In the dark, she went back over everything he had said and done. Part of being a good attorney was the ability to evaluate people and situations quickly and accurately. His recitation had been simple and straightforward, without the slightest hint of fanaticism, and without any indication that it was rehearsed. She had listened carefully for that. His gestures and expressions had been totally consistent with someone who was confused about the circumstances in which he found himself. She could find no misstep.
Dana sighed. If Corey Latham were in fact the cold-blooded terrorist who had committed this crime, he was certainly hiding it well. She recalled the panic in his eyes and voice, on the way down for the arraignment, when she told him that he would enter his plea, but there would be no bail.
“You mean I have to stay in this place?” he cried. “I can’t go home until the trial? I can’t go back to my boat?”
“This is a capital case,” she explained, experiencing a sudden rush of sympathy for him that made her actually regret having to say the words. “There is no bail.’
At that, his knees seemed to buckle, and one of the escorts had to prop him up to keep him from falling. When the elevator doors opened, both guards bolstered him between them and, as though heading for the gallows, marched him toward the courtroom. Only when they were about to enter did he regain his composure, and she heard him mutter under his breath, “Suck it up, sailor.”
Like a turtle exposed to danger, Corey seemed to retreat into himself, withdrawing his emotions, protecting himself from the judge and the proceedings going on around him, doing and saying only what he was told to do and say, nothing more. Dana watched the shutdown with a mixture of fascination and compassion. When she left him to go back to his cell, he barely acknowledged her.
That image of him bothered her for hours afterward, and still tugged at her. But it was her own feelings that bothered her even more. It was almost as though she had in some way followed him into his shell, and taken on his pain. She had never before connected with a client on anything other than a professional level, and she did not want to do so with Corey Latham. Certainly not about this, anyway. Because, whichever way it played out, it was clearly going to be a no-win situation.
Dana disagreed wholeheartedly with Paul Cotter. It was unfair, if not inappropriate, for him to ask her to take this case simply because he wanted a woman up front. And despite his attempt to gloss over it with platitudes about her legal prowess, there was no mistaking his message—abortion was a woman’s issue, and he intended to dismiss it as such.
She smiled to herself. On that basis alone, she would have no problem dropping this case right back in his lap.
TEN
Corey Dean Latham was born on the tenth of September in Cedar Falls, Iowa, a picturesque little city in the middle of a state that was, give or take a bit, right in the middle of the country.
He was the only son born to Dean and Barbara Latham, and the youngest of three children by eleven years, his birth having been unplanned, but certainly not unwelcome. His father was a mathematics professor at the nearby University of Northern Iowa. His mother worked at a local Christian preschool.
A self-sufficient child, with brown curls, bright blue eyes, and endless curiosity, Corey loved his family, his golden retriever, and his Red Flyer best in all the world, if not always in that order. He had a gentle disposition, a ready smile, and a disarming charm.
By the time he reached his teens, he had developed a keen sense of right and wrong which, combined with a personal code of honor to do no harm, earned him the respect and admiration of both his peers and his elders. As he moved into adulthood, he was looked upon as one of the brightest lights the community had ever produced.
Growing up, he excelled at sprinting and acting, splitting his time between the track and the theater. His father often joked that he didn’t know which Corey was better at, running lines or running between the lines. In his junior year, he won the state championship in the hundred-meter sprint, and also won the lead role in his high school’s production of Hamlet.
Whether they were aware of it or not, Dean and Barbara Latham raised their two daughters to marry young, have large families, and stay in Iowa. They raised their son to leave.
“There’s a great big world out there,” Dean suggested when the boy was about to enter his senior year in high school. “Go take yourself a good hard look at it before you decide what to do with your life.” What he didn’t say aloud, but fervently hoped, was that his son’s choice would not be the theater.
Perhaps because Iowa was a landlocked state, Corey had always had a deep and abiding fascination for the sea. He took that fascination, along with a strong middle-American sense of duty and patriotism, excellent grades, and the blessing of a career congressman, to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.
“This is the finest young man I have come across in many a year,” the congressman wrote in his letter of endorsement. “It is my privilege to sponsor him, and I have every belief that given the opportunity, he will do his family, himself, and his country proud.”
Corey had barely turned eighteen. It was the first time in his life that he had been outside his home state, and he was totally unprepared for what greeted him. The sudden, unfamiliar freedom, the constant carousing, and the easy access to drugs, alcohol, and women, combined with the rigorous training, rigid class system, and unabated, academy-endorsed hazing, tested his morals, threatened his determination, and wreaked havoc with his studies. For the gentle, sheltered Iowan, the mental and physical brutality was shocking. He finished the first quarter in the bottom ten percent of his class, and would likely have quit a dozen times over had it not been for a very experienced and understanding academy chaplain.
The Lathams were good people who believed in traditional family values. They had raised Corey on an abundance of affection, tempered with occasional discipline, and the constancy of the Methodist version of Jesus Christ, the Bible, and the Golden Rule. His religion was as much a part of who he was as were his good looks or his lean body or his quiet sense of humor.
For months, the chaplain met with the plebe on an almost daily basis, helping him to find his footing, and encouraging him not to give up, but to stick it out. He shared anecdotes about previous plebes, and the ways they had found of coping. Corey listened and absorbed. By the end of the year, he had regained his balance and added a thick layer of toughness to his Midwest hide. When he graduated from the academy, he was in the top ten percent of his class.
In return for his education, Ensign Latham owed the Navy the next five years of his life. He spent the first twenty-four weeks of it at the nuclear power school in Orlando, Florida, after which he was sent to Charleston, South Carolina, for twenty-six weeks of nuclear prototype training. Then it was thirteen weeks in Groton, Connecticut, for the submarine officer basic course. And everywhere he went, he worked hard and excelled. Finally, he was rewarded with the prestige assignment to the Bangor Naval Submarine Base, located near Bremerton, Washington, where he was assigned to the crew of a Trident class submarine, the USS Henry M. Jackson.
His first patrol, which began in the middle of August, was a disaster. Submerged for sixty-eight straight days, he was subjected to the endless criticism of a neurotic engineer, packed into a steel fortress without an inch of privacy or a ray of sunshine, forced to breathe fetid air, unable to sleep, worried every moment about fire or leakage or worse, and scared to the point of constant nausea about living cheek-to-jowl with a formidable nuclear arsenal. He returned to Bangor at the end of October with a gastric disorder and a sickly pallor, twelve pounds lighter and ten years older.
“I think I know what hell is,” he told his roommate, who already had two patrols under his belt.
The roommate laughed. “There’s only one cure,” he replied. “Go out and get laid.”
There were a few girls who had wandered through Corey’s life during the last several years; fine young women from good families with whom he spent pleasa
nt evenings that never progressed past the preliminary fondling stage. The church in which Corey had been raised considered intercourse inappropriate outside of marriage. His parents had both been virgins on their wedding night, at the age of twenty-two, as had their two daughters when they married, one at nineteen, the other at twenty. And their son was without experience at the age of twenty-four.
His roommate, Zach Miller, took him to Seattle, on a series of bar-hopping excursions through Belltown, a section of the city frequented by yuppie singles. He met three girls in rapid succession, each of them pretty, each of them available, each of whom invited him to come in when he escorted her home. In all three cases, he bought them dinner, took them to the movies or to a concert or to a sporting event, and said good night at the door. A girl who thought so little of herself that she was willing to go to bed with him on the first date was not what he was looking for.
“What’s the matter?” his roommate asked.
“Nothing, I hope,” he replied.
Zach was usually in bed with at least half a dozen different girls during the months between his patrols. But as far as Corey was concerned, what his roommate was doing was like drinking out of a paper cup that was discarded soon after it was used. There was no way he could explain that he was looking for just one cup—clean, reusable, and made of the finest porcelain.
“I intend to test the product before I buy,” Zach told him. “After all, a lifetime is an awfully long trip to take with someone incompatible in bed.”
But for Corey, sex without love was much like a church without God. He knew how long a lifetime was, and he was in no hurry.
Three weeks later, he met Elise Ethridge, and his world turned upside down.
“Hi,” she said, sliding up beside him at the bar of a fashionable Belltown watering hole, all tall, and slender, and golden. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a dump like this?”
“Gosh,” he said before he could stop himself, “I didn’t think anyone ever said that for real.”
She laughed a deep, husky laugh. “Well, I saw your uniform and I just couldn’t resist. My name’s Elise.”
“I’m Corey,” he replied a little breathlessly, because someone had squeezed in on the other side of her and pushed her against him, and he could feel her warmth down the length of his body.
Elise reached into her handbag for a cigarette and stood waiting for a light. But Corey didn’t smoke, and had no lighter. He glanced around in a near panic until he spied a pack of matches lying on the bar and grabbed at them. It then took him three tries to strike one up. She wrapped her hand around his to cup the flame, or perhaps to prevent his hand from shaking too much for the match and the Marlboro to meet. Green eyes looked at him through a lazy stream of smoke and he tried his best not to choke. Her perfume was intoxicating. He invited her back to his table.
Long before the end of the evening, Corey decided that Elise was the most mature and sophisticated woman he had ever encountered, which may have had something to do with the fact that she was two years his senior. Nevertheless, next to her, all the other girls he had known suddenly seemed silly and superficial, and he couldn’t believe his good fortune when she agreed to go out on a date with him.
Zach did not seem particularly impressed with her, but then he was a good deal more experienced than Corey, and had a whole stable of willing women at his beck and call.
“She’s a bit chilly,” he observed on the way home to Bremerton, as they stood on the top deck of the ferry, leaning over the rail, letting the wind blow in their faces.
“You mean, not the type to jump into bed with you on the first go-round?” Corey responded with a chuckle. “I think I like that about her.”
After a couple of double dates, Zach took him aside. “Take it easy,” he cautioned.
“Why?” Corey asked. He was now seeing Elise at every opportunity, sometimes just for a few minutes between round-trip ferry rides. They would step outside the terminal, weather permitting, and share a few lingering kisses in the dark. Or they would sit inside the lobby and hold hands, saying little, their eyes locked. When they couldn’t arrange to meet in person, he would spend hours on the telephone talking with her.
“Because there’s no need to get that serious this soon,” Zach told him. “You’re a country kid, still wet behind the ears. You’ve never even been in the sack with anyone. And she’s a city girl, with a definite level of expectation. It’s obvious she’s got all your hormones going crazy, which doesn’t exactly correspond to seeing straight, but you’re from two different sides of the aisle here.”
“So what?” Corey protested. “That doesn’t mean we can’t be in love with each other.”
Zach groaned. “You’re not in love, you’re just in lust. Love takes time. So, do yourself a favor, slow down. Get to know her.”
“I know her.”
“No, I mean, get to really know her, before you do something stupid.”
“You don’t like her very much, do you?” Corey observed.
“She’s all right, I guess,” Zach replied with a shrug. “Just a little too anxious, you know what I mean? Anyone that anxious always makes me nervous.”
But she didn’t make Corey nervous. And she wasn’t any more anxious than he was. His heart raced out of control at the mere thought of her. He proposed after six weeks, two days before he shipped out on his second patrol, and he and Elise were married a month after he returned, a week after he received his promotion to lieutenant, junior grade.
“Did you really think putting a ring on her finger was the only way to get in bed with her?” Zach asked after the ceremony.
“No,” Corey responded with a happy grin. “I thought it was the only way to spend the rest of my life with her.”
The newlyweds honeymooned in Hawaii, and Corey had ten days to discover that Elise was anything but chilly. When they returned, it was to a cute little house with a detached garage they had rented on West Dravus, on the north side of Queen Anne Hill. They spent the remaining days of Corey’s leave, in addition to several thousand dollars, furnishing their new home, and then began the process of settling into married life.
On most Mondays through Fridays, Corey would take the five-twenty car ferry to Bremerton in the morning, driving the short distance from there to Bangor, and the six-twenty ferry from Bremerton back to Seattle in the evening.
“Why do you have to work such ridiculously long hours?” Elise complained once she realized he would be abandoning their bed at four o’clock in the morning, when she didn’t need to rise until nearly eight, and returning home too late to participate in the preparation of dinner, a chore she quickly learned she loathed.
“Someone has to protect the country,” he told her with a gentle smile because he didn’t really want to be away from her so much. “And for the next two years anyway, that means me.”
Corey continued blissfully on, seeing Elise for a few precious hours at night, occasionally enjoying the luxury of an uninterrupted weekend, and even making time to participate in a number of activities involving his new church, until August when it was time for him to go back on patrol.
His only contact with his bride during the next two and a half months was a weekly “family-gram,” containing a maximum of fifty words—including salutation and signature—which was routinely read by his commanding officer, and to which he could not reply. It was a most unsatisfactory form of communication, but given the highly sensitive and secret nature of his work, it was all the Navy would allow.
He spent every wakeful minute of the tour dreaming of her, planning their future, reliving their nights and weekends together in such intimate detail that his reaction made him blush, and sent him searching for a square foot of privacy. He returned to shore at the end of October, eager to resume his storybook marriage with his very own princess.
On a Saturday afternoon in the middle of March, there was a knock on the front door of the house on West Dravus.
“Corey Dean Latham
?” inquired one of two civilian men in dark suits, thrusting a badge in his face that identified him as a police detective.
“Yes,” he replied, perplexed because he recognized both the badge and the man.
“You are under arrest for the bombing of Hill House,” the detective said, “and for the murder of one hundred and seventy-six people.”
“What are you talking about?” Corey asked, looking from one to the other.
The two men ignored the question. Instead, one of them moved in and began to run his hands up and down Corey’s body, until he had assured himself that his suspect carried no weapon. Then he pulled Corey’s arms behind his back and snapped handcuffs around his wrists. The other detective pulled out a card and began to read aloud the most chilling words the young naval lieutenant had ever heard.
“You have the right to remain silent…”
After a brief flurry over protecting one of its own, the United States Navy decided it wanted no part of the Hill House bombing. Once the King County Prosecutor’s Office claimed jurisdiction in the matter, Bangor relieved the lieutenant of his duties, put his career on hold, pending the outcome of the case, and retreated.
ELEVEN
Okay,” Paul Cotter said pleasantly. “You’ve met him, you’ve talked to him—what do you think?”
Always the consummate strategist and gentleman, he had not summoned Dana to his office first thing Tuesday morning, but had given her until well after lunch to make a decision.
“I think there’s a pretty good case here for rush to judgment,” she replied automatically, the effects of her sleepless night not evident. “When did the bombing happen, six, seven weeks ago? Hardly enough time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. As far as I can tell, Corey Latham is not a fanatic, and doesn’t appear to be emotionally unbalanced. In fact, he seemed perfectly normal to me. Of course, I’m hardly an expert,” she hastened to add. “You can certainly have him examined by a psychiatrist, if you like.”
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