by Sydney Bauer
‘I understand, Your Honour,’ said Carmichael, now rising to move around her desk towards the middle of the room. ‘And I am the last one to want to slow things down – which is why the District Attorney’s Office has decided that this particular prosecution, now officially two days old, is two days too long in our opinion.
‘The confession was a sham in the first place, Your Honour,’ Carmichael went on, her voice calm and even. ‘And I can assure you the lead investigators in this matter agree. Doctor Logan did not kill his wife, Your Honour, and I will not be party to any charade which says that he did.’
At that moment a woman in the back row let out an involuntary ‘hear, hear’ in support of the ADA’s proclamation of Doctor Logan’s innocence, and was promptly removed from the room. Judge Kessler was not one for making idle threats – and now all present were aware of it.
‘You need to explain yourself, Miss Carmichael,’ said Kessler, now returning her attention to the ADA taking centre stage before her.
‘Your Honour,’ Carmichael said, ‘on the weekend I held an extensive meeting with Boston Police’s Homicide Unit Commander, Lieutenant Joe Mannix, and his fellow investigator in this case, Detective Frank McKay.’
‘Jesus,’ said David, whispering in Arthur’s ear. ‘She’s going after the boy and she is going to use Joe to do it.’
‘The lieutenant and his deputy made it clear to me, in no uncertain terms, that they did not believe Doctor Logan committed the crime for which he has confessed, and they assured me,’ Carmichael continued, ‘that as soon as the physical evidence had been analysed, the doctor would be quantifiably cleared of the charge and free to return home to his family – or . . . what remains of it.’
At first this last comment sounded like a jibe at the defendant, but David knew better. Carmichael wasn’t talking about the loss of Stephanie Tyler, but the impending incarceration of her son.
‘Is the lieutenant here?’ asked Kessler.
‘Ah . . .’ said Carmichael, looking around the room.
‘I’m here, Judge,’ said a stony-faced Joe from where he was standing at the back of the room.
‘Come here, then,’ said Kessler, using her right pointer finger to beckon Joe towards the front of the room.
David saw Joe shake his head almost imperceptively. His hands curled into fists.
‘What is this all about, Lieutenant?’ asked the judge as Joe finally stopped in front of her. ‘Is what Miss Carmichael claims true? Did you tell her the man being arraigned here this morning was innocent?’
‘I told her the evidence would be in on Wednesday,’ said Joe, not giving Carmichael an inch.
‘He said,’ interrupted Carmichael, ‘and I quote, Your Honour, “No matter which way you looked at it, Doctor Jeffrey Logan is not good for the kill.” And Detective McKay seconded the lieutenant’s astute opinions by telling me that if it were not for Doctor Logan’s confession, the man would never have been arrested in the first place.’
‘Is that true, Lieutenant?’ asked Kessler of a now red-faced Joe.
‘Well . . . yes . . . but . . .’
‘Your Honour!’ said David, feeling the need to say something but not sure how in the hell he should proceed. He could not object because Carmichael was basically giving his client a ‘get out of jail free’ card. But as the victim’s friend, he did not want to sit mute and effectively allow this incredibly ambitious young woman to railroad Stephanie’s young son into a good ten years of imprisonment – at least until he was aware of the facts.
‘This is highly unusual, and while I commend Miss Carmichael’s dedication to speedy justice, she knows that Lieutenant Mannix and Detective McKay were only doing their jobs when they suggested she wait until the evidence report was filed. With all due respect, I would suggest we ask for an adjournment until Wednesday, when this evidence can be examined by the prosecution, the defence and yourself as the current presiding judge in this matter.’
David was trying to buy the boy – and himself – some time, but he was not sure this was going to work.
‘You don’t want me to send your client home, Mr Cavanaugh?’ asked a wide-eyed Kessler.
‘Of course we do, Your Honour, but . . .’
‘And is Doctor Logan here paying you by the day?’
‘No,’ stressed David. ‘That’s not it, Your Honour.’
‘Well then, sit down for God’s sake and let Miss Carmichael here do your job for you.’
Amanda Carmichael met David’s eye and gave him the slightest of smiles.
‘Miss Carmichael,’ said Kessler, returning her attention to the now victorious ADA, ‘I am assuming, given you are willing to let Doctor Logan go, that you have another course of action in mind.’
‘Yes, Your Honour. The District Attorney’s Office calls for the arrest of Jeffrey Tyler Logan in the matter of the death of his mother Stephanie Tyler.’
The hysteria broke out again as the previously jubilant crowd drew breath in one almighty expression of shock. At least two members of the media were on their feet trying to get a look at the young boy’s expression, while David’s client swivelled and reached for the young man’s hand behind him.
‘Enough!’ boomed Kessler, rising from her seat and raising her two short but substantial arms in protest.
David used his left arm to steer his client back towards the front of the room as Katherine de Castro pulled young J.T. close. David then stole a glance at Caroline Croft in the now animated press gallery – and saw that she was smiling.
‘Lieutenant Mannix,’ said Kessler, slowing her voice as if needing to ask this question correctly. ‘Does the evidence, collected by the police and crime scene specialists at the Logan home last Friday night the eleventh of May, suggest Doctor Jeffrey Logan to be the perpetrator of this crime?’
‘Judge,’ began a furious Joe, ‘like I said before, the analysis is due in on Wednesday and we . . .’
‘Answer the question, Lieutenant,’ demanded Kessler.
Joe took a breath before stealing a glare at the smirking ADA beside him. ‘No, Your Honour. No, it does not.’
‘And would you have taken the young boy in question into custody on Friday evening if Doctor Logan had not confessed?’ asked Kessler.
‘Probably, Your Honour,’ confirmed Joe, hamstrung.
An openly emotional Doctor Logan began to cry.
‘So what are you suggesting, Miss Carmichael?’ asked Kessler. ‘That the boy be arrested and held in juvenile detention until he can be arraigned and then tried in the Juvenile Court upstairs?’ The Edward W. Brooke Courthouse also served as a home for Boston’s Juvenile Court.
‘No, Your Honour,’ returned Carmichael, taking a step towards the bench. ‘Considering the heinous nature of the crime and the fact that the District Attorney’s Office can prove premeditation, the Commonwealth wishes to express its intention to try J.T. Logan as an adult in the Superior Court of Massachusetts.’
The crowd erupted again as Doctor Logan got to his feet. ‘No!’ he cried, before turning to look at his now completely confused son. ‘This is crazy,’ he said, twisting back to David, the entire gallery watching as his eyes filled with tears.
‘Your Honour.’ David was on his feet. ‘This is nothing short of preposterous. The boy is a juvenile. Miss Carmichael has no grounds to suggest . . .’
‘The boy,’ interrupted Carmichael, striding back to her desk to pick up two sheets of paper, ‘according to his teachers at the respected Curtis Academy, is intelligent beyond his years.’ She began to read from the information in front of her. ‘His reading age is sixteen; his ability in mathematics suggests that of a seventeen-year-old brain. He is working on a science curriculum two years above his fellow junior high classmates and his IQ is over 140.’ Carmichael waved the papers in the air. ‘This is one extremely intelligent young man, Your Honour. He is so clever in fact, that he murdered his mother in cold blood and then managed to convince his father to go to prison in his stead.’
/> ‘Your Honour,’ said David, moving to the front of the room to join his opposition in front of the podium, Joe having moved off to the side – where he stood across from Sara and Arthur and the semi-hysterical Doctor Logan as if needing to show where his loyalties lay.
‘Regardless of how smart this boy is, regardless of how hard he works at school to achieve such results, the law states that children under the age of fourteen be tried in the juvenile court system, and J.T. Logan was . . .’
‘Fourteen when he killed his mother,’ said Carmichael, staring David directly in the eye.
‘He turned fourteen on Saturday,’ said David, squaring off directly against his opponent.
‘He was born in the early hours of the twelfth of May,’ she countered.
‘Which makes his birthday last Saturday.’
‘No,’ said Carmichael. ‘No, it does not.’
It was as if the entire room had disappeared, as if all David could see before him was the pure determination in the young woman’s face. And then he realised that Amanda Carmichael, with the perfect face and the even more perfect body, was not so beautiful after all but rather poisoned by a dire desperation to win. David had refused her advances and now would pay the ultimate price for saying ‘no’ to a girl who had never lost once in her life. Amanda had found a way to pull this off – he could see it in her eyes.
‘Your Honour,’ said Carmichael at last, breaking free from David’s gaze to face the judge once again. ‘The legal definition of one’s birthday specifies the exact anniversary of one’s time of birth – or more pointedly, the number of exact years, to the second, a person has spent independent of their mother’s womb on this planet. And this Commonwealth has always adhered to the case law in place at the specific time of the offence.
‘J.T. Logan was born at 12.13am on May the twelfth,’ she went on with confidence, ‘in Auckland, New Zealand – which was exactly 8.13am May the eleventh Boston time.
‘The young man turned fourteen last Friday morning, Judge,’ she said. ‘Just before a quarter past eight – twelve hours before he walked into the kitchen and shot his mother to death.’
17
‘It’s a technicality,’ said a frustrated David, the first to push through the front door of their Congress Street offices in Boston’s busy Downtown Crossing.
‘It’s a travesty,’ said Nora, following Sara into Arthur’s office.
‘She can’t get away with this,’ said Sara, third into the room.
‘She can,’ said Arthur, bringing up the rear. ‘And she just did.’
The group was beyond furious – hot, bothered and anxious to discard suitcases, jackets and ties which were being tossed onto Arthur’s couch with abandon. It was almost midday and the world was spinning. J.T. Logan had been formally arrested, charged and arraigned, right there before their very eyes in the adult Boston Municipal Court.
Kessler had been swayed by Amanda Carmichael’s ridiculous ‘the kid was fourteen not thirteen when he shot his mother’ argument and Arthur suspected the judge had some selfish motives of her own in that regard. He knew that Kessler was chomping at the bit to make her mark in the respected Superior Court, and suspected she would be doing everything she could to make sure she was assigned this media magnet bonanza when it went to trial.
‘Carmichael and Kessler are two of a kind,’ said Arthur, tugging at the top buttons of his rarely worn shirt. ‘Both are determined to get their hands on this one.’
‘What?’ said Sara, who had kicked off her shoes and was already headed to Arthur’s corner fridge for four cans of soda. ‘So they team up to play schoolyard bullies and strip this kid of any semblance of dignity that he might . . . ?’
‘No, it’s worse than that,’ interrupted David. ‘By trying J.T. as an adult they have taken this way beyond the schoolyard. If he is convicted he could be sentenced to life, without parole – no future, no hope.’
They stopped then – noting David’s seeming loyalty to the young teenage boy. Yesterday afternoon, after their discussion with Katherine de Castro, David and Sara had spent a good half-hour just ‘hanging out’ with the kids. And David had to admit that he felt for J.T. instantly, sensing the fear in his quietness and the unmistakable sadness in his eyes.
‘All right, I know we haven’t seen the video,’ he said, ‘but this is Stephanie’s kid we are talking about here, and I can’t help but think that despite the fact that she was the victim in this whole bloody mess, that she would want me to help him.
‘Years ago,’ he began, taking a seat on Arthur’s sofa, ‘not long after we graduated, Stephanie told me that she felt responsible for her mother’s death. Stephanie was only ten at the time, and with her dad away on business, she had been trying to talk her mom into taking her down to their place at the Cape for Christmas. Anyway, her mom eventually conceded, but a week of intermittent snow followed by days of rain meant the ice on the motorway was thick and slippery.
‘Long story short,’ David continued after a breath, ‘they were almost at the Cape when her mother lost control taking a hairpin bend, crashing into a ditch and dying instantly at the wheel of their family SUV. And Stephanie told me all those years later, that despite her guilt, she knew her mother was still watching over her – furious at her for feeling responsible, angry that she couldn’t get over blaming herself for being a determined ten-year-old kid.’
‘I understand what you’re saying, David,’ said Arthur after a pause. ‘But that was an accident and this was . . .’
‘We don’t know what this was yet, Arthur,’ interrupted David. ‘But my point is . . . Stephanie once told me that when she had kids, she would do anything, everything to make sure they knew that her love for them was unconditional – that she would give her life for them in a second, without a single hesitation or regret.’
There was silence, until David looked at Sara, almost predicting what she was going to say.
‘You have to be sure you want to do this, David,’ she said, taking a seat next to him and looking him directly in the eye. ‘Because in defending her son, you will be destroying the reputation of the very person you feel indebted to help. Stephanie is dead, David – and perhaps justifiably so. And if we take this on, if you agree to do this, your job will be to prove her death was reasonable beyond a shadow of a doubt. So unless you feel you are up to this, unless you are willing to crucify your old friend’s character in front of an audience of millions, we cannot agree to represent him, because to do so without such a commitment would be unfair to J.T. and, perhaps, cost him his life as well.’
David looked at her, before turning his eyes to Arthur and finally to Nora whose knowing nods had never set him wrong.
‘I spoke to Logan immediately following J.T.’s arraignment,’ he said. ‘He will have the video to us within the hour.’
Sara nodded. ‘So let’s watch it and see what we think,’ she said, taking his hand and squeezing it. ‘And then you can make the decision for us.’
18
Marc Rigotti was on deadline. The Boston Tribune deputy editor had spent the entire weekend working on a Doctor Jeffrey Logan profile piece and now, after the startling revelations in this morning’s arraignment, had put aside his feature article to concentrate on a major news story for tomorrow’s front page. His editor, a newsprint dinosaur named Ed Wiseman, had been by his office twice, pacing around his desk like an expectant father. Ed was like that – had an inexhaustible passion for his job and considered every one of his potential front-page headliners as ‘babies’ just waiting to see the light of day.
Briiiinng. The shrill of his desk telephone cut across his stream of consciousness. Rigotti jumped in his seat before deciding the call should be ignored – until none of the editorial assistants deigned to pick it up, forcing him to give in to its incessant buzzing and grab at the receiver in frustration.
‘Rigotti,’ he barked, his tone loaded with irritation.
‘Mr Rigotti,’ said the voice, the man’s repl
y also tinged with a degree of intolerance. ‘My name is Carleton Blackmore, General Manager of Hunting Rifles Inc. Las Vegas, Nevada.’
Jesus, thought Rigotti, one of those random gun nuts, the last thing he needed.
‘Ah . . . right, well, I’m sorry, Mr Blackmore. I’m actually on deadline and . . .’
‘Slandering another honest American enterprise, no doubt.’
‘Excuse me?’ Now this Blackmore was starting to piss him off.
‘I know people like you, Mr Rigotti, journalists set on destroying honest businesses with your inaccuracies and lies. Yes, we sell firearms, sir, but our rifles are for hunting and everyone who buys one is skilled in the art of using them.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Blackmore.’ Despite himself, Rigotti was intrigued. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Stephanie Tyler’s murder,’ explained Blackwell. ‘I read your report, sir. You claimed in your article that the gun in question – one of ours I might add – was rumoured to have been purchased by the dead woman as a present to her husband.’
Rigotti had had access to the police report in which Logan had explained how he had come to own the gun. He had even been provided details on its appearance, make and model – information he had included in his original post-murder report.
‘But we do not operate that way, Mr Rigotti,’ Blackmore went on. ‘We have a very select clientele and Mrs Tyler would not have been able to purchase that particular weapon – a custom-made Mark V – nor the specified cartridges, the powerful .460 Weatherby magnums – from us without proof of firearms training. In short, your story is a load of rubbish, sir, and makes us appear . . .’
‘How do you know the rifle was one of yours?’ asked Rigotti, grabbing a pencil from his drawer and dragging a notepad from across his desk.
‘Because of what you described, sir – the Mark V Deluxe’s aesthetics. I am personally aware of the weapon you spoke of, Mr Rigotti, because all of our rifles are a one of a kind.’
