Jessie Black Legal Thrillers Box Set 1

by Larry A Winters

  She noted with a sense of dismay that several of the jurors looked skeptical, and a few looked confused. She could practically hear their thoughts: What’s she talking about? I thought that kid Russell Lanford—the crazy one who hanged himself—shot those people.

  She resisted the impulse to glance into the gallery, where she knew Warren was sitting amongst the throng of spectators. Leary was there, too, but she didn’t look at him, either. She was on her own, for better or worse.

  Come on, Jessie. You’ve got this.

  She’d written and rewritten at least ten drafts of the opening statement. Looking at her jurors now, she wished she’d had a few more nights to fine-tune it further, to make it clearer. For some reason, the time between an arrest and a trial always felt shorter than it was. Two months ago, when Eldon declared that he’d managed to recover vital evidence from Harrison’s laptop, she’d felt like she had an eternity to prepare for trial. But here she was, as if time had compressed itself and pushed her from one moment to the next with barely a second to breathe.

  That wasn’t true, obviously. It only felt that way. In reality, she’d had time. Time to prepare her arguments, her witnesses, and herself. Time to prepare this statement. She was nervous, but she was ready.

  She resumed her position in front of the jury box. The jurors focused on her again. “What does Jordan Dunn’s affair with a teacher have to do with the murder of seventeen people? The evidence is going to show you that there was a direct connection. That the defendant, Clark Harrison, planned and assisted in—choreographed—the murders for the purpose of covering up his affair with Jordan Dunn.”

  Usually, at this point in an opening statement, after presenting the theme of her case, she’d have some of the jurors nodding along with her. Not this time. But several of them looked interested, even intrigued, and that was better than nothing. She’d take it.

  The spectators in the gallery also seemed interested. The media had used the months after Harrison’s arrest to turn the upcoming trial from a government proceeding into a full-blown event, and the payoff was a packed house. Those in seats squeezed in shoulder-to-shoulder, while those unable to find seats lined the back wall. She knew that this audience—the court of public opinion—was only slightly less important to win over than the jury. Warren and Rivera would probably consider them more important.

  There was a lot riding on this trial, and therefore a lot riding on her.

  Finally, she allowed herself a quick glance at the defense table. Brand and Harrison sat side-by-side, both of them dressed in nice suits. Brand was taking notes—or maybe just pretending to—on a legal pad in front of him. Harrison was watching her. Now he caught her eye, and even though his mouth remained a neutral straight line, she thought she saw a smile in his eyes. The bastard was confident that he’d outsmarted the authorities, that he’d covered his tracks, that he was going to win and walk out of here. Jessie took a deep breath and turned to face the jury again.

  “You may be wondering how Clark Harrison could be responsible for a mass shooting committed by another person. The defense will certainly raise this question, and tell you that the answer is he can’t be. But under our laws, that’s not the case. After both sides have presented their evidence, Judge Sokol will give you instructions about the law. Her Honor will explain that under Pennsylvania’s criminal code, an individual can be guilty of murder even if that individual doesn’t personally pull the trigger. Think of a person who hires a hit man. If the hitman commits a killing for hire, then both the hitman and the person paying him are both guilty of the murder. The evidence will show that Russell Lanford was like a hitman—only, unlike a hitman, Russell Lanford didn’t get paid. He paid, with his life, while Clark Harrison derived all of the benefit.”

  She watched the jurors’ reactions. Leary had actually been the one who came up with the hitman analogy, during one long night spent working on her statement. She’d thought it was pretty good. Still thought that. But the jurors didn’t look convinced. She continued to face expressions of skepticism and confusion.

  Her old professor’s advice played in her head again: Just start at the beginning, and lay it out in chronological order until you reach the end.

  “Like I said, Jordan Dunn was sixteen. You’re going to meet her parents and her little sister Ellie, who will tell you all about her. They will tell you that she was bright and helpful and loving. Ellie will tell you that even though they fought sometimes, as sisters will, Jordan was always there for her. Her father will tell you about visiting potential colleges, and the excitement in Jordan’s voice as they spent the long drive home from Amherst talking about her future. Her mother will tell you about the time they spent an afternoon volunteering together at a soup kitchen. And then you will hear from another witness, Jordan’s friend Arabella Minsky, who will tell you that Jordan had a secret. She was involved with a teacher.”

  Jessie watched the jurors closely. She knew that some of them would blame Jordan Dunn for that affair, consider her a seductress and home-wrecker. Based on the questions the jurors had answered during jury selection, she could even guess which ones. She’d removed as many as she could during the voir dire process, but a few remained on the jury—Elizabeth Armstrong, a widow who looked and spoke like a zealot who’d stepped out of the days of the Puritans, and Jane Grange, a forty-something, recently-single mom whose husband had left her for his eighteen-year-old secretary. Both women looked angry at the thought of an affair between Clark Harrison and Jordan Dunn, but angry at whom, she didn’t know. Either or both might well see Harrison as the victim, seduced by a manipulative woman.

  This was one of the challenges of the American legal system—juries were people, who brought their own histories, prejudices, and other baggage with them into their deliberations. Being persuasive on the facts and the law wasn’t always enough to overcome that hurdle. You had to read the mood of the jurors as you engaged them in a strange, one-way dialogue, in which you communicated with words and they communicated in less obvious ways—a quiet intake of breath, a widening of the eyes, the impatient jittering of a leg. You had to shift gears mid-argument—sometimes mid-sentence—to respond to these signals.

  Jessie was lucky in that she seemed to have an innate talent for “feeling” the mood of a jury. She thought she had maybe a third of these jurors shifting toward her side now, with another third undecided and a final third against her for reasons that might be logical or illogical.

  To convict, she’d need all of them.

  “Mr. Brand, the defense attorney, will tell you we don’t really know what happened between Jordan Dunn and Clark Harrison. He’s right. Jordan was secretive about the affair. She didn’t talk about it, except with her oldest childhood friend, or keep a diary. We suspect there may have been photographs or other materials on her phone, but we’ll never know, because that phone disappeared on the day of her murder. We will present evidence to you indicating that Mr. Harrison was one of the few people with access to the locker where we believe she stored the phone during the cheerleading practice at which she was killed, and a motive to hide it and any evidence it may have contained.”

  Some of the jurors peered accusingly at the defense table.

  “At any rate,” Jessie said, “we can surmise that a married man, who has recently been promoted to principal, would have a lot to lose if a secret, sexual relationship with a student came to light.”

  “Objection!” Brand said, half-standing.

  Judge Sokol nodded. She said, “Stick to the facts, please, Ms. Black.”

  “Sorry, Your Honor. I’ll move on.”

  She was supposed to limit her opening statement to the facts, and refrain from making arguments or drawing conclusions for the jury. But sometimes you had to break the rules a little bit. The idea that Harrison had a motive for murder was critical to her case. She’d gotten the idea into the jurors’ minds, and that was what mattered. She could see Jane Grange, one of her problem jurors, thinking it over.
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br />   “The facts,” Jessie said to the jurors, “lead us next to another student at Stevens Academy. That student’s name was Russell Lanford.”

  She watched the jurors’ reaction to the name, and saw looks of distaste, disgust, anger, and sadness. The jury wasn’t supposed to come to a trial with knowledge of the case, but that was impossible here, and everyone knew it. The shooting had been national news.

  “The evidence will show that Russell Lanford was a troubled and unhappy young man. He blamed a lot of his unhappiness on women. He believed that they rejected him unfairly. On the internet, he found a message board called Manpower, a forum supposedly about men’s rights, but in reality about hatred of women. The posts he found there stoked his hatred and his anger. During the trial, you will have to read some of these posts, which may be unpleasant but will be necessary for your understanding of the facts.”

  Unpleasant? Several jurors were leaning forward as if they couldn’t wait to see the message board posts. Jessie felt a grim satisfaction. It was an old trial lawyer trick. Give the jurors a preview, like a movie trailer, to increase their interest.

  “One of Russell’s teachers, Christiana Weaver, will tell you that she was so disturbed by an essay Russell wrote in her English class—an essay about the men’s rights movement as he understood it from the Manpower website—that she brought it to the attention of the principal, Clark Harrison. Mr. Harrison did not take action. Not in his capacity as school principal, anyway.”

  She gave the jurors a few seconds to ponder that.

  “It was on the Manpower message board that Russell Lanford connected with a user going by the online handle of True_Man. True_Man seemed to share Russell’s anger and frustration toward women. Moreover, he seemed sympathetic to Russell’s experiences. For example, you will see an interchange between Russell and True_Man in which they commiserate about Russell failing to get a date to a dance. As the two became closer, they took their conversation off of the public forum and used the website’s private messaging functionality instead.”

  Many of the jurors were looking at Harrison now. Some seemed to be wondering what this story had to do with him. Others had clearly already figured it out. Jane Grange had her arms crossed over her chest and was staring at Harrison with narrowed eyes. I’ve won her over, Jessie thought.

  “The evidence will show that True_Man was in fact Clark Harrison,” she said. “When you see the private messages that passed between them, you will see that Mr. Harrison, posing as the sympathetic True_Man, persuaded Russell to take violent action against female classmates. True_Man was careful to suggest a specific group of female classmates, too—the cheerleading squad, which included Jordan Dunn. Finally, Mr. Harrison helped Russell plan the attack, every detail from how to obtain the combination to his father’s gun safe, the time and place, and the escape route. Several times, Russell expressed doubt and fear and tried to back out of the plan, and each time, Mr. Harrison convinced him to proceed.”

  She had more of the jurors on her side now. Instead of a third, she had half of them, maybe more. The spectators, too. She could feel it, a sea-change in the courtroom, a swell of outrage. She looked at the defense table and saw Harrison staring at his hands, Brand scribbling on his legal pad. Could they feel it, too?

  “On a seemingly typical day, a day that will now haunt the families of the victims for the rest of their lives, Russell Lanford returned to school at around four in the afternoon carrying a large gray duffel bag filled with guns and ammunition. He walked through the gate of Stevens Academy, then circled around the building to the athletic field where the cheerleaders were practicing their routines. He took a seat in the bleachers, watched them for a moment, and then started shooting them.”

  Even though every juror had known this was coming, several of them gasped anyway.

  “Russell shot and killed every person on the squad, as well as the coach. Even when he must have heard the sound of approaching police sirens, he kept shooting. Those had been the instructions he’d received from True_Man, the online friend he had no way of knowing was actually his principal, Clark Harrison. True_Man had emphasized the importance of killing every girl. There was nothing more critical, he’d said. Russell Lanford followed that instruction. He killed everyone, including Harrison’s real target, Jordan Dunn. Some of the women died instantly. Others died later, after hours of suffering.”

  Six of the fourteen people in the jury box had tears in their eyes. One was audibly sobbing. Those with dry eyes still looked uncomfortable, exhausted, disgusted, or all three. How many were on her side now? Two-thirds? More? All of them?

  “This story started with Jordan Dunn, and it ends with Jordan Dunn, because it is and always has been about Jordan Dunn. Clark Harrison, after engaging in a risky sexual affair with her, decided he would be better off if she was dead. So he used Russell Lanford to kill her. The coach and the other fifteen young women were collateral damage, their lives callously sacrificed so that the killing would look like a random school shooting and not the targeted murder that it really was. But the truth will come out now, here, in this courtroom. And I will ask you, at the close of evidence, to find Clark Harrison guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  She paused, thanked the jurors, and returned to her seat. The courtroom was silent. The spectators in the gallery seemed frozen. Brand and Harrison sat stiffly in their chairs. Judge Sokol took a moment before she cleared her throat and suggested a short recess.

  Opening statements were critical—part skill, part art, part luck. Jessie knew that many cases were actually won or lost in opening statements.

  She sensed that this might be one of them.

  34

  Graham was on another blind date when she received the phone call from Novak. At first, she thought it was a prank. Just Novak, bored at home, having some fun with her. “Funny,” she said. She gestured to the man sitting across the table from her—a nice enough guy, definitely better than the last one her mother had dug up. One second. “Listen, I’m kind of on a date,” she said into the phone. “I’ll call you later—” Then, abruptly, she realized Novak wasn’t joking.

  To her date, she said, “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

  “Police emergency?” He said it with a sardonic smile, as if the thought were amusing. It wasn’t amusing to her. Her blood felt as if it had gone ice-cold in her veins, and the pleasant buzz she’d attained from her cocktail was gone. All she could think was, I need to call Jessie.

  She rose from her chair. Dropped her napkin onto her bare place setting. Their salads had not even arrived yet, but she’d have to forego dinner and the man who was buying it.

  “Another time, okay?” she said.

  “Wait. You’re really just going to leave?”

  She turned before he finished the sentence and headed for the door, dodging around waiters and other diners until she emerged into the chilly darkness of night.

  Her hand still gripped her phone. She brought it up now and called Jessie. The phone rang, but the prosecutor didn’t pick up. Probably busy preparing for the next day of the trial.

  She clicked off without leaving a voice mail, and texted her instead: Harrison escaped. Call me asap. She stared at her own message for a moment.

  Remembering her reaction to Novak’s call, she added: Not a joke.

  She put her phone away. She stood on a sidewalk on Walnut, in Center City. Jessie’s apartment building wasn’t far. She could probably get there in five minutes, even in heels. But there was no guarantee Jessie was home. She might be at her office, which was in the other direction. She might be at Leary’s place, wherever that was. She might be anywhere.

  A group of young guys, loud and reeking of beer, surged past her. One of them bumped her shoulder as he stumbled past and almost knocking her over. Indecision gripped her. She looked at her phone again. Jessie had not responded to her texts.

  Just because Clark Harrison had escaped from his cell didn’t mean Jessie was in danger, of course.
But the circumstances bothered her. Someone had helped Harrison escape. A guard, presumably. According to Novak’s terse update, the working theory was that Harrison had made friends with another woman-hater on the Manpower message board, possibly using a different alias than True_Man. And if that theory turned out to be correct, then she had to wonder how many aliases Harrison had. And how many people he’d influenced.

  “I know people,” he’d said. “I have a lot of friends.”

  He’d used Russell Lanford to murder seventeen people. If he had other willing online buddies, what was to stop him from using them as well? She could think of several women Harrison might want dead, but she and Jessie probably topped the list.

  I’ll try her apartment, Graham decided. Better than just standing here.

  She started heading west. After four strides, as she was passing the mouth of an alleyway between two restaurants, someone shoved her. She wasn’t expecting the collision and it almost knocked her off her feet. She staggered into the dark alley, catching herself by grabbing the side of a Dumpster. Turning, she saw a man stalking into the alley after her. The light from the street silhouetted him. He was a dark figure. She couldn’t see his face.

  Whoever he was, he’d messed with the wrong person.

  “I’m a cop, moron.” She reached for her gun, thankful that she’d made the decision to carry concealed tonight, even though doing so had a tendency to spook some of her dates.

  She knew something was wrong when her fingers brushed the top of her holster and felt the strap there open. Her gun was gone.

  “Looking for something?” the man said. “You might want to check the garbage can a few blocks east.”

  The man who’d bumped into her, she realized. Oh, shit.

  “Don’t they teach you anything at the police academy?” he said. He stepped forward, cracking his knuckles. “Or do bitches like you get a free pass so the police department can show what an equal opportunity employer it is?”