“The police?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been trained to defend my country, sure, but that’s a lot different than being trained to kill. I’m not a violent man. I’m a man of peace. That’s why I’m in the Navy, to protect the peace. In any case, I know I’m a man of conscience. I could never go out and just kill a whole bunch of people like that. It goes against everything I believe in.”
“What do you believe in, Mr. Latham?” Dana inquired, taking advantage of the opening.
“Well, for one thing, I believe that life is sacred and precious,” he replied.
“All life?”
He looked at her as though perplexed by the question. “Yes, of course,” he said. “All life. How can you separate one kind from another?”
A small stab of appreciation darted down Dana’s back. Without any prompting, he had given exactly the kind of answer that would play well with a jury—simple and forthright, and reeking of honesty. She felt tempted to believe him herself, and abruptly straightened up in her chair.
“It seems to me the state is prepared to do just that, separate one kind from another,” she suggested. “As far as they’re concerned, abortion is legal—murder is not.”
“I didn’t kill those people,” he said softly.
“Whether you did or didn’t isn’t the issue right now,” she told him. “You’re being charged with the crime, and unless you enter a guilty plea and throw yourself on the mercy of the court, you’re going to stand trial. So, the question is, how do you want to proceed?”
His eyes widened. “Are you recommending I plead guilty to something I didn’t do?”
“No,” she said. “I’m obligated to present you with your options. If you lose at trial, you’ll almost certainly be facing the death penalty. If you plead now, I may be able to get the death penalty off the table.”
“I want to be completely exonerated.”
I’m not going to kid you, Mr. Latham,” Dana said. “This won’t be an easy case to win. At the very least, it’s got terrorist overtones written all over it. And we’ll have to deal with the high body count, including all those children. Emotions are running rampant. People want to taste blood.”
“My blood?” he asked.
Dana chose her words as carefully as she could. “This town, who knows, maybe even the whole country by now, is looking for a conviction here, needs a conviction here,” she told him. “The pressure that’s been mounting since this thing happened has been extraordinary. And in a situation like this, sometimes what the people need becomes far more important than a little matter of guilt or innocence. Given the tidal wave of media coverage that I guarantee you is building out there, we’ll be trying this case in—and out—of the courtroom, under bright lights and a microscope. No one will be able to escape it. Not the victims and their families, not the jury, not you.”
“Does that mean I’ll lose?”
Blue eyes met brown for a long moment, and the attorney was first to look away.
“Of course not,” Dana replied with more conviction than she actually felt. “It just means that the odds won’t exactly be running in your favor.”
“Do you think I did what they say I did, Ms. McAuliffe?” he asked suddenly.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” she replied.
“It does to me,” he countered.
Dana thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I don’t know enough about you to form an opinion.”
He seemed to sag in his seat. “Well, I guess you could say I had a pretty good motive,” he said, looking down at his manacled hands.
“And what was that?” she asked with a little sigh.
“My wife and I got engaged six weeks after we met, and we were married only three months when I went out on my last cruise,” he told her. “I guess maybe we rushed things a bit, didn’t know each other very well, didn’t take the time to cover all the bases, so to speak. But we sure were in love. Everyone told us we should wait a year or two before we tied the knot. But what we felt, we knew it was the real thing, and we didn’t want to wait.”
Dana didn’t want to hear this, certainly not now, when she was almost out the door and clear of it. “And?” she heard herself ask.
He looked up. “Oh, we’re still very much in love, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said. “But I guess you could say things got a little stressed.”
“Stressed?”
“Well, just before I left on the cruise, Elise—that’s my wife—she said she thought maybe she was pregnant,” he explained. “I mean, she just dropped it on me, real casual like, right in the middle of dinner. Well gosh, who cares about chili when you’re going to have a baby, right? I was totally blown away. And Elise was excited, too. I know she was. That is, until she realized that I still had to go away. I don’t know, I guess she figured the Navy would just let me stay home with her or something. But of course, that’s not the v/ay it works. Lots of Navy wives go through pregnancy while their husbands are at sea. Sometimes, guys don’t even get to be at the birth.”
“She was upset with you?”
“Well, I think maybe more with the Navy,” he replied. “But I was so juiced about being a father, I could hardly stand it. Sure, I’d rather have been home with her, only there I was, out in the boat for three straight months, without even knowing if she really was pregnant.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Navy doesn’t let you communicate about anything important when you’re on patrol. The submarine service being so hush-hush, you know, nobody’s even supposed to know where we are. It’s a tough life out there, and it’s all about maintaining morale, keeping up spirits. So they don’t allow any ’Dear John’ letters, or the dog died, or little Billy fell off his bike and broke his neck, or anything like that. No birth, no death, just ’Hello, everything’s fine, and I miss you’ kind of stuff. So just in case, I spent my time thinking up names, and doing the numbers every which way I could think of, to see whether we could afford to buy a little house somewhere, you know, where the schools are good.”
“And when you got back?”
His gaze wavered, and for an instant, Dana saw real pain in his eyes. “Elise told me she’d been right about being pregnant, but that she’d had a miscarriage.”
“A miscarriage?”
He nodded. “I felt awful,” he confided. “Awful for Elise that she had to go through that alone, and awful for us that we weren’t going to have a baby, after all.”
She looked at him a bit skeptically. “How awful is awful?” she asked.
“I love kids,” he told her. “I have two sisters back home in Iowa. Between them, they have four boys and three girls, all of them terrific. I can’t wait to be a daddy.” Suddenly, the light went out of his eyes, and his face darkened.
In spite of herself, Dana took the bait. “What?” she prompted.
“A week later, I found out that Elise hadn’t really had a miscarriage, after all. She’d had an abortion.”
“Your wife lied to you?”
Corey nodded. “She said she was afraid to tell me the truth because she knew how I felt about kids, and she didn’t know how to tell me she didn’t feel the same way. But I don’t think that was it. I think, you know, she was just plain scared about having a baby so soon into the marriage, especially with me being away so much of the time.”
“You mean, she wasn’t thrilled about being a single parent half the year?”
“I guess not,” Corey replied. “You see, Elise may be a couple of years older than I am, but she’s pretty immature in a lot of ways. And I wasn’t there, and she had no way of contacting me, and she had to make the decision by herself. So the decision she made was that she wasn’t ready to start a family.”
“Were you okay with the abortion?”
Unexpectedly, tears filled his eyes, and without thinking, Dana reached out and put her hands over his, perhaps to comfort him, perhaps to give him strength, she wasn�
��t sure. All she knew was that she had never done that with a client before.
“No, I wasn’t,” he admitted. “First I was hurt when I found out about it, and then I was furious. Didn’t I have a right to be? That was my baby she got rid of, a piece of me, a piece of both of us, a wonderful expression of what our love for each other was supposed to be all about.”
A sudden twinge of nausea rumbled through Dana’s stomach and threatened to rise. She hastily withdrew her hands. “Okay, you had a right to be angry at your wife,” she conceded.
“I couldn’t understand how she could do such a thing. It goes against who I am, against everything I believe in.”
“Did she know how you felt about abortion?”
“I thought she did,” he replied.
“What happened then?”
“Well, finally, I guess I calmed down, and we went and got some counseling, and we talked and talked about it, and I tried to see things from her perspective. I joined a group through my church that helped, too. After a while, I sort of started to understand where she was coming from.”
“And you forgave her?”
Corey looked at Dana with an expression that was so raw and exposed that she could actually feel his anguish. “I love my wife,” he said.
The attorney nodded. “I understand.”
“Do you?” he asked, and she wasn’t sure whether he was questioning her reply or simply seeking affirmation. “There’s so much peer pressure put on women, you know. Do this. Do that. You have to have this baby. You don’t have to have this baby. Stand up for this right. Stand up for that. People pulling you in half who don’t even know you, and who don’t really give a damn about you. People who all they care about is their own agenda.”
“And when she decided to have the abortion,” Dana asked, as gently as she could, because of course she already knew the answer, “Elise went to Hill House, didn’t she?”
He nodded.
“And the police knew that?”
“I don’t know, I guess they must have,” he said. “They were at me for hours, wanting to know just how angry I was, and how far I would go to vent that anger. I tried to tell them, no matter how I might have felt, I don’t believe that two wrongs make a right. My baby was already dead. How would killing all those innocent people change that?”
“But they weren’t buying it.”
Corey shrugged. “Like I said, I’m not saying I didn’t have a good reason to do it. I’m just saying I didn’t do it.”
Dana nodded slowly. “Well, that’s all we need to get into for the moment,” she said as she stuffed her pad and pen back into her briefcase. “Look, I have to leave for a little while now. But try not to worry. I’ll be back at two o’clock, and we’ll go downstairs for the arraignment. That’s when you’ll be formally charged, and you’ll enter your plea. I’ll tell you exactly what to say, and when to say it. Other than that, I don’t want you to talk about the case. No police, no reporters, no one here at the jail. Not even your friends and your family. Not a word to anyone. It’s very important for you to remember that.”
With that, she snapped her briefcase shut and stood up, giving him what she hoped was an encouraging smile.
“Please,” he said, as she stepped past him on her way to the door, “if you’re going to be my lawyer, you’re got to believe me… I didn’t kill those people. Oh God, somebody’s got to believe me.”
“Is that the delivery man you told me about?” Big Dug asked, thrusting a newspaper he had found at the ferry terminal under Joshua’s nose. Taking up almost half the front page, a picture of Corey Latham stared back at the retarded man.
“I don’t know,” Joshua said. “It was pretty dark, and I didn’t get to see him very good.”
“But does it look like him?”
Joshua shrugged. “Naw, the guy I saw had a cap on his head.”
“What kind of cap?”
“The soft kind, that comes down around the ears.”
Big Dug fished a stub of pencil out of his pocket and proceeded to draw a knit cap over the man’s hair in the photograph. “Now what do you think?”
“Yeah, it could be,” Joshua said. “That looks lots more like him. Why?”
“’Cause that’s the guy they say set the bomb at Hill House.”
“Really?” Joshua peered at the photograph with more interest, then shook his head. “I couldn’t say for sure,” he said.
Big Dug tossed the paper aside. “Come on,” he said.
“Where?” Joshua asked.
“We’re going to go find us a television set.”
They found one in their favorite bar on First Avenue. Between them, they scraped together enough money to buy a glass of beer, and the bartender let them sit at the end of the counter while they shared it. The television was tuned in to the fourth quarter of a Sonics basketball game, and the two men sipped the beer as slowly as they could, and waited for the game to be over and the news to come on. Sure enough, the top story was about the young naval lieutenant who had been arrested for the bombing of Hill House.
“Well?” Big Dug asked, as they showed a tape of the suspect being escorted into the King County Jail. “Now what d’you think?”
“Don’t say it so loud,” Joshua hissed, darting a look at the other patrons. “No one else’s supposed to know, remember?”
“What do you think?” Big Dug persisted, in a somewhat lower voice.
Joshua stared at the television screen, squinting up his eyes to get a better look. “I don’t know,” he replied. “It looked more like him in the newspaper with the cap on. And he was wearing a dark jacket, too.”
“Then try to see him dressed that way.”
Joshua sighed. “Maybe it was him,” he said. “If the police say it was him, I guess it was him. It coulda been him. It kinda looks like him. But like I said, I couldn’t say for sure. It was too dark. It coulda been anybody.”
Priscilla Wales sat in her San Francisco office, decorated over the years in what she only half jokingly referred to as Salvation Army eclectic, and contemplated her options. It didn’t matter that it was after midnight. One time of day was just like any other time of day as far as she was concerned.
It hadn’t always been that way. There was a time when she had rushed home to her son every evening to fix his dinner or to help him with his schoolwork or simply to be near him and watch as he grew into an excellent young man. And after he was grown, when he was away in college and then at law school, there were the nightly telephone calls when they would talk for hours about anything and everything, like best friends.
But all that ended abruptly two months ago, when a drunken driver had taken her son’s life at the age of twenty-four.
What was left was her work. FOCUS—Freedom of Choice in the United States—kept her going now. And after more than two decades of dedicated effort, Priscilla believed the organization finally had the break it had been waiting for. A suspect in the Hill House bombing had been charged with the crime, and if indicted, faced a trial that was certain to provide the broadest possible media coverage.
It was becoming clear that this year’s presidential election would feature two candidates who could not have been further apart on the issue of abortion. Since one of them was running on the unwritten but nonetheless clear “let’s-get-women-backunder-our-control” platform, it was all-important that the other one win the White House.
What better kickoff could the campaign have, Priscilla reasoned, than a conviction in this case? It would be an unequivocal statement that dominance over women would no longer be tolerated in this country, and that violence toward them would be dealt with swiftly and severely.
The fifty-one-year-old civil rights attorney sat back in her chair, pondering exactly what she and her organization might do to further that effort.
Priscilla had just turned fourteen when a boy who lived down the street cornered her in his garage and raped her. Too ashamed to tell her parents she was pregnant, she got a nam
e from a friend of a friend and made her way to a dilapidated building in the seediest section of San Francisco. She barely survived the procedure.
Lying in the hospital, while doctors fought to stop the bleeding and control the infection, Priscilla made a pact with God. If He let her live, she would become a crusader for the rights of women in America. It was years before the Supreme Court would rule on Roe v. Wade.
God let her live, and she kept her promise. She graduated summa cum laude from law school and promptly hung out her shingle. By the time she got there, however, things had changed. Abortion had become the law of the land, but constant efforts to undermine it needed to be deflected. After twenty-five years, she was still waging the battle.
The tall, gaunt brunette knew this was the line in the sand. This was where the hard right had to be stopped, or women’s rights would be set back a hundred years. Her lip curled up at one corner. That was exactly where the ultrarightists of the nation, like Roger Roark of the Coalition for Conservative Causes, were heading, she thought. Repeal a woman’s right to choose, and could the vote be far behind? She made a note to schedule a meeting with her board of directors in the morning, to formulate a plan that would aid in the conviction of Corey Latham.
“Oh God, somebody’s got to believe me.’
Dana jerked awake at the sound of the voice in her head, and glanced at the clock on the nightstand. The green digital display read three-twenty-three, exactly nineteen minutes since she had last looked at it. Sam was snoring softly beside her in the big four-poster bed. His low rumble was usually a comforting sound to her but tonight she found it irritating.
“Somebody’s got to believe me.”
That’s what Latham had said, and she couldn’t seem to get the words out of her head. They had followed her out of the jail, back to Smith Tower, and throughout the rest of the day. Now they were replaying in perfect rhythm with Sam’s breathing.
Dana punched up her pillow and leaned against it. Who was Corey Latham? she wondered.
Act of God Page 7
