.”

  Abe would have laughed if the situation weren’t so serious. “What about social media?”

  “As best we can tell, he wasn’t on social media.”

  “Huh. So Swyteck wasn’t blowing smoke about that, after all. Fine. Let’s talk physical evidence.”

  Jessica flipped to the next page of her notes. “Nothing in the way of weapons. No handguns. No rifles. No ammunition. No magazines. No knives.”

  “No cache,” he said, writing it on the whiteboard. “What about clothing or accessories? Any Kevlar vests?”

  “No.”

  “Anything like the shooter was wearing in the video? Camouflage jacket? Shoe covers? Balaclava? Tactical gloves?”

  “Nothing. Well, there was an Elsa ski mask.”

  “Elsa?”

  “The princess from Frozen. You know: ‘Let it go.’ They found it in his sister’s bedroom.”

  “Not helpful,” said Abe, popping the cap back onto the marker for emphasis. “I presume the search warrant you drafted specifically asked for each of these items.”

  “Yes.”

  “Teaching moment,” said Abe, trying not to come down too hard on a newbie. “Never ask for something in a search warrant unless you know it’s there. This search warrant is an outline for Swyteck’s cross-examination of our lead detective. He’ll go point by point: no handgun, no rifle, no ammunition, and on and on. The only answer we have for the jury is that we tore the house apart looking for each and every one of these things and found nothing.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jessica. “But if you look at the history of mass shootings, the items I listed in the warrant always turn up.”

  “I understand,” said Abe. “It’s puzzling. And one more reason this case is not the cakewalk that everyone seems to think it is. Nothing in the hands of a jury is easy.”

  There was a polite knock at the door. It opened, and Abe’s assistant stuck her head into the conference room. “Lieutenant Vega is on the line. It’s important. Good news, she says.”

  Vega was the lead homicide detective on the case. “Patch her through on the speaker,” said Abe, which sent his assistant racing back to her desk.

  Abe had been just a “pit assistant,” a C-level prosecutor in his first year of adult felonies, when he’d met Claudia Vega—“Cloud,” as he called her, since she was always correcting gringos on the Hispanic pronunciation of her name: “Clow-dia,” not “Claw-dia.” They’d worked at least a dozen homicide cases together. Abe still considered her a friend, though much had changed since the days of double dates to the movies or the Miami City Ballet, the cop, the prosecutor, and their spouses. Samantha loved the ballet almost as much as Claudia’s husband did. Abe could take it or leave it. But he would have feather-stepped across hot coals for the chance to sit through another one, holding hands with the love of his life. Abe had always worked long hours, but only after Samantha’s death did he come up with the name Boomerang for the building he never left, except to go home and sleep. Alone.

  The phone beeped to announce the transferred call. Abe hit the speaker button. “What you got, Cloud?”

  The detective’s voice filled the room. “The lab finally lifted a print from the murder weapon that doesn’t belong to Xavier’s father. It wasn’t easy. That gun is more than twenty years old, and I don’t think Amir ever wiped it clean. Forensics had to deal with fingerprints on top of smeared fingerprints. But finally we got a clean one.”

  “And?”

  “A match,” she said. “Right index. One hundred percent certain it belongs to Xavier Khoury.”

  “Good work,” he said with a little smile. “I can’t wait to tell Swyteck.”

  “Wish I could be there,” said Claudia.

  “Here’s what I wish,” said Abe. “I wish someone would find the clothes Xavier was wearing when he shot up his school.”

  “It’s not for lack of trying.”

  “We know exactly what he had on. It’s right there on the school security video. Somehow he got rid of everything between the time he left the school grounds and the time he showed up at his house in his mother’s Mercedes.”

  “I printed hundreds of pictures from that video. Teams of officers have checked every culvert, every Dumpster, every alley, every place you could imagine within a mile of the school. Nothing turned up.”

  “Listen to me more carefully, Cloud. I said somehow all of it disappeared by the time he pulled up at his house in his mother’s Mercedes.”

  There was a pause on the line, and Abe could almost hear the wheels turning in the detective’s head.

  “You think the mother dumped all the gear?” she asked.

  “I don’t think a Kevlar vest, camouflage, and all that other shit that makes a punk feel powerful vanished into thin air. But I need evidence.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “I’m waiting,” said Abe, and with the push of the orange button he ended the call.

  Chapter 13

  Icy glares followed Jack down the granite steps as he left the justice center. The pursuit of justice, whatever that meant, sometimes required a quick exit from the courthouse. Jack needed to clear his head. And fill his stomach. He drove to Coconut Grove for lunch at Cy’s Place, pulled up a barstool, and glanced over the menu.

  “Try the conch chowder,” said Theo. “It’s Uncle Cy’s recipe. Extra sherry.”

  “Sounds good,” said Jack, laying the menu aside.

  Theo put the order in to the kitchen and set up Jack with a cold draft.

  “I didn’t order a beer,” said Jack.

  “You look like you could use one,” Theo said, in the knowing voice of a bartender. “How did your hearing go this morning?”

  “Better than expected,” he said without heart. “And worse than expected.”

  Jack’s gaze drifted toward the café tables that fronted the stage, where musicians played till two a.m. on weekends. It was at one of those tiny tables, barely room enough for two pairs of elbows, that Jack had put a ring on Andie’s finger, surprising her on what she’d dubbed “the second anniversary of Jack’s thirty-ninth birthday.” Seemed so long ago. It was sometimes hard to remember life bc, before child. Harder still to imagine life after losing a child, the way thirteen families from Righley’s school would live the rest of their lives.

  “It’s so crazy,” said Jack.

  “What?”

  “If Xavier Khoury had done this one day earlier, I wouldn’t be his lawyer. On Tuesday, death by lethal injection was cruel and unusual punishment. On Wednesday, no punishment but death fit the crime. Thirteen life sentences with no chance of parole isn’t enough.”

  “I was sixteen when I was on death row. What do you think the Department of Corrections would have said after I was dead and gone, and the Supreme Court said no executing kids convicted of murder.”

  “Probably the same thing they said in their press release after trying to execute you three times before DNA proved you innocent.”

  “Yeah,” said Theo, summarizing: “‘Oops.’”

  Jack turned serious. “To be honest, I do see why a parent would want the shooter dead. My wife and daughter were at the school. How would I feel if Andie and Righley were on the list of victims?”

  “You’d want the death penalty?”

  “I’m saying that I can understand why someone would.”

  “Well, excuse me for having strong views on the subject, but I got a problem with it.”

  “Everybody has a problem with executing innocent people. I’m not telling you my client is guilty, but—well, you get my point.” The server brought Jack’s chowder. Jack tasted it. “Wow, that is good.”

  Theo didn’t want to talk food. “Are you getting out of the case?”

  “It’s almost impossible to withdraw in a death case. Once you’r
e in, you’re in. Unless the client fires you.”

  “Would you get out? If you could?”

  Jack put down his spoon. “I’ll say this much. Right out of law school, when I went to work at the Freedom Institute, all fired up to seek truth and justice in the world, there was no doubt in my mind that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment. I don’t know if I’m getting old, or if the world is just becoming a darker place. Maybe the way Andie thinks is rubbing off on me. Part of me almost wants to say that, for certain crimes and certain people, maybe there’s room for capital punishment.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” said Jack. “Seriously.”

  “To me, it’s a simple equation. We’re human. Anytime you put humans in charge, there will be mistakes.”

  “I get that argument.”

  “Maybe you need a little refresher. How many innocent people are on death row?”

  “Depends on whom you ask. According to the inmates, probably in the neighborhood of ninety-nine-point-nine percent.”

  “Let’s stick to reliable sources.”

  “National Academy of Science says four percent.”

  “There you go,” said Theo, doing the math in his head. “Are you okay strapping one innocent man onto the gurney so that you can execute twenty-five guilty ones? Or, to put a more personal spin on it: Is it okay to execute one Theo Knight so you can execute twenty-five Xavier Khourys? If your answer is yes, then get the hell out of the case, Jack. If the answer is no . . . then you’re doing the right thing.”

  Jack actually felt a little better. A little. “You’re a pretty smart guy, Theo Knight.”

  “Hanging around dumb fucks makes anyone look smart.”

  “Thanks, man. Really appreciate it.”

  Abe ate lunch in his office. Detective Vega joined him.

  “Really, Abe?” she said, watching him unload his paper sack. “Cheesesteak sub, barbecue potato chips, two chocolate chip cookies, and a can of diet soda?”

  “Gotta cut back somewhere.”

  It was a working lunch. Abe had watched the video from the security cameras at Riverside at least a dozen times, but he needed to sit down and go through it with someone who could tell him what he was missing. That was Detective Vega.