Act of God

by Susan R. Sloan

  Brian leaned back in his chair, his head almost touching the wall behind his desk. “Well, you wouldn’t have any way of knowing it,” he informed his young assistant. “And for that matter, the powers that be over at Cotter Boland may not know it, either—but they did put their big gun on this case.”

  As usual, Dana was at her desk late into the night. Phase one of the Latham trial, and some would say the most crucial, was about to begin. The evidence was in, the witnesses had been interviewed, the strategy was in place, and the only thing left for her to do was think. Think it all over, from beginning to end, one last time, making sure that she had everything covered, and that there were no loose ends. She had spent the last three hours doing just that. Now she was waiting for a telephone call.

  Three weeks ago, the list of prospective jurors had been turned over to Craig Jessup. A week ago, Jessup had passed the list, along with a concise dossier on each person, to jury consultant Lucy Kashahara, a perky thirty-two-year-old that everyone at Cotter Boland swore up and down had to be psychic. So far, in the half-dozen cases for which a specialist had been deemed necessary by the firm, she had not once steered them wrong.

  Lucy had taken the information acquired by Jessup and prepared a general, but exquisitely detailed, inquiry: a ten-page, in-depth analysis designed to probe each prospective juror’s psyche. All one hundred and twenty who were summoned to the courthouse the previous Friday had been required to fill it out.

  “You can ask a question during voir dire,” she explained to Joan Wills. “But you never really know what kind of an answer you’re getting. Depending on his agenda, a person can tell you the absolute truth, or he can tell you what he thinks you want to hear, or he can tell you just what he wants you to know and nothing more. With the questionnaire, we ask the same questions in so many different ways that, in the end, most people can’t help but reveal themselves.”

  “You don’t do that for every case, do you?” Joan asked.

  “Only when we think we need an edge,” Dana told her with a wry smile. “In this case, we’re going to need all the edge we can get.”

  “And don’t forget for a minute that the other side is doing exactly the same thing we’re doing,” Lucy added. “The only hope here is that your consultant is going to be just a little bit better at her job than their consultant is.”

  It took all of Friday for the jury pool to complete the questionnaires. They were not turned over until six o’clock that evening. Then Lucy had gone to work, giving up her entire weekend and continuing right through Monday to sift, review, evaluate, compare, and then prepare her recommendations.

  The telephone in Dana’s office rang just after ten.

  “I’m done,” Lucy reported, sounding tired but pleased.

  “Good,” Dana replied. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  In eleven hours, Dana thought as she hung up. In eleven hours, she would be walking into court, joined by Jessup, Lucy, Joan, and Charles Ramsey. Among them, they would try to select the twelve jurors and four alternates who would be most likely to decide the fate of Corey Latham in their favor. If they guessed wrong, their client would surely be convicted and sentenced to death. But if they guessed right…

  Dana pursed her lips. If they guessed right—what? A hung jury? An out-and-out acquittal? Was that too much to expect? Had the fire in the community, ignited by the gruesomeness of the crime itself, been fanned too high and too hot to allow room for rational argument? Had the ongoing presence of spokespersons from the prosecutor’s office, airing their case in every tabloid and all over the television newsmagazines, pushed public perspective beyond reasonable doubt? Would people be looking for a neck to hang, no matter whose neck it was?

  Not for the first time, Dana found herself wondering whether she had made the right decision not to participate in the media blitz created by the state’s efforts to demonize the young naval officer. She had certainly been invited to jump into the fray. From Newsweek to the Seattle P-I and from 60 Minutes to Larry King Live and everyone in between. She was courted by all of them.

  “Don’t stoop to the prosecutor’s level,” Paul Cotter had advised her. “Let him try his case in the media. You try yours in the courtroom.”

  It seemed sound advice, and dovetailed with her own intuition that told her to stay out of the spotlight where reporters never stopped digging, and so much was so often misinterpreted.

  The only deviation from that plan came from Cedar Falls, when Barbara Walters of the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 invited the Lathams to sit down with her for a conversation.

  “They’re saying such awful things about our son,” Dean explained. “We just want a chance to set the record straight.”

  “Only on the clear understanding, and absolute guarantee, that I’ll be given final content approval prior to airing,” the attorney told him.

  Amazingly, 20/20 agreed to the demand, but Dana needn’t have worried. Walters was a pro, and the living room interview, which filled an entire show at the end of July, was handled with taste and sincerity, and was absent any hint of sensationalism. The Corey Latham who came to life through the words and world of his parents was the Corey Latham that Dana herself had come to know. She hoped fervently that everyone who would wind up on the jury had seen the interview, or if they had not, that she would be able to re-create the essence of it for them in the courtroom.

  The telephone call she was waiting for having come, Dana pulled herself out of her chair and left the office, taking the after-hours elevator down to the lobby. Her car was parked just across the street from Smith Tower, ready to take her home, but she ignored it, and instead took the eight-minute walk up to the jail.

  “Are you ready?” she asked her client when he was escorted to the interview room.

  “I want to get this over with,” he replied. “I want to go home. I want my life back. Yes, I’m ready.”

  “But are you ready if it doesn’t go the way you want it to?”

  The blue eyes widened slightly. “Do I have to think about that?”

  “There are no guarantees here, Corey,” she cautioned him. “I’ll do the very best I can, but you never really know how a jury will decide until they come back with a verdict.”

  “But how could they convict me if I didn’t do it?”

  Dana sighed. “I wish I could tell you there were no innocent men in prison,” she said. “But I know better. In the final analysis, our justice system isn’t about truth. It’s about the appearance of truth. It’s about what can be proven, to a reasonable certainty, to twelve specific people, at a given point in time.”

  “And I can’t prove my innocence?”

  “Under the law, you don’t have to prove your innocence. On the contrary, the state has to prove your guilt.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand. How can they prove something that isn’t true?”

  “I don’t know,” she had to tell him. “But sometimes, they do.” More often than they should, she thought to herself, but she would never say it aloud. He was already too fragile.

  “Ms. McAuliffe,” he said suddenly. “I know you’re my lawyer, and you’re going to do the best you can for me at the trial, but, well, I guess I ought to ask—do you believe me?”

  Dana stared at him. There was a routine answer to that question, of course, that had something to do with it not being her business to doubt him, but she knew it wouldn’t be adequate just to tell him that.

  “I don’t normally think about guilt or innocence, Corey,” she said. “I think about the merits of the case, and whether I can win it. In other words, I assume innocence, which is essential to doing my job. That’s why I’ve never asked you whether you bombed Hill House or not. To be honest, I don’t want to know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, if I did ask you, and you told me yes, you had set that bomb and killed all those people, then it would severely handicap my efforts to defend you.”

  “How?”

  “Well, let
’s see,” she replied. “First of all, I could never put you on the stand to testify. It would be called subornation of perjury, and I’m not allowed to do that. I can’t knowingly let you lie under oath. I could be disbarred.”

  “Are you going to put me on the stand?”

  “Absolutely,” she told him. “You’re the best witness we have in this case. And you’re going to tell the jury exactly what you told me.”

  “But you couldn’t do that if you were representing a guilty person?”

  “No,” she told him. “If I knew for a fact that my client was guilty, I would look for mitigating circumstances that I could present to the jury instead, such as diminished capacity.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s when the defendant admits he did it, but we say he did it under such extreme emotional distress that he didn’t fully realize what he was doing at the time. In other words, at the time of the crime, he was not mentally capable of knowing right from wrong. If there’s a good enough reason for the distress, and the state is trying him on just one charge—murder one—which means a jury doesn’t have the choice of a lesser charge, then they might be inclined to return a verdict of not guilty. The difference is, instead of trying to refute the state’s evidence, as we do for a defendant we believe to be innocent, we would try to justify it.”

  “You mean, if I really had bombed Hill House, you would tell the jury that they should acquit me since I wasn’t in my right mind when I did it because I was so upset about the abortion?”

  “Well, maybe something like that,” Dana replied.

  “You don’t have to worry, Ms. McAuliffe,” he said firmly, his clear blue eyes looking directly into hers. “I didn’t kill those people.”

  She smiled a bit. “That’s good,” she said. “Because I might have had a pretty hard time convincing a jury that you were still under extreme emotional distress three months after the fact.”

  “You do believe me, don’t you?” he asked softly.

  “Well, since it doesn’t really matter to the defense of your case,” Dana replied, “and I can see how much it matters to you, the answer is, yes, I believe you. I don’t think you had anything to do with the bombing of Hill House.”

  Corey let out a breath that was so deep and so long that it seemed as though he had been holding it for months. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m ready for tomorrow now. I know everything will be all right. God is with me, and you’re with me, and if that isn’t an unbeatable team, I don’t know what is.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  The King County Courthouse dominated an entire city block. The massive twelve-story, H-shaped building was separated from the jail by the County Administration Building, but connected to it by a rather ingenious, if unattractive skyway, which was used primarily to shuttle defendants safely back and forth.

  Constructed of white brick and granite in Corinthian style, with a columned portico, traditional high ceilings, classic moldings, and elegant marble interiors, the courthouse had opened for business in 1930.

  Allison Ackerman had only a passing interest in architectural dinosaurs. It was shortly before eight o’clock on Tuesday as she crossed the building’s portico, pushed through one of the revolving doors, surrendered her handbag for a security check, and made her way to the seventh floor.

  When the elevator opened into a dramatic oval-shaped lobby, she turned to the left, retracing her steps of four days ago to Room C701, the room where prospective jurors were required to report. She had been told on Friday that one hundred and twenty people, an unheard-of number, had been called in for the Latham trial. It appeared that all but perhaps a handful had returned, and were now trying to cram themselves into a space usually occupied by no more than fifty.

  Allison checked in at the desk, giving her name and group identification number. In return, she was handed a white plastic tag that classified her as a juror in big red letters, and assigned a number, 52. She dutifully attached the badge to her jacket before squeezing herself into an empty chair along the wall.

  It took a minimal amount of observation for her to conclude that those assembled came from every social stratum, every educational level, every occupational category, and every age and income bracket that King County had to offer. She saw suits, dresses, housecoats, and blue jeans, along with briefcases, tote bags, and lunch boxes. She wondered which twelve of these people would end up serving on the jury.

  A capital case was an interesting process, she decided, and one to observe carefully. When she had arrived at the courthouse the previous Friday, only her fourth visit in nearly a decade, Allison was presented with a clipboard holding two separate questionnaires that she was instructed to complete to the best of her ability. Flipping casually through them, she realized she had never seen anything like this: page after page of repetitive requests for specific information that in some instances, she was sure, bordered on being invasive. It would not have surprised her to find, buried somewhere in the fine print, questions concerning her weight, her sexual preference, and whether she had ever been a member of the communist party. Her curiosity thoroughly piqued, she had done the best she could with it.

  It occurred to her now, as she waited for the next step in the process to begin, that she would be required to speak to those responses, and so she sat there and tried to remember exactly what it was she had written, not sure that she could.

  Nor was she even sure that she knew what she was doing here. It would have been so easy for her to get out of jury duty. She had been excused three times before, each time for a legitimate reason. But there had been no ready excuse this time, and something had stopped her from manufacturing one. She wondered whether the real reason she was here, and willing to participate in the Latham trial, was because she had a specific interest in its outcome.

  The Honorable Abraham Bendali was not, by any stretch of the imagination, what one would call a defendant’s judge, but he had a twenty-five-year history of being unerringly fair.

  “We couldn’t have done better,” Brian Ayres told Mark Hoffman when the assignment was posted. “He used to be one of us.”

  “We could have done a lot worse,” Dana was quick to assure Joan Wills. “He may be tough on defendants, but he knows the law better than anyone else on the bench, and he sticks to it.”

  A massive man by normal standards, Bendali’s six-foot-four-inch frame was reputed to be supporting more than three hundred pounds. It was the result of a childhood of starvation, which he understood intellectually well enough, but could never seem to deal with emotionally. His doctors had long ago given up berating him. His wife had long ago traded their king-sized bed in for twin beds. Out of fear of being crushed in the night, she said.

  He was sixty-seven years old, and he had been fortunate to live most of those years in generally good health. The bulk of his diet consisted of fruits, vegetables, and grains, if in gargantuan quantities. He had not touched red meat in over fifteen years, and he regularly measured his cholesterol at a respectable two hundred and twelve. And every dawn, weather notwithstanding, which was no small thing in Seattle, Bendali could be seen propelling his custom-made kayak through the waters of Lake Washington; huge, authoritarian strokes that swept him miles away from the beachfront of his Kirkland home and back again.

  Inside the King County Courthouse, he dominated the bench as he dominated the lake, ruling his courtroom with a firm hand and a steely glance, demanding proper conduct and orderly proceedings, and tolerating minimal legal nonsense. It was said that he had once reduced an unprepared attorney to tears by leveling an expectant gaze on him for five full minutes.

  Magnified to enormous proportions by thick, gold-rimmed glasses, his deep-set brown eyes missed very little that went on below him. His bushy brows were frequently used as a means of direct, albeit silent, communication. A fringe of gray, which he shaved off as soon as it grew long enough to engage a razor, was all that remained of a once full head of hair. His appearance, added to his reputation
for both personal and professional integrity, had earned him the nickname Mr. Clean.

  Bendali had not asked for the Latham case, but he had not refused it, either. He knew exactly why it had been assigned to him—so that no hint of impropriety could ever be attached to the trial or its outcome, by either side.

  “We’ve got to keep a tight lid on this,” the presiding judge told him. “We want it over and done with as quickly as possible. We’ll give you all the security you need. We’ll take every precaution. We’ll back you up on any decision you make.”

  Bendali nodded. He had handled his share of high-profile cases over the years, both as a judge and as a King County prosecutor before that. Although nothing else quite rose to the level of Latham, he had a pretty fair idea of the media feeding frenzy that was already in progress, and promised to overwhelm the proceedings, if left unchecked. His first action, therefore, was to exercise his right to bar all cameras from his courtroom.

  Members of the broadcast media were furious, trying every legal maneuver they could invent to force him to reverse his decision. Their efforts failed.

  “But the people have a right to know,” they protested.

  “And so they will,” the five-term Superior Court judge, who over the years had rejected at least a dozen serious political overtures, and several attempts to elevate him to a higher bench, replied. “The old-fashioned way.”

  “But this case has historic merit,” they argued. “It could set legal precedent well into the next century. The essence of it should not be diluted by secondhand evaluation, but should be accurately documented and preserved.”

  “To the best of my knowledge, court documents are reliably accurate and always preserved.”

  They tried persuading him with flattery. “The exposure will make you famous,” they said.

  “Who do I look like?” he retorted. “Lance Ito?”

  “You’re favoring some over others,” they claimed, resorting to petulance.

  “Nonsense,” he declared. “I don’t like any of you.”