Killer Ambition

by Marcia Clark

  “Are you going to ask that Ms. Knight be recused?” said another reporter.

  “I don’t want to waste the time. Mr. Powers is anxious for his day in court. He’s an innocent victim of an unscrupulous frame-up, and we are going to prove it!”

  The news cut away to a health insurance commercial and Melia turned off the television. “That’s all there was,” she said.

  It was enough.

  60

  The moment my office door swung closed, Declan exploded. “That woman is a classless, lying menace! Just because she’d sell stories to the tabs, she thinks everyone else is as tacky as she is. We’ve got to call a press conference. We’ve got to tell them it’s not true—”

  “No.” I was just as steamed as he was, but I had experience with this kind of trash talk and knew better. “That’s just what she wants. The minute we answer this garbage, we give her exactly what she’s looking for: a sideshow that discredits the prosecution and deflects attention from her guilty client.”

  “But won’t Andrew Chatham back you?”

  “Who knows? And even if he did, it’ll just look like he’s protecting his source: me.”

  Bright spots lit up Declan’s cheeks as he set his jaw. “I want to beat the crap out of her.” He looked at me with consternation. “I don’t know how you can be so calm about this, Rachel.” He sat down heavily and stared at the floor.

  I smiled. “Truth? The first few times I got knocked around by the defense, it made me insane. Matter of fact, I once got so mad at a defense attorney, I offered to dismiss the case against his client if he’d do the time.”

  “Back when you were a baby DA in Misdemeanors, right?”

  “Try three years ago on a double homicide.”

  Declan shook his head and we both laughed.

  My cell phone played “Killer Joe.” “Bailey’s heard the news,” I told Declan.

  “Frame-up?” she demanded. “Why the hell would we give a rat’s ass about this friggin’ clown?”

  “In case you didn’t notice, Terry said a lot of other ridiculously stupid—”

  “That garbage about you selling your story—people who’re dumb enough to buy that line aren’t going to make it on the jury anyhow. But this noise about a frame-up—”

  “What makes you so sure she’s pointing the finger at us? Remember how many times we heard Russell’s people say that everyone in the industry could be a suspect? They’ve got practically a whole city’s worth of straw men they can prop up.”

  Bailey was silent for a moment. “It’s pretty hard to believe that a pissed-off actor would murder a director’s kid and her boyfriend just to frame the manager.”

  “Cops would make more sense…” Who else would’ve had the ability to plant blood and prints? Still, I had a feeling Terry wasn’t aiming at LAPD. “We’ll hash this out later. One thing’s for sure, I’m going to hammer them hard about discovery. I’m not buying that they don’t have anything yet. They’ve got to have witnesses lined up if they’re going to prove Ian was framed.”

  “You’d think,” Bailey said.

  “You have time to come over? I’m going to put together the jury questionnaire and we should talk about who we want.”

  Most prosecutors don’t consult their investigating officers about pure trial work like jury selection, but most prosecutors don’t have someone as smart and experienced as Bailey.

  “Give me half an hour. I’ve got to return a couple of calls, one of ’em to our witness on maternity leave.”

  “Good enough. I’ll get us lunch.”

  Declan and I got down to work on the questionnaire. Not all lawyers are fans of juror questionnaires. And I don’t think they should replace the gut feeling you get when you actually talk to jurors, see their body language, their reactions in the moment. But used correctly, the questionnaire can help us weed out the liars. That’s critical in big cases, because the more high profile the case, the more we risk getting groupies who’re in love with the defendant, or the spotlight, or who want to write a book—or all of the above. After half an hour, we took a break to get sandwiches and chips from the snack bar. When we got back, Bailey had pushed a flower arrangement to the side and was leaning back with her feet up on the table next to the window.

  I threw her a pastrami sub and a bag of potato chips and dropped mine and Declan’s on the desk.

  “In general we want people who aren’t impressed with celebrity,” I said. “So no tabloid readers—”

  “Get a list of Melia’s friends. That ought to put a dent in the jury pool,” Declan joked.

  “And since Hayley and Brian were just kids, I’d say we like women more than men,” Bailey said.

  Her words hit me between the eyes. “You know, this is the first time in maybe a week that I’ve heard anyone mention the names Hayley and Brian,” I said. Bailey nodded grimly and Declan looked pained. Too many stupid lawyer tricks and not enough time spent remembering what’s really important. I’d make sure it didn’t happen again.

  “Old or young?” Declan asked.

  “That’s a tossup,” Bailey said. “Young jurors might identify with the victims, but older ones will be less likely to identify with Mr. High Life Powers and his trophy babe.”

  “This all started with Brian and Hayley staging a kidnapping to extort money out of her father,” I said. “That’s more likely to turn off our usual law-and-order types, who are generally older.” Even if only subconsciously, older or more conservative jurors might wind up feeling like Brian and Hayley had brought it on themselves. “Younger jurors might be a little less judgmental about it.”

  “Any exceptions you guys can see to our general preference for educated professionals and people with jobs?”

  As a rule, the prosecution wants smart jurors—the smarter the better. And people who hold down jobs tend to feel more civically responsible than those who don’t. All of these stereotypes are generalizations, of course, but we get only a few minutes with each juror, so we have to rely on them to some degree. After all, clichés are clichés because they’re usually true, and jury selection is always, at bottom, a crapshoot. We just play the odds.

  By three o’clock we’d settled on our prototypical best juror: female, professional, and someone who’d turn a skeptical eye on the defense conspiracy theory—which prompted Bailey to say, “God help us, we’re looking for Rachel Knight.”

  “God forbid,” Declan said with a smile. “We’d start late every single morning.”

  I gave him a mock glare. “What a card. I could laugh for…seconds.”

  After Bailey left, Declan and I finished up the questionnaire on our own. He offered to drive me home, but I wanted to walk. I needed the air and the exercise. At seven o’clock it was still fairly light outside, but the air was a little cooler and it felt good to stretch my legs. As I reached Pershing Square, I noticed a film crew was setting up for a shoot. I was passing by, looking at the area they’d roped off for the scene, when I heard someone say, “Hey, isn’t that the prosecutor bitch?” A young white guy with blonde dreadlocks who was unloading lights from one of the equipment trucks craned his neck to look at me and replied, “Sure is. Hey, Ms. Prosecutor! What’re you gonna do when you lose? Maybe work a food truck?” That inspired a heavyset girl in Doc Martens and cutoffs. “Say, ’ho! Whyn’t you get on up here so I can show you what we think of your bullshit case—”

  Shocked and a little worried, I started to back away, when a booming voice behind me cut her off. “Yo, Buckwheat, you want to talk about showing something? Get on up over here!” The girl muttered under her breath and turned away. “Yeah, I thought so,” said the voice I now recognized as Drew’s. “Come on, Rache, you’ve earned a martini on the house.” He put a protective arm around me and steered me past the crew and in through the back door of the Biltmore.

  “I wouldn’t mind waiting if you want to go back there and ‘show’ her, uh…something,” I said. “I can promise you no charges will be filed.”

/>   Drew smiled. “Finally, I find a perk in being friends with a prosecutor.”

  61

  I had a martini and some welcome laughs with Drew. When I got back to my room, I saw that I had a voice mail message on my cell. The crisp tones of Andrew Chatham, my supposed tabloid co-conspirator, greeted me. “Rachel, I’m so very sorry about what Ms. Fisk said. I wanted you to know that I never told her I’d spoken to you. I do admit that I have spoken to her, and I imagine that’s why she took a shot in the dark and falsely accused you that way. If there’s anything I can do to clear up this mess, I’ll gladly do so.”

  Yeah, I just bet you will. No, gracias.

  I poured myself a glass of pinot grigio and was lying back on the couch with the remote when my cell phone played “Janie’s Got a Gun,” Graden’s ringtone—in honor of his getting me my gun permit. I brought him up to speed but didn’t mention my encounter with the film crew. On calmer reflection, I realized they probably hadn’t intended to do me any physical harm. The only real danger lay in the possibility that someone had shot footage of my retreating derriere.

  “Your turn,” I said. “What’s new?”

  “I’ve made some progress on those reports Lilah talked about. They appear to be legit—”

  Lilah, the murderous sociopath who’d sent me reports on my sister, Romy. “Why didn’t anyone pick up on them before?”

  “A couple of reasons. Number one reason, because I wasn’t the investigating officer on the case, and number two, because the reports were from different jurisdictions, both of which were tiny and not computerized until very recently; and neither of the jurisdictions was where Romy was taken.”

  They hadn’t realized the significance of what they’d seen. “Of course.”

  “So I’d say so far, so good. If our kidnapper kept Romy alive for six months, it’s a lot less likely that he…”

  “It’s okay, you can say it: that he killed her. I’ve been living with the possibility that he killed her for over twenty years, I can certainly handle hearing that he might not have.”

  “You have the DA investigators trying to find Lilah, right?”

  The DA investigators had wound up working that case with me, and in the course of the investigation, Lilah’s accomplice, Chase Erling, had killed their beloved team leader. So when Lilah ran, they’d asked to take over the search for her. No one would have thought of refusing, even though she was technically an LAPD suspect.

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Why?”

  “Just making sure. So when do you start trial?”

  “We hand out questionnaires to the jury pool in a few days and voir dire starts next week.”

  “That’s fast.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been jammed before, but never like this.”

  Just talking about it made my stomach hurt. After we hung up, I took a hot shower, got into bed, and watched rich housewives scream about one of them getting too drunk and another one hitting on someone’s husband. It made me feel better about not being rich…or married. I was asleep within minutes.

  The jury questionnaire was forty-five pages long and we had over two hundred of them. I always grade each juror on a scale of one to five, with five being best, and I flag the answers that need follow-up. It’s a backbreaker of a process, but it really gets me on top of what I’ve got in that jury pool. I had a second copy made for Declan so he could review them all and make his own assessments. I spent the week going through each and every questionnaire, page by page, and sometimes more than once to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

  It was a task that had me alternating between relief and misery. Mostly misery. There were some real gems—smart, well read, and solid. But there was a depressingly high number of defense groupies. Not that they directly admitted it. Their bias—and lack of candor—lay between the lines. A municipal bus driver who admitted in the first pages of the questionnaire that he watched every news program from five o’clock till ten o’clock every night, in later pages insisted he’d heard nothing about the case. He also said he knew he could be fair, but admitted he’d heard that Ian Powers had been framed and thought it was possible. Another potential juror turned out to have been under investigation for a string of arsons in Torrance; he said he wouldn’t hold the unfair suspicion against the prosecution. I told myself that I was being unduly critical, but it felt like for every solid juror, there were ten rejects.

  I wanted to believe it would all change when the jury saw the evidence, but I knew better. You can’t make a jury buy logic. I fought to keep my spirits up in the days leading to the trial, but the truth was, my optimism was losing the battle against a growing dread.

  Too soon, the day for voir dire arrived. I dressed in one of my “believe me” suits and left myself plenty of time to get to the office and do hair and makeup repair, as per my lessons from Toni. I’d gone back to hoofing it to and from the office. I needed the exercise, and the danger of being chased by reporters had lessened considerably, thanks to Terry’s penchant for giving daily interviews on the courthouse steps. The press now stuck close to the building, where they could be sure of getting their sound bites.

  Even from two blocks away, I could see the antennae of the satellite trucks that now permanently surrounded the courthouse. The sight irritated me all over again. I’d wanted Judge Osterman to seal the transcripts of jury selection, so the jurors would feel safe enough to be candid, but he’d refused. “The right to a public trial means the whole trial.” The press wouldn’t physically be in the courtroom because there wasn’t room for them. But they’d be monitoring and reporting every word uttered in court—other than jurors’ names—in a separate room that was wired for sound.

  Fortunately, I now had a key to the freight elevator, so I made it up to the eighteenth floor in blissful privacy. As I passed Eric’s office on the way to my own, I heard the television playing what sounded like a crowd at a rock concert. When I leaned in, I saw that Melia was watching the coverage. Curious, I stepped in to get a look. A move I immediately regretted.

  The low wall that fronted the length of the courthouse building was now a shelf for vendors hawking everything from T-shirts to teacups, all emblazoned with faces—of me, of Terry, of Don, and of Ian. People were marching back and forth, carrying signs that read TEAM TERRY and TEAM RACHEL.

  “What about Team Hayley and Team Brian?” I fumed.

  Melia gave me a mournful look. “I know, it’s terrible.”

  Not so terrible it made her turn the damn thing off, though.

  I’d felt pretty well dressed in the navy suit with the thin silver pinstripes that I’d found on sale at Bloomingdale’s. Until I saw Declan. His was a darker navy that looked like it had been made for him. There’s just no substitute for bespoke.

  Now that jurors would be walking the hallways, the judge had ordered the reporters to either stay in the sound-wired room or go outside. The only camera allowed inside was the one mounted on the wall above the jury, which would ensure that no photographs of the jurors would be taken. And it wouldn’t be activated until after jury selection was finished.

  When we walked up the courtroom aisle, I saw that Russell was once again firmly ensconced on the defense side of the courtroom and Raynie was sitting in neutral territory, the back row of the middle section. As we set up at counsel table, I stole glances at the defense side. Terry was in a beige dress with a pleated skirt. No doubt trying for the soft, feminine touch. That would work until she opened her mouth. Don wore the standard dark suit. No fewer than six law clerks, and all wore more expensive suits than mine.

  The lockup door opened and Ian sauntered out as though he were walking into an A-list party. He had a big smile and wave for girlfriend Sacha, and a smile and a nod for all his loyal acolytes, which included Russell. Five minutes later, the judge took the bench. He surveyed the courtroom with a frown and spoke to the bailiff, Deputy Jimmy Tragan. “I’ll need all family members to sit in the section on the far right, away from the jurors.”

&n
bsp; The bailiff turned to face the gallery and gave them Judge Osterman’s edict. Raynie reluctantly moved to the designated area, but as far away from Russell as she could get. I took that as a good sign. Then again, I might just have been desperate for a positive omen.

  With the family and friends safely cloistered, the jury commissioner’s emissary opened the door and our group of two hundred prospective jurors began to file in. I watched them fill the benches, looking for early signs of a bad attitude or an overly excited glance at Ian Powers. Not one nuance could be overlooked. Among this group were the twelve people who’d decide whether Brian and Hayley’s killer would be brought to justice.

  62

  “You’ve all been assigned numbers and that’s what we’ll use today instead of your names,” Judge Osterman said. “We do this to protect your privacy. My clerk, Tricia Monahan, will call out sixteen of you by your numbers, so please look at your number while she reads them. If she calls your number, kindly move up and take a seat in the jury box, starting with the upper-left corner as you face it. Trish?”

  Tricia stood, pushed her glasses up her small freckled nose, and began. I pulled out their questionnaires as Tricia called the numbers. When I saw that the electronic engineer from Silicon Valley was in the first batch, I turned my back to the jury and hissed, “Damn it.”

  As a general rule, engineers are good prosecution jurors. Smart, logical, and dispassionate, they see through defense games and have no problem convicting. This one in particular was even better because he had sat on a murder case before—and I would bet he’d been the foreman. He was perfect.

  And he was toast. Each side got twenty peremptory challenges in this case—meaning challenges we could use without having to show actual bias or inability to serve. The trick in jury selection is in how and when you use these precious challenges.