The 3rd Victim

by Sydney Bauer

  ‘You asked to see me,’ he said.

  He was right of course, it was she who had set up this meeting – but not to share anything with him, simply to try and procure access to his DNA as quickly and as discreetly as possible.

  ‘I wanted to ask you –’

  ‘Wait,’ he interrupted her.

  She met his eye.

  ‘I think that before you go on, I should tell you that my friend Dick Davenport has been asked to appear as a witness for the prosecution. I've heard the trial starts tomorrow. Dick rang me late this afternoon and told me that while he was torn, his duty was to tell the truth and not lie to protect the instigator of the tragedy. I tell you this in case you think anything you say to me tonight will go back to Davenport – which I can assure you it will not.’

  Sara took a breath. He wasn't telling her anything she did not already know but his frankness teamed with his vow to remain loyal was disconcerting. ‘Is this your way of warning me Dr Davenport may go with your murder-suicide theory?’

  ‘I've tried to convince him otherwise.’

  ‘You're telling me you asked him to lie under oath? Or at least lie about your lie.’ She was not meant to antagonise him, but she could not help herself.

  Hunt considered her. ‘Yes,’ was all he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Sienna is my friend.’

  Another melting pot of emotions – anger, exasperation, frustration at herself for not being able to keep a clear head. Despite what she knew this man was capable of – or maybe even because of it – he had a way of unsettling her, of getting under her skin and leaving her feeling vulnerable, confused. She quickly reminded herself that she had a job to do. ‘Are you waiting for me to thank you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because you'll be waiting for some time, Mr Hunt.’

  ‘I understand that. I know that you think I am behind this thing somehow.’

  Another shot of guilelessness. Sara was unsure how to react.

  ‘The thing is …’ He stopped as the waiter delivered two drinks to their table. A scotch for him and a top-of-the-line nip of vodka with a glass of lime and soda on the side for Sara. He remembered. And that made her squirm also. But she poured the vodka into the fizzy glass and took a long slow sip, the strong taste of alcohol somehow fortifying her resolve while the cool bubbles sharpened her focus, as Hunt put his own lips to his tumbler.

  ‘I can understand why you would want to target me as your scapegoat,’ he continued. ‘I am the closest thing to a plausible villain in all of this.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’ she asked, genuinely wanting to see how he would manipulate this seemingly frank analysis of their predicament.

  ‘I am the common factor, the glue that holds this whole thing together,’ he said. ‘I knew Jim, and he was killed under somewhat unusual circumstances. I kept a close eye on Sienna before and after the birth of her daughter. I was there the night of Eliza's murder, I involved her physician, who for all intents and purposes appeared to have sedated Sienna after the fact. I tried to conscript your husband as Sienna's attorney …’

  ‘And you told him that Sienna was guilty, knowing there was no way he would even consider taking the case if she –’

  ‘You think that that first phone call was contrived?’

  ‘That, and everything else that followed it.’

  ‘Including David's presence at Sienna's arraignment, when he was unexpectedly assigned to her case?’

  She hesitated. This was not the way the conversation was meant to be going. She wasn't even supposed to be engaging him, simply talking in circles until she had the opportunity to take his glass. ‘I don't care how unlikely it appears. I know you had something to do with that,’ she answered, surprising herself by her candour but knowing there was no way she could stop herself now. The man in front of her represented everything she hated about the world – his malevolence, his arrogance, his conceit. ‘You forgot one other reason we know you did this, Mr Hunt – because you are the one with the most to lose.’

  And then she caught it, the slightest tic in his left eye. She had finally hit a nerve and the attorney, the human being, the mother, the woman in her, felt an all-encompassing need to drive it home until it hurt.

  ‘Do you think you impress me? Do you think your designer suits and your blue chip company and your cool facade actually turn me on? The truth is, Mr Hunt, you disgust me – you with your subtle comments and thinly veiled suggestions.’ She took a breath. ‘You want the truth, Mr Hunt? Then you can have it. Yes, we think you are responsible for that little girl's death and all the events that led up to and followed it. We've suspected it since the beginning and we are slowly compiling the evidence that will prove it. You think you are invincible – the perpetrator of the perfect crime, the master architect who slips under the radar not only unnoticed but painted as the friend who begrudgingly sells out his friend. But here's the thing, Mr Hunt, David and I – we won't rest until we expose the atrocities that you are capable of. I was right when I said that it is you who have the most to lose, but what I should have added is that you have already lost, Mr Hunt. You lost it all the night that that baby girl was murdered. Two lives were taken that night, Mr Hunt – it is just that you are taking a little longer to die.’

  Sara stopped, her aqua eyes never leaving those of the expressionless man before her. And then Hunt did something she did not expect. He leant forward in his seat until he was perched across the small table between them. And then he stretched his neck so that his lips were mere inches from her ear. She did not flinch, did not move, determined not to let the man intimidate her, as he opened his mouth to say, ‘That last bit … you're right,’ before shifting back, picking up his glass, downing his scotch and placing the tumbler back on the table in front of her.

  And as he stood up and walked away, she sat there, straight-backed, resisting the urge to turn and watch him go. That last bit … he had said. That last bit … She could barely remember how she had started or how she had finished. And it mattered little in any case, because she knew that everything she had said to him was true.

  PART SIX

  67

  Esther Wallace's BlackBerry rested heavily in the palm of her lightly wrinkled hand. It was no weightier than it had been moments ago, but the email she had just received seemed to add to its substance, given it was now calling upon her to make a decision on exactly how to respond.

  Her logical mind told her to err on the side of caution, but her gut – or perhaps it was her heart – told her to move. And she wanted to listen to her gut, she wanted to leave the parcel and do what she did best, but this was no time for self-indulgence and she knew better than most that decisions made in haste were the ones you lived to regret.

  The sun coming through the window was warm, making her soft pink skin tingle and kissing her cheeks with a reassurance that was strangely comforting despite the situation she found herself in. And for the first time in her life she found herself envious of those who had opted for an alternative existence, one of solitude, far from those evil enough to do what they were –

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, his skin already tan after only a few weeks of sunshine. It would stay that way until November, she knew, when it would turn that pale shade of russet – the residue of the past twenty years he had spent in the outdoors.

  ‘A message from America,’ she said.

  In the end she had told him, not just because she was a good judge of character and knew he could be trusted, but because, when it came down to it, he had a right to know.

  His jaw clenched. In recent weeks she had learnt that this was how he showed anger, frustration and perhaps in this case fear. ‘What does it say?’ he asked.

  ‘It asks for my help.’

  ‘Are you going to give it?’

  ‘I want to.’

  ‘Then give it.’

  ‘It's not that easy.’

  He shook
his head. ‘Nothing looks easy to you.’

  Perhaps he was right. ‘Even if you're correct,’ she said, turning in her seat to face him, ‘not all things are served by action. Some are served by patience.’

  ‘A coward's response,’ he said.

  She knew it was not her but the argument she had been conditioned to offer that he was labelling as cowardly. ‘I don't know what to do,’ she admitted to him then. Six words she had not uttered in … well, truth be told she could not remember ever having uttered them, at least not since she was a child.

  She met his eye. ‘What would you do, if you were me?’

  ‘You're asking my advice now?’ He shifted his weight. ‘I don't do what you do.’

  ‘Maybe that's why I need your opinion.’

  ‘I'm a hunter,’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘Then perhaps our job description is not all that different.’

  The room fell silent as the man took a step into the room. ‘Hunters understand when it's time to kill and when it's time to run. If you intend to kill and you hesitate in picking up your rifle, your prey has scampered and the opportunity is lost.’

  She smiled at him. ‘You're telling me it is time I aimed and fired,’ she said.

  But he just looked at her, his only response being the blink of his deep-set pale grey eyes.

  68

  In most TV shows and movies, courtrooms were presented as either old-fashioned bastions of understated grandeur or more clean-lined modern takes on the twenty-first century's answer to justice. But most of the rooms in Boston's Suffolk County Superior Court building were stuck somewhere in between – large, rectangular production houses that on the one hand lacked the painstakingly carved railings of the older versions, but were not ‘new’ enough to have benefited from the spoils of what the latest developments in modern architecture had achieved. But they did manage to make their inhabitants comfortable enough as offender after offender was led in and out, their fates decided by twelve complete strangers who were unsure about how to handle the power invested in them. And like any courtroom around the country, these spaces were simultaneously filled with feelings of hope and possibility, futility and despair.

  Courtroom 17, the one preferred by Judge Isaac Stein, was one of these production houses. It was smaller than some (which Stein preferred, given it limited the number of voyeurs in the gallery), larger than others (which the Judge was also grateful for given the smallest rooms lacked the air circulation necessary for surviving his eight-plus hours in the less than comfortable judge's chair) and situated on a corner which was even better given the Judge's bench ran parallel to a wall which housed three double-height windows – openings which let in the sun to warm his back in winter, and held air-conditioning vents in their middles to cool his neck and indeed his temper during the sometimes heated exchanges that occurred before him. And heated they would be.

  The Judge looked out over the crowded space before him. The gallery was packed as he knew it would be – men and women, old and young, black and white, short and tall, many of them having swapped their living room for the real thing, as they bunkered down in their front row seats to watch this highly anticipated drama.

  Stein glanced to his right. There sat the media, their pens poised, ties loosened in readiness for the marathon that would assure them a front page by-line, or a top-of-the-bulletin sound bite, or a broadcast headline that would play on their channel's promos all day.

  Next Stein took in the jury to his left, their faces a mixture of dread and excitement as their individual personalities prepared to establish their own take on the one to two weeks of testimony that lay ahead of them.

  And finally Judge Stein turned his attention back to the room before him – to the defence and the prosecution, and the small, pale woman whose fate they were here to decide.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, understanding it was time – deciding there was nothing to be gained by observing the defendant further as courts of law were the one place where first impressions could be tragically misleading.

  As usual the gallery had no idea whether it was appropriate to respond to this opening greeting, and so he turned his attention to the players. ‘Mr Katz, you represent the Commonwealth in this matter?’

  The DA took to his feet. ‘Good morning, Your Honor, yes I do.’

  ‘And Mr Cavanaugh?’

  ‘I represent the accused, Your Honor, Sienna Alison Walker.’

  Stein met the defendant's eyes then, before his glance, from force of habit, moved to the bench immediately behind the defence table. This was where the accused's family usually sat, but in this case he saw no one connected to the defendant and once again he cut the thought short so as not to allow himself to feel any sympathy.

  ‘I gather all witnesses are available to give their testimonies at the time allotted to them?’ said Stein.

  ‘Yes, Judge,’ the DA was quick to respond.

  Stein nodded before turning to the jury once again. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I want to thank you in advance for treating the duty assigned to you with the greatest respect and consideration. I shall not condescend to repeat the words I shared during your empanelment, except to reiterate that the defendant cannot be found guilty in this matter unless you reach such a conclusion without the slightest of reasonable doubt. And you all understand the definition of “reasonable” as explained to you by myself and the court administrator assigned to these proceedings?’

  The jury nodded.

  ‘All right then, we shall begin with opening statements, but please be aware that these statements are mere summaries of the arguments both the prosecution and defence propose to present to you in the days ahead. There will be none of the usual “objections” and “overruleds” and “sustaineds” you see on TV, because these statements are not pieces of evidence nor arguments of proof, merely parameter setters which give you an idea of where each team's argument is headed. Do you see?’

  The jury nodded once again.

  ‘Mr Katz, are you ready to proceed?’ asked the Judge, addressing the DA once again.

  ‘Yes I am, Your Honor. Thank you, Your Honor.’

  And so … it began.

  *

  David held Sienna's arm under the table, the vanity curtain draping it hiding both his gesture of support and the handcuffs she was wearing. He had filed a motion of request to have the cuffs removed during the course of the proceedings, knowing that they gave the immediate impression of guilt, but a countermotion by Katz had seen his attempts end in failure, with the only compromise he had managed being the addition of the curtain which kept his client's tiny wrists from view.

  Katz was already making his way toward the jury, his manner relaxed but contemplative, his designer suit cutting shadows behind him as he walked below the four pendulum lights hanging from the ceiling.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have to be honest with you,’ he began, ‘us attorneys at law,’ he had the hide to gesture toward David, ‘we spend a lot of time working on our opening statements – the summaries, as Judge Stein so astutely explained to you, that set the tone of the all-important events to follow.

  ‘These statements – once again as the Judge so wisely pointed out – while not testimonials of evidence, are vital to your getting a handle on how we plan to play things. They are descriptions of our intentions, if you like, and as such we have an obligation to present them to you with as much honesty and straightforwardness as possible.’

  David wanted to puke.

  ‘So here's the thing,’ he said, now lifting a pointed finger in the air as if about to proclaim something of great significance. ‘I could stand here and list the facts that make up the story that begins some time before Eliza Walker's death and concludes at the heinous disposal of her body, I could go on to outline the extraordinarily comprehensive accompanying evidence that proves the defendant is responsible for her daughter's murder, I could brief you on my witnesses and explain how they will annihilate any skerrick o
f reasonable doubt you may currently hold as to the defendant's culpability, but in all honesty, ladies and gentleman, to do so would be patronising and a blatant waste of your time.’

  What the hell is he up to? It was written on a Post-it note, passed across Sienna to David. David met Sara's eye and shook his head ever so slightly. He had no idea where this was going – and this alone was enough to scare the hell out of him.

  ‘You see,’ the DA went on now, taking in the fourteen jurors who sat elevated a good six inches above the rest of the courtroom, ‘all of these things will come quickly and efficiently as I present my case over the next few days. They will be clear and absolute and, given I know you are an intelligent and interested group, I am sure you will absorb these facts without my preceding them with a self-serving speech of introduction.’

  Jesus, thought David, now the Kat was bullshitting about his obsession with bullshitting.

  ‘Perhaps sadly,’ the DA went on, ‘given the relationship between the defendant and the victim, I will meet the prosecution's burden of proof so easily that at least in this respect your job will be relatively straightforward. But that being the case, I think I would be remiss if I did not use this opening statement not to pontificate about all the evidence I will provide you but to offer you two things, both of which I feel it my duty to come clean about before this trial begins.’

  Sara shot another look at David, who felt his breathing starting to quicken. The Kat had not taken the road they'd expected and, worse still, he had cleverly swept the jury off their feet and carried them with him on this clever, unanticipated route.

  ‘Number one comes in the form of a warning,’ said Katz, taking another step forward as he met each juror eye to eye. ‘I know – this sounds ominous. But once again I feel I would be shirking my responsibility as a presenter of the cold, hard truth if I did not alert you to the fact that you are about to hear and see things that will shock, repulse, and at times make you sick to your stomach. We are talking about the murder of a nine-week-old baby girl here, and as much as I would like to protect you from that, I am afraid I cannot do so, because when it comes to my responsibility as a representative of the people, that would be tantamount to negligence.