“How are you doing?” she asked instead.
“Just fine,” Judith replied with a toss of her dark hair. “I’ve gotten a couple of small commissions that I’m working on, and I’ve been talking to a gallery in Bellevue about a show.”
“That’s terrific,” Dana said.
“Well, I don’t know about terrific,” Judith responded. “It’s very iffy at the moment, but it might pay the bills for a couple of months, anyway.” Not for the world would she tell her friend that her mother was no longer able to help her out financially, or that she was juggling credit cards, or that she and her son, Alex, were living on macaroni and cheese.
“I know this hand-to-mouth business isn’t exactly what you’d hoped for,” Dana said. “But I really do have the feeling that things are going to change for the better for you, and soon, too.”
“Well, soon would be good,” the artist allowed. “In the meantime, don’t worry about me, I’m getting by. So, how’s the big case going?”
The attorney shrugged. “Let’s just say,” she said, without going into details, “that I haven’t been getting a whole lot of sleep lately.”
“Are you going to get him off?”
“There’s always a chance.”
“Do you want to get him off?”
“If he didn’t do it, sure.”
“Didn’t he do it?” Judith asked in surprise.
Dana frowned, clearly uncomfortable about discussing an ongoing case. “If the state can’t prove he did it,” she said, “then he deserves to be acquitted.”
Judith contemplated her friend of thirty years. “Then no wonder you’re not sleeping,” she suggested softly.
Across the restaurant, out of earshot and unnoticed by the two women, a man with a thickening middle, sandy hair, and a five o’clock shadow, wearing khakis and a Seattle Mariners T-shirt, sat eating a bowl of pasta. Tom Kirby had been in Seattle for almost a month, and he had just figured out why he had come.
On arriving, the first thing he did was rent a small apartment in a residence hotel at the foot of Queen Anne, and stock the kitchenette with orange juice and frozen dinners. Probe was paying him a healthy per diem that would more than cover a room and three meals a day in a good hotel, but he did not intend to spend any more of it than he absolutely had to. Let his counterparts live high off the hog, if they wished. Lengthy unemployment had taught him to economize.
After settling in, he did some shopping, picking up the T-shirt and a few other items of clothing that would help him blend into the fabric of the city. The last thing he wanted was to be identified as an outsider—a tourist, or even worse, a member of the media.
Then he rented a pickup truck and went exploring, familiarizing himself with the neighborhood surrounding his residence, wandering through the financial, shopping, and international districts, and then poking around the university. He went to a baseball game and cheered for the home team, he learned the bus routes, and he took a ferry back and forth across Puget Sound. Only when he felt reasonably comfortable in his new environment did he turn his attention to the matter that had brought him here.
The Hill House bombing trial was still more than two months off, which gave him plenty of time to look for his angle.
“How will you know where to look?” his publisher asked, a little vague about his reporter’s quest.
“Instinct, I guess,” Kirby replied.
He went to the offices of the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer, and spent days poring over the issues that covered the bombing, requesting more and more until there was a mountain of newsprint on the table in front of him.
In truth, there were dozens of stories in those issues, just waiting to be told, about survivors, about victims, about the families of the victims, about the impact that the loss of the clinic had on the community, but he passed them all over.
“If you could tell me what you’re looking for,” a patient clerk suggested after a week, “maybe I could be of more help.”
“The problem is, I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he confessed. “But I will when I find it.”
He kept looking. He talked to the people he encountered on the streets, the homeless who had depended on Hill House for so much.
“They were good folks up there,” one man told him. “They understood us, and they cared about us, when no one else in the city did. Now that they’re gone, the churches have stepped in. They don’t really understand, and they don’t really care, but they bring food. The difference is, Hill House did it without making a big fuss. The churches make sure everyone knows.”
There was a good story there, he thought, and not one that the media hotshots who were beginning to fill the city would be likely to go after. But it wasn’t the right one.
He turned to the alleged perpetrator. He wondered why such an apparently upstanding young man would go off the deep end like that. It fit his criterion for a Pulitzer. Kirby wanted an interview, but he was told the kid’s attorney wasn’t letting anyone near him. So instead, the reporter spent a couple of days at Annapolis, and a few more days in Cedar Falls, but didn’t come up with very much.
He spoke to people on the fringes of the case, to neighbors, to friends and acquaintances, to potential witnesses. He nosed around the police department and the courthouse, befriending a clerk here, an assistant there, but he knew that Corey Latham’s story wasn’t the one he was looking for. Nor did it turn out to be the prosecutor or anyone from the investigation team. Finally, on a sunny afternoon in early July, Kirby called his office.
“I don’t know about the Pulitzer,” he said, “but I’ve got the subject for my story.”
“Who is it?” the publisher of Probe asked.
“It’s the kid’s attorney,” Kirby replied.
“But she won’t talk to you,” his boss asserted. “She isn’t talking to anybody.”
“Well, that’s the whole point now, isn’t it?” the reporter said. “Why isn’t she?”
TWENTY-ONE
Judith Purcell skidded into the driveway of her Beacon Hill home, relieved that she had managed to make it all the way there, and jumped out, fearing an imminent disaster of some kind. The smoke coming from under the hood of her car was so thick it had almost blinded her the last several blocks.
She couldn’t believe it. When the last thing she needed was trouble with the car, this definitely looked like trouble, and she didn’t know the first thing about cars. She stood there, frightened and frustrated, and started to cry.
“It would be better if you turned off the engine,” a voice behind her said.
Judith gasped. “Of course,” she responded. “I should have thought of that.”
“Let me,” the voice said.
She watched as a man came around the side of the car and proceeded to climb inside, turn off the engine, extract the keys, and pop the hood with calm efficiency. He was not particularly tall, and not particularly trim. His sandy hair was badly in need of cutting, and it looked as though he hadn’t shaved for days. He was wearing khakis and a T-shirt, and didn’t look familiar.
“If you’ve got a garden hose handy,” he told her, I’ll cool this down and take a look for you.”
Judith produced the hose, turned it on at the man’s instruction, and watched as he first doused the smoke and then disappeared under the hood.
“Just let me get a screwdriver,” he said a few moments later, trotting over to a pickup parked in the street, and rummaging around in the bed. Returning with a small toolbox, he disappeared under the hood again.
“It’s nothing serious,” he declared, perhaps fifteen minutes later. “A loose radiator hose, that’s all. I’ve tightened it back up, and it should be okay for now. But if it blows again, you might want to take it in to your mechanic and let him check it out.”
“Oh thank you,” she breathed. “I don’t think I could have handled something serious.”
“Modern conveniences,” he said with a grin. “We can’t live with �
�em, and we can’t live without ’em.”
“Are you from around here?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “I’ve just been doing some work for the people across the street.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“A little bit of everything, I guess,” he told her. “I’m your basic handyman.”
“Oh, in that case, please, let me pay you for your time and trouble,” Judith said immediately.
“Not necessary,” he assured her with a broad grin. “It’s always my pleasure to come to the rescue of a damsel in distress.”
The damsel smiled back. “Do you also tilt at windmills?” she asked.
The man chuckled. “Whenever possible,” he replied.
He looked to be somewhere in his forties, and while he wasn’t especially good-looking, he had a nice face, and he spoke as if he were educated. His eyes were what most drew her attention. It seemed as though they had been looking at the world for at least a hundred years. “Well then, sir,” she declared, “you have my undying gratitude.”
“I’ll be back over here tomorrow,” he said with a little wave. “In case the car acts up again.”
She thought about her dripping faucet, her running toilet, her leaking windows, her erratic oven, and her clogged gutters, but not about the fact that she had no money to hire someone to fix them.
“What’s your name?” she asked anyway. “If you’re not too busy, I might have some work for you.”
He smiled. “I’m not too busy,” he said. “And my name is Tom. Tom Kirby.”
TWENTY-TWO
With very little fanfare, spring became summer. The days were drier than normal and cooler than expected, but otherwise unremarkable. For Dana, the best part of the season was that daylight lasted until almost ten o’clock.
It had become her habit to take advantage of that, and work late into the evening. She found it easier to do what she referred to as her courtroom planning once the phones had been switched over to the message service, the bustle and chatter of the busy office had subsided, and there were few, if any, interruptions. Corey Latham’s trial was scheduled to begin in a matter of weeks, and she had been working sixteen-hour days since the middle of June.
During that time, she had rarely made it home before dark, and only barely made it to Molly’s tenth birthday party. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cooked a meal for her family, or the last time she and Sam had made love.
Thankfully, he understood. Or if not, at least he accepted it. Perhaps more than she, he had recognized from the start the demands that the Latham case was going to make on her, and on the family. As much as he could, he had filled their scant time together with pleasant evening jaunts around town and happy picnics in the park. Despite his best-laid plans, however, someone from the media usually managed to spot them.
“Tell us your strategy,” they begged from the other side of a street, the next table at a restaurant, a neighboring blanket at Green Lake.
“I’m saving it for the jury,” Dana always replied with a tight little smile that made it clear the inquisitor was to intrude no further. She resented their persistence, and the uncomfortable feeling they gave her of being cornered, like an animal.
The transition from prosecutor to defense attorney had not been an easy one for Dana. Despite her repartee with Brian Ayres over angels and devils, it had always been her intention, after a brief stint in the prosecutor’s office, to change sides. After all, she wasn’t her father’s daughter for nothing. But she had struggled with it for years, perhaps, subconsciously, right up to this very moment.
“How can you defend such scum?” she had asked, the summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Stanford, when her father was in the middle of a gruesome rape trial.
“This is an equal opportunity system,” Jefferson Reid told her. “Defending him guarantees you and me and everyone else in this country a process that protects all of us.”
“How would it protect the victim to have her rapist go free?” Dana countered.
“I’ll tell you how,” her father replied. “Remote as the possibility may seem to you, what if this ’scum,’ as you call him, didn’t do it? What if the evidence against him was flimsy at best, or manufactured at worst, only everyone wanted him to be guilty, so they didn’t much care? Now, let’s say you were his daughter, and he went to prison for fifteen years for a crime he didn’t commit. How would you feel?”
“Angry,” she admitted. “So, is he innocent?”
Reid shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to wait for the jury to tell us.”
After fourteen years in practice herself, Dana had come to believe wholeheartedly in the adversarial system as a fundamental part of the judicial process, and she fully understood and agreed with the need to challenge the state to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Still, there was something about the apparent ease with which some defense attorneys could circumvent the rules and manipulate the truth on behalf of a client that upset her sense of moral balance.
After a lifetime of watching her father represent his share of guilty defendants, and marveling at his skill, it always seemed to her that he had a line that he would not cross, which in her eyes, anyway, seemed to justify his actions. She had tried to find that line for herself, despite the pressure she sometimes felt to win at all costs, but she was never quite as comfortable with her position as she had been with her father’s. Until now.
Now there was Corey Latham. And she could see clearly all the reasons why it was so important to protect the rights of every defendant. Because unless there was vigorous defense of the guilty, she knew there could be no chance for the exoneration of the innocent.
The transition from defender to champion had taken place so gradually that she had not even been aware of it at first. It had begun with her accepting the case, and assigning the standard presumption of innocence that she applied like a blanket to all her clients, without thinking or judging, simply as a matter of law.
Then, ever so slowly, and without her actually realizing it was happening, that perfunctory presumption gave way to the possibility that Corey Latham really might not be the Hill House bomber after all. His confusion was just too real, his vulnerability too great, his sincerity too obvious, his story too credible, and the evidence far too vague.
“I think I’ve probably read more books in the past few months than I did in my whole life,” he said with a sheepish grin one day in July. “I just finished Les Misérables, and I have to tell you, I know exactly how Jean Valjean must have felt.”
“He spent almost his whole life as a victim,” Dana replied. “Hopefully, you won’t have to.”
“He made one little mistake, and that started everything. But he wasn’t a bad man. I believe he had principles. I believe he was a good man.”
“At one point or another in our lives, many of us become victims of circumstance.”
At that, Corey had sighed. “Sometimes, at night, you know, when I lie in bed, I listen to the sounds of this place,” he said. “Men banging around in their cells, whispering to one another in the dark, crying out in their sleep. And I think there’s this whole world I never knew anything about before, running parallel with the world I grew up in, and I wonder how we can be so ignorant of each other.”
“This world is not your world, and don’t you ever start thinking it is,” she declared, somewhat more vehemently than perhaps was warranted.
He smiled at her then, delight tinged with sadness. “You know what?” he said mischievously. “I think you like me.”
“Never mind that,” she said, a bit embarrassed by her outburst. “Tell me how you’re getting along with Dr. Stern.”
“He’s okay,” Corey said. “For a shrink.”
“Do you like him?”
“Yeah, I like him, I guess. He’s funny. He makes me laugh sometimes.”
“That’s okay,” Dana said. “I’d just appreciate it if you didn’t make him
cry.”
“Do you think he’ll find me insane?”
She looked at him quizzically. “Do you want him to?”
“Hell, no. I don’t think I’m crazy. But it’s like he’s got this invisible microscope peering into my brain, and even I don’t know everything that’s in there.”
She smiled. “As long as you tell him the truth,” she said, “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
Leaving the jail that day, Dana realized she no longer accepted just the possibility of Corey Latham’s innocence. In her mind, it was now a probability. And by the end of July, after four months of such conversations in the cramped interview room, after having taken the time, in spite of herself, to get to know the person behind the horrendous indictment, the probability became belief.
Shortly after that conversation, Brian Ayres had begun the process of disclosing the thrust of his case, turning over documentation, analyses, and witness lists to the defense. The material consisted of evidence found in Corey’s car and home, a witness who saw what could have been her client’s vehicle at Hill House the night before the bombing, and various other witnesses who would testify to Corey’s state of mind and actions after he found out about the abortion. Dana spent hours sifting through it all, bouncing ideas off Joan Wills and Craig Jessup, until gradually the shape of a strategy came into focus.
Now she glanced at the chalkboard on the wall beside her desk. On one side, she had diagrammed what was clearly going to be the prosecution’s scenario. On the other side, she had drawn her preliminary rebuttal to that scenario. Visualizing an abstract by giving it actual form was a tool that had proven very useful to her over the years. Both she and Joan concluded that the prosecutor’s case was even weaker than they had initially thought, and each day Dana grew more convinced that reasonable doubt was going to be well within her reach.
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