Act of God

by Susan R. Sloan

  “It was about ten o’clock on a Tuesday night,” Thorson related. “I work at a bakery, and have to get up at three in the morning, so I usually go to sleep around eight. On that Tuesday, I’d been asleep for about two hours, when I got waked up by loud shouting.”

  “Could you tell where the shouting was coming from?”

  “My bedroom windows face out on the Lathams’ house. The shouting was coming from there.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The first time, I called them on the telephone. Elise answered, and I asked her please to keep the noise down.”

  “Did they?”

  “For a while. Then just as I was getting back to sleep, it started again. Well, then I got a little mad. So I got up, got dressed, and went over there. It’s a good thing, too, because Corey looked like he was about to start smacking her around.”

  “Objection,” Dana declared.

  “Sustained,” Bendali said. “The jury will disregard the last remark.” He turned to the witness. “Mr. Thorson, please listen carefully to the questions as they are asked,” he advised, “and just tell us what you saw and what you heard, not what you think.”

  “Okay, I saw that Elise was crying, and that Corey was stomping around the house, all red in the face, and mean-eyed. And he was yelling about something, calling her a bitch and a murderer. He didn’t seem to care that I heard him, either. Tell you the truth, I’m not sure he even knew I was there.”

  “He called his wife a bitch and a murderer?”

  “Yes, he did,” Thorson confirmed. “At least twice that I heard.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “I asked Elise if she was all right. My wife was still awake, so I asked if she wanted to come back with me to my house for a while.”

  “You thought that Elise Latham might actually be in imminent physical danger from her husband?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” he replied, “but it sure looked that way to me.”

  “Thank you,” Brian said.

  “Mr. Thorson, do you and your wife ever argue?” Dana inquired.

  “Everyone argues sometimes,” he replied. “I suppose we do our share.”

  “When you argue, do you shout?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “And do you ever say things, or in the heat of anger, call your wife names you later regretted?”

  “I guess so,” he conceded.

  “Have you ever had an argument with your wife that was so heated that you went out and bombed a building over it?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “All right, Mr. Thorson, let’s go back for a minute to the night you went over to the Lathams. You testified that you thought Elise Latham was in such physical danger that you asked her to leave her house with you, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you suggested that, what did she say?”

  “She thanked me, and said it wouldn’t be necessary.”

  Dana looked surprised. “You mean she declined the opportunity to remove herself from imminent physical danger?”

  He shrugged. “I guess she didn’t see it as serious as I did.”

  “Do you think that can be the case sometimes, that what we think we see, looking in from the outside, may not be what’s really happening on the inside?”

  “I can only tell you what I heard and what I saw,” he said. “I can’t tell you what it means.”

  Dana smiled. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Thorson,” she said.

  Brian had no redirect. “Your Honor,” he said, “the prosecution has one more witness to call, but due to a scheduling conflict, he won’t be available until tomorrow afternoon. May I beg the court’s indulgence, and request a recess until then?”

  Bendali peered over at the defense table. “Ms. McAuliffe?”

  “The defense has no objection, Your Honor,” Dana replied.

  “All right then, ladies and gentlemen, you get a rare morning off,” the judge said to the jury. “We’ll see you all back here tomorrow at one o’clock, ready to go. Is that right, Mr. Ayres?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Brian assured him.

  At six o’clock, Dana made her way up Capitol Hill to Craig Jessup’s house. Louise Jessup opened the door. She had pale hair that was brushed to gleaming, bright eyes that took in everything, a few extra pounds that went unnoticed by most, and a bubbly personality that was a perfect complement to her husband’s quiet demeanor.

  “Come on in,” she said with a welcoming smile. “Would it be all right if I called you Dana? I’ve heard so much about you over the years, I feel as if I know you.”

  Dana smiled. “Dana it is, and you took the words right out of my mouth.”

  “Craig’s in his office,” Louise said, beaming. “He said to bring you right up.”

  Jessup’s small, second-floor office seemed filled to overflowing by a scarred old desk that sagged under an avalanche of books and papers and files, a bookcase stuffed with all manner of texts, and a battered recliner. He gestured her to his prized recliner.

  “I’m sorry we had to do it this way,” he said. “But I think you’ll understand why in a moment.”

  “Well,” she responded cautiously, “you certainly got my attention.”

  “I followed the jury list leak,” he told her, getting right to the point. “I know where it came from.”

  Dana frowned. “Why do I think I’m not going to want to hear this?” she murmured.

  “I’ve had a contact inside the AIM organization for a number of years now,” he explained. “It took me a while to warm him up, but eventually, he put me on to someone, who put me on to someone else, who finally put me in touch with another person who was in a position to know, and he confirmed to me that AIM had the list two days after the jury was sworn in.”

  “Two days after?”

  He nodded. “Once I knew that, all I had to do was track backward.”

  At that moment, Louise came in with two steaming mugs of coffee. She placed one of the mugs on the desk in front of her husband, and handed the other to Dana. “I think you’re going to need this,” she murmured.

  Dana sighed. Given the backlash the fetal photograph campaign had generated, she had already concluded that the leak had most likely come from the prosecutor’s office, and after fourteen years of friendship, she didn’t want to hear the name.

  “Who?” she asked dully.

  Jessup plucked a piece of paper from a file on the desk, although he didn’t have to read from it. “Charles Ramsey,” he said.

  “Who?” she said again, positive she had heard him incorrectly.

  “Charles Ramsey,” the investigator repeated clearly.

  Dana blinked. Jessup was telling her that her third chair, the venerable senior partner of Cotter Boland and Grace, had not only breached legal ethics, but had leaked a document that could very well result in the conviction of their client. It didn’t make any sense.

  “That’s not possible,” she said.

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” Jessup acknowledged. “So I double-checked, and then I triple-checked. I’m afraid it came up the same way all three times.”

  “But he’d have to be crazy to pull a stunt like that.”

  The investigator shrugged. “Or senile.”

  Dana sagged into the recliner, unsure what to think or what to feel. Craig Jessup was both meticulous and cautious, she knew, and he was never wrong.

  SIXTEEN

  Dana was curled into a corner of the living room sofa, contemplating her dilemma. It was approaching three o’clock in the morning. Both Sam and Molly had been in bed for hours, but it would have been useless for Dana to try to sleep. Not until she had figured out what to do.

  The obvious move was to go to Paul Cotter immediately. Armed with Craig Jessup’s information, he would of course have no choice but to remove Ramsey from the case. But was that all they were obligated to do? Did they not have an ethical duty, as officers of the court, to report jury tampe
ring?

  Charles Ramsey had been practicing law for as long as Dana was old, and to the best of her knowledge, he had an unblemished record. Other than a desire to win a case that he believed was unfairly stacked against them, she could not understand what had prompted him to do this. And while she might applaud his determination, she was appalled at his method.

  He had committed a crime that was punishable by imprisonment and she knew she should report him. But how could she ruin his career, when it was clear at least his heart had been in the right place? And more important, once she did report him, where did that leave her?

  Exposing Ramsey was almost certain to cause a mistrial and that was her biggest problem. On the whole, she was quite happy with the way things were going in court. She truly believed they had mitigated a great deal of the state’s case, and she was not at all sure that a mistrial would be in the best interests of her client.

  On the other hand, if she didn’t go to Cotter, if she allowed the matter to slide for a while, and her client was convicted, could she then blow the whistle and have the verdict set aside? Where was her obligation? Where was her loyalty?

  Her head began to ache and without thinking, she reached for the telephone on the table beside her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said when Jefferson Reid answered, “but I need your help.”

  “Just give me a moment,” he responded, and she heard a click, and knew he had put her on hold while he made his way out of the bedroom and into his study. “All right,” he said, coming back on the line, “what is it that has you worrying at this ungodly hour?”

  She told him what she had learned. When she finished, it was several minutes before he replied.

  “You believe in Corey Latham, don’t you?” he said, not really asking.

  “Yes, I do,” she replied. “Absolutely.”

  “Then I’m afraid that puts you between a rock and a hard place,” he told her. “Because your first obligation here is not to your client, it’s to the law. It’s always to the law. Jury tampering is not just a felony, it’s an automatic mistrial.”

  “But we’ve been down that road,’ she said, “and the judge declined to call it.”

  “Because he didn’t have all the facts,” Reid suggested. “In any case, your third chair is facing disbarment, maybe even jail time. And you can’t sit on it. Believe me, you don’t want to. Things like this have a way of coming back to bite you. And your instincts are correct. It’s probably going to work against your client.”

  “What’s the matter?” Louise Jessup asked her husband, finding him in his office. She had awakened at seven o’clock to discover he had not come to bed at all.

  “There’s something I’m trying to get hold of,” he told her, rubbing his eyes. “But it’s just out of reach.”

  “What? Something about the jury leak?”

  “Yes,” he said with a sigh. “But I can’t quite grasp what it is.”

  Dana was at Smith Tower by eight-thirty, although she knew that Paul Cotter rarely arrived before nine.

  “Jeez, you look like someone got you with a gavel,” Angeline Wilder told her as soon as she entered the office.

  “Thanks for the compliment,” Dana replied, thinking the receptionist had come closer than she knew to hitting the mark.

  She went into the bathroom and surveyed her face. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her skin had a definite grayish cast to it. She reached for her handbag. If Angeline had noticed, so would the rest of the world. Her usual modicum of makeup was not going to be sufficient today.

  At twenty minutes past nine, Angeline buzzed her. “Mr. Cotter just came in,” she announced.

  At nine-thirty, Dana was knocking at the managing partner’s door.

  “Come in, come in,” he invited, when he saw her.

  “I’m afraid we might have a problem,” she said, closing the door behind her.

  “With the case?” he asked.

  “No, not exactly.” She handed him the report Craig Jessup had given her.

  “This could be serious,” he said, when he had scanned the contents.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night. I was trying to find a good way out. I couldn’t.”

  “Well, how do you want to proceed?”

  Dana shrugged. “He’s off the case, of course. Past that, we’re bound to report him.”

  “Do we have to be so hasty?” he asked.

  “Do we have a choice?” she countered.

  He sighed. “Look, all we have are some damaging but so far unverified allegations. Don’t you think, before we go off halfcocked, and maybe ruin a good man’s life and reputation, we should confirm the facts?”

  “How?”

  “Why not let me look into it,” Cotter suggested. “You have the trial to worry about. Let me worry about this.”

  “What about the third chair?”

  “Yes, there’s that,” he mused, drumming his fingers on his desk. “Well, we can’t very well take him off the case, without raising a lot of awkward questions. So, why don’t we just let it lie for the time being, until we get everything sorted out?”

  “All right,” Dana said, with an inward sigh of relief. She had put the problem into the managing partner’s very capable hands, and it was now his to deal with. She was off the hook, so to speak, which was just fine with her. As he had said, she had other things to worry about.

  Half an hour later, Paul Cotter was engaged on his private line.

  “What the hell is going on?” the voice at the other end demanded.

  “I’m not sure,” Cotter replied.

  “Are you as out of control as you sound?”

  “This has just been brought to my attention,” the attorney declared defensively. “It hardly means I’m out of control.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to do something, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am,” Cotter snapped. “It’s just going to take a little time to figure out what.”

  The final witness for the prosecution was Omar Ram.

  A short, dark man, Ram lived with his wife and six children in a small house on the back side of Queen Anne Hill.

  “Do you know the defendant?” Brian asked.

  “I most certainly do,” the man replied with a smile. “He lives right across the street, and is always very polite to me and to my family.”

  “Tell me, sir, were you at home around midnight on the night before the Hill House bombing?”

  “I was.”

  “Will you please tell the court specifically where you were?”

  “At that hour, I was in my bed.”

  “Can you recall whether anything unusual happened on that particular night?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Ram said in his clipped voice. “Ours is a very quiet neighborhood, you see. So much so that I am usually able to sleep soundly with my window open. But on that night, I was restless and not sleeping, and I remember distinctly hearing the sound of an automobile engine being started.”

  “Can you tell us what time that was?”

  “Oh yes,” the witness replied. “It was at fourteen minutes past midnight.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Brian pressed.

  “When I heard the vehicle, I looked immediately at the clock beside my bed.”

  “Why?”

  “In our neighborhood, automobiles are usually in bed, as are their owners, at that hour,” Ram declared. “And I worried that someone might be ill.”

  “Could you tell, sir, where the vehicle you heard was when the engine started?”

  “Oh yes,” the man said. “It was directly across the street.”

  “Thank you,” Brian said.

  “Mr. Ram,” Dana inquired on cross-examination, “when did you report that you had heard a car start up that particular night?”

  “A policeman came to my door in the middle of March,” he replied. “It was then that I reported it.”

  �
��That was about six weeks after the bombing, is that correct?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “That’s a pretty long time to remember something as unimportant as hearing a car engine, isn’t it?”

  “As it turned out, it was not so unimportant.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t know that at the time, did you?”

  “No, this is true. I did not.”

  “And yet you are absolutely positive that you heard the car engine start up on that specific night?”

  “Oh yes. You see, my memory is quite good.”

  “I’m sure it is. Tell me, where were you, say, the night before?”

  “On the Sunday? I think I was at home.”

  “You think? You aren’t positive?”

  “I am positive,” Ram corrected himself. “I was at home.”

  “Did you hear a car engine start up late that night?”

  “No, I do not recall hearing one,” the witness said. “I must have been sleeping.”

  “On the night you say you heard the engine start up, did you get out of bed and look to see who it was?”

  “No, I am sorry to say I did not.”

  “Could you see out the window from where you were?”

  “No, I could not.”

  “So you heard an automobile engine being started, but you cannot testify that the one you heard belonged to my client?”

  “No, I cannot say that with any certainty.”

  “And am I to assume that also means you did not see who was driving the vehicle?”

  “No, I did not,” he said.

  “So,” Dana summarized, “your testimony here today, sir, is that you claim to have heard an automobile start up around midnight, but you cannot positively identify it. You cannot identify the person who was driving it, and you can tell us only that you believe it came from directly across the street. Is that correct?”

  “That is correct.”

  “And you’re certain that it was the night before the bombing?”

  “I am certain.”

  “It couldn’t have been the night before, or even the night after?”

  “No,” the witness declared. “I have said it was that night.”

  “Thank you. I have nothing further.”

  “Mr. Ram,” Brian asked on redirect, “although you can’t positively identify the vehicle you heard for the court, what makes you think it came from the house directly across the street?”