Trial and Terror

by ADAM L PENENBERG

Detective Tyler shook his head. “We kept it from the press to discourage copycats, although I suppose someone here in the court system could have gotten wind.”

  Hightower said, “It didn’t even come up during the trial. Why is that, Mr. Raines?”

  “The prosecution contends the mark was a red herring, that the defendant was trying to throw the police off her trail,” Raines said. “That’s why we didn’t bother having that aspect of the ME’s report entered into the record. Since the defense hasn’t presented its case yet, it’s obvious why we didn’t hear it from them.”

  “Do you wish to amend that contention?” Hightower asked.

  “No,” Raines answered. “I’m not convinced it’s the same murderer. The physical evidence is, for now, inconclusive. And there are key differences. Namely, that the body was dumped on the courthouse steps sometime during the night. There is no evidence that the victim was killed at home like the others. Also, the victim is obviously not in law enforcement.”

  Hightower tweaked his venetian blinds and looked out on the swarm of media out front. “So what are we going to do about this case? The national media’s gotten hold of it. Already my court clerk has received hundreds of calls and thousands of emails begging me to drop the charges.”

  Raines looked out the window. “How do we know the jury’s not tainted?”

  Hightower sipped bourbon. It was early, but... “As soon as I got the word, I told the bailiffs to round them up and sequester them, but they could have gotten an earful of media coverage on this. They couldn’t have known to shut off their TVs, radios, and not read the newspapers. They were told to avoid the Stephanie Killington case. I interviewed each one independently; most of them admitted they’d heard about this latest murder but swore they’d be able to reach a fair and impartial verdict.”

  “The question is, can we believe them?” Raines asked. “They’ve invested more than a week into this trial. My experience with jurors is once they’ve been seated, they want to go the distance. How do we know they’re not telling you what you want to hear?”

  “You make a valid point, but what do you want me to do—declare a mistrial? Wait for the police to complete their investigation?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  The judge went to the window again and fiddled with the blinds. After surveying the press corps again, he focused his eyes on Raines. “There is another option available to us.”

  Raines stood, pushing his chair back with the backs of his legs. “I won’t do it. There is no way I’ll drop the charges.”

  “If I declare a mistrial, there’s no way you’ll win next time around and you know it,” Hightower shot back. “Your eyewitness is a kook, your physical evidence is shit, and there is substantial proof that Detective Tyler planted evidence.”

  Tyler opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it.

  “If I let the jury decide,” Hightower continued, “there’s a good chance they’ll acquit Ms. Killington anyway. There’s no way that at least one of them wasn’t influenced by the similarities in these two murders. Frankly, if I were on the jury, I’d vote to acquit her because you did not present compelling proof of her guilt.”

  “If you’re so sure,” Raines said, “then why don’t you tell the jury to go home and issue a directed verdict of not guilty?”

  Hightower smiled sweetly. “That’s a marvelous suggestion.”

  Raines chewed on his bottom lip, his dreams of a judgeship in tatters. He took a moment to weigh his options. “The D.A. drops the charges.”

  “Even better,” the judge said, barely able to conceal his glee.

  Raines kicked the wastebasket on his way out, scattering balls of paper and tissues.

  After Raines slammed the door behind him, Hightower calmly bent down to pick up the mess. When he was finished, he turned his attention to the back of the room.

  “Summer,” he said, “Please extend my apologies to your client about this miscarriage of justice. I’m afraid Mr. Raines was a little too ambitious.”

  Summer had been seated quietly, fidgeting with her turtleneck. Thankfully the weather was cooler today. “I will, Judge.”

  “Good.” Hightower stood over her. “I must point out that two out of four of the main players in the Marsalis video-rape trial are now dead. I have accepted the police’s offer of protection and recommend you do too until they get to the bottom of this.”

  “No police protection for me, Your Honor,” she said simply.

  “Have it your way, Summer.”

  Epilogue

  Summer dug through her closet and removed a garbage bag. She dumped the contents on the floor. The window looking out on to the sea was boarded up. There was a patch of dried blood not far from the desk where she had once kept her computer.

  Clack-clack-clack at the door. “It’s Tai. Open up.”

  Summer was too weary to move. “Door’s open.”

  Tai came in, his arm wrapped in gauze and supported by a sling. He surveyed the mess. “We have to get rid of this stuff,” he said.

  “Well, things were tight.” Summer looked up at him. “It’s hard for me to trust anyone. Things may not always be smooth between us.”

  He touched her cheek with his good hand. “I know. Besides, you’re a killer and I’m an accomplice to jury tampering.”

  “And about a dozen other violations of the penal code.” Summer looked into his eyes and lost herself in their sparkling green. “I’ll never be able to thank you for saving my life. When Marsalis held that knife at my throat, I saw my whole life flash before my eyes, and not only was it a short reel, I didn’t like what I saw.”

  “You saved my life too, don’t you remember?” Tai mussed her hair. “You know when I figured it out?”

  Summer began putting the tape, gun, condoms, and knife back into the bag and waited for Tai to continue.

  “At my place,” Tai said, “after you told me about the scars on your back. Ignacio told me a similar story of sado-masochistic kink after I sprung her.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Tai looked at her like she was as dense as the language in the penal code. “I didn’t want to scare you off. Besides, if you denied it, what was I going to do? Without you, your client would have fried for a murder she didn’t commit. I got no problem how this turned out: Gundy deserved to die. In cop talk, we say it’s a ‘C.C.’—‘condition corrected.’ ”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “But to satisfy my curiosity… tell me what happened the night Gundy died?”

  Summer twisted the end of the bag and tied it in a knot. “I didn’t go over there with the intent to hurt him. I just wanted to find proof that he was the one who raped me. I held a gun on him and made him tell me where he kept his tools. Gundy was a coward. He was easy to intimidate. I made him pull his pants down and stand by the railing on the second floor so I could keep my eye on him while I searched his bedroom closet. After I found this garbage bag and all his neat little toys inside, I started to call the police, but he freaked. He knew I couldn’t just shoot him, so he hopped toward me and grabbed the gun. We fought over it. He lost his balance, tripped, and crashed through the railing.” Summer stopped to take a deep breath, living in the memory.

  Tai prodded gently. “And then?”

  Her voice wavered. “He was in bad shape when I got to him. I didn’t know what to do. He started to dial 9-1-1, but he died before completing the call. I realized this was a point of no return: He was the highest-ranking prosecutor in the county, and I just knew the D.A. would find a way to string me up. Then I remembered that old case my father worked on; hence the mescal and lipstick.”

  “Strickland,” Tai said.

  “Strickland,” Summer repeated. “But two things went wrong. Number one, I forgot about the pictures of Jonathan Sadbury. They just didn’t seem important at the time. When the cops arrested SK and I was appointed to represent her, I almost turned myself in. But that would have meant that Gundy would not o
nly have succeeded in scarring me for life, but getting me thrown in jail, too. I just couldn’t let him win.”

  “And number two was Marsalis.”

  Summer nodded. “He had video of me in Gundy’s apartment when he died.”

  “That’s why you wouldn’t let the cops—or me, for that matter—help you out,” Tai said. “What tipped you off about Gundy?”

  “After one heated exchange during Marsalis’s rape trial, he and I had words in the elevator. ‘How do you know you’re not defending your rapist?’ he asked. ‘How do you know he isn’t the one who burned your back?’ But the thing is, not a soul could have known about that. I was too ashamed to tell anyone.”

  Tai whistled through his teeth. “Aren’t you afraid someone’s going to stumble on to Marsalis’s website and find that video of you killing Gundy?”

  “No,” she said. “This website will always be up, floating around in cyberland, but accessible only to me, since I’m the only one who knows the passwords. If anyone ever finds Marsalis’s hideaway, and I wouldn’t bet on it, it’ll set off an alarm and cut off access, like it did when the cops found his surveillance equipment at Gundy’s condo. If someone tries to hack in with the wrong passwords, the site will either implode, or, knowing Marsalis, it’ll send out a nasty virus. I think what’s really weird is that Marsalis wanted his final attack on me to be immortalized on the Internet. Ironically, it will be, only I’m the only one able to access it.”

  “Forget about Gundy,” Tai said. “I want to see us.”

  Summer clicked on the icon labeled “Summer’s House” and scrolled to a date two days prior. She double-clicked on it and the screen blossomed into video. Summer fast-forwarded past the point where Marsalis dragged her inside by her hair, past the fight and conversation, up until the point where he was plucking buttons off her blouse one at a time with his knife.

  While the computer whirred, Summer and Tai watched intently:

  Marsalis dug the blade into her neck and pulled up her skirt, his hand crawling upward. “Let your fingers do the walking,” he sang.

  “Marsalis, stop it!” She punched him square in the face.

  He stopped for an instant, and then curled his hand and squeezed.

  Summer cried out.

  He cut Summer’s bra off with the knife and her breasts fell free.

  Marsalis bent over to lick them, when there was a shattering explosion of glass.

  Tai was writhing on the floor, rolling in glass, yelling, “Shit, shit, shit!” His gun had been jarred from his hand.

  Marsalis let go of Summer and turned on him. Before Tai could retrieve the gun, Marsalis raised the knife like a javelin and threw it. The blade pierced Tai’s arm and pinned him to the floor. Tai screamed. Blood flowed out of him.

  The gun was just precious inches out of his grasp. When he couldn’t reach it, Tai fought through the pain and struggled to unpin himself. Marsalis approached, and Tai wrestled with the knife and, while roaring in agony, yanked it out of his arm.

  Marsalis, calculating the distance, turned back from Tai, who was fumbling with the gun safety, and pulled out the plugs inputted into Summer’s computer monitor. He picked it up over his head and started toward Tai, who was operating with only one hand, his bad one.

  Marsalis was about to heave the computer when Summer leaped up and kicked him from behind. Marsalis’s spine buckled. He lost his balance, slipping on Tai’s blood. The computer came crashing down on his head. Marsalis was still, his legs bent, his arms spread out.

  Summer ran to Tai, who was covered in sticky blood. She told him she would be right back and returned with a towel. She made a tourniquet for him.

  “What do we do about him?” Tai asked.

  “I suppose I should check his pulse, see if he’s alive.”

  “Don’t.” Tai grunted his way to his feet. He winced. “You got any booze?”

  “Under the kitchen sink.”

  Tai, holding his arm up, fetched a bottle of tequila. He handed it to Summer. “Could you open it?”

  She did and Tai took two deep sips. He sighed. “That’s better.” He handed the bottle back to her. “Put the cap back on, please.” She did. “Now, wipe the bottle thoroughly with your shirt.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get SK off, that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Summer shut the computer down.

  Tai touched the tender part of his arm. “What now?” he asked.

  “I think it’s up to you,” Summer said.

  Tai extracted a pair of handcuffs from his blazer pocket. One shackle he cuffed to her wrist, the other to his.

  Summer didn’t resist. “You’re arresting me?”

  Tai led her to the bedroom and pulled her on to the bed. “Who said anything about arresting you?” he said. “I’m just making sure you don’t run away again.”

  He unknotted the sling and tossed it aside, then pushed her shoulders down onto the bed, until she was pinned under him.

  Between kisses, he said, “Hang on, Summer, because I’m going to love you today, tomorrow, forever.”

  The End

  About the Author

  Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at New York University who has written for Fast Company, Forbes, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, Slate, Playboy, and the Economist. A former senior editor at Forbes and a reporter for Forbes.com, Penenberg garnered national attention in 1998 for unmasking serial fabricator Stephen Glass of the New Republic. Penenberg’s story was a watershed for online investigative journalism and portrayed in the film Shattered Glass (Steve Zahn plays Penenberg).

  Penenberg has published several books that have been optioned for film and serialized in the New York Times Magazine, Wired UK, and the Financial Times, and won a Deadline Club Award for feature reporting for his Fast Company story “Revenge of the Nerds,” which looked at the future of movie-making. He has appeared on NBC’s The Today Show as well as on CNN and all the major news networks, and has been quoted about media and technology in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Wired News, Ad Age, Marketwatch, Politico, and many others.

  Wayzgoose Press is proud to present Adam’s novel Virtually True, available on Amazon:

  True Ailey is a journalist in a strange land, exiled by his network to a damp Southeast Asian republic gouged out a war-ravaged peninsula weeping monsoon tears. When his friend is murdered, True sets out to find the killers, and in the process untangles a vast conspiracy that threatens to upend the global balance of power. Set in the near future, Virtually True takes readers on a wild ride through a world where nothing is what it seems, corporations rule, technology has been woven into the fabric of people’s lives, and information can be both weapon and life-saver.

  Award-winning journalist Adam Penenberg, whom Slate called “one of the best-known technology writers in the world,” has peopled a literary thriller with unforgettable characters and crafted a plot worthy of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Martin Cruz Smith.