The length of the summer days almost made time hover in place, as perfect and fragile as a hummingbird. A Duluth summer felt as if it could be endless, not gone with the puff of a cold breeze. And yet everyone knew that perfection was a tease. The warmth was brief. July. August. Each sunset came with a little warning label to enjoy the moment while it lasted.
Stride lounged in a deck chair on the sand dune behind their house on their first night back from Alaska. Cindy sat beside him, nearly asleep. He wore sunglasses on the bright evening, which gave the lake a midnight glow. People jogged, and dogs ran along the sand in front of them. He was exhausted from the long flight back and the drive north from the Twin Cities, but he couldn’t recall a time when he’d felt so content with his life.
They’d had the perfect vacation. Luxurious food. Wine. Glaciers calving in front of them. Floatplanes over the remote wilderness. Hours spent in bed on a sea day, making love to the rough rhythm of the waves. Stride, who didn’t do vacations well as a rule, had set aside Duluth and the job for seven whole days. Cindy called it nothing short of a miracle.
Even so, he was happy to be home. To be in Duluth in the summertime. To feel a lake breeze, to hold Cindy’s hand, to drink cold beer from a bottle. His wife was quiet, and he knew a little part of her was sad to be back to reality, but he didn’t mind the ebb and flow of the world. He knew you could never predict the moments that would linger in your memory, but he thought this was one.
‘Favorite port?’ Cindy murmured, revisiting the trip.
‘Juneau.’
‘Favorite meal?’
‘That Chinese restaurant we ate at before we sailed from Vancouver. With the noodles. What was it called?
‘Hon.’
‘Yeah, that one,’ he said.
‘Favorite day overall?’
He nudged his sunglasses up to his forehead and let her see his eyes, and he just grinned. She laughed.
‘Sea day,’ she concluded.
‘Definitely.’
They were quiet for a while. The lake breathed waves in and out. As dusk spread shadows, the crowds on the beach thinned. Someone started a bonfire, and they could smell the wood and feel the smoke in their eyes. An ore boat glided through the nearby ship canal and rolled toward the open water. Stride wanted a cigarette, but he didn’t take one.
‘The trial starts next week,’ Cindy said.
‘I know.’
Back to reality.
The murder trial of State of Minnesota, Plaintiff, vs. Janine Snow, Defendant, was scheduled to begin on Monday. Stride knew that Dan Erickson planned to call Cindy as his first witness, and the idea of testifying weighed on his wife. She’d put it out of her mind during their trip to Alaska, but it was back as the clock ticked closer.
‘You’ll do fine,’ he told her, which was as much as he could say. His own testimony would follow hers. She would probably be off the stand in an hour; he would spend most of the day there. Then in the days to follow, Dan would build his house of cards witness by witness, and Archie would try to blow it down.
Eventually, Cindy said: ‘Do you think she’ll be convicted?’
Stride hesitated. Saying nothing would have been better, but he couldn’t remain completely silent. ‘You can never tell with juries.’
That was true. Jurors were a strange lot. Impossible to read or predict, always able to surprise. Dan said that trial attorneys were storytellers for a jury of children, and the lawyer with the best bedtime story won.
Stride respected the difficulty of what jurors had to do. They were asked to set aside a lifetime of bias, but they were also human beings, filled with prejudice and empathy. They were asked to evaluate nothing but the evidence in front of them, and yet they had to share a courtroom day after day with the man or woman whose fate they held in their hands. You couldn’t vote guilty in a felony murder case if you didn’t believe that the person behind the table ten feet away was capable of a terrible crime.
The state didn’t have to establish a motive. The defendant didn’t need a reason to cause the death of another person. Even so, every investigator and every prosecutor knew that jurors craved the why.
Why did respected surgeon Janine Snow murder her husband, Jay Ferris?
Because she was living under the threat of Jay stealing away the only thing she cared about. Her career.
‘You never found that man,’ Cindy pointed out.
‘No.’ Stride knew who she meant. They’d been unable to identify the man who’d threatened her at Miller Hill Mall. He was a ghost. ‘Guppo saw a man matching his description at the marathon, but he wasn’t able to get close. The guy disappeared before Guppo got there. But we haven’t stopped looking for him.’
‘It’s been months,’ she said. ‘If you haven’t found him by now . . .’
He didn’t answer, because he didn’t want to argue with her. Arguing only ruined the perfect day. She felt the same way, because she squeezed his fingers with her small hand and then pulled his fist to her mouth and kissed it.
‘Sorry,’ Cindy said.
‘That’s okay.’
They sat, and the evening got darker, and the wind grew a little bite off the water. It was time to go inside, to go to bed. She got up first. By then, she was mostly a shadow. She leaned down over his deck chair, with her long hair falling across him, and she kissed his lips. A hard kiss. A Cindy kiss.
‘I’m glad we went to Alaska,’ she said.
‘Me too.’
‘Nobody can ever take that away from us.’
He thought that was a strange thing for her to say, but he let it go, because it was a beautiful summer night, full of love and life. You don’t question such things. Even so, something in her voice made him shiver and think of winter.
20
Juror #5.
That was Howard Marlowe’s identifying number. He stood along with thirteen other men and women – twelve jurors, two alternates – to swear their oaths to the court. With that, the trial began.
The judge, the Honorable Jeffrey R. Edblad, spoke directly to the jury, and Howard tried to concentrate on his words. Edblad had short gray hair, black glasses, and a rounded face. If he hadn’t been a lawyer and a judge, Howard figured he could have been a teacher. He was calm, and he spoke slowly and deliberately, like a father offering words of wisdom to a teenager about to take the car out for the first time. I’ll be fair, I’ll be gentle, but I’ll be firm.
Members of the jury, you will hear testimony from witnesses in this trial. It will be up to you to evaluate their credibility and decide how much weight to give what they say. I’m asking you to be patient and listen carefully to each witness and not to come to any conclusions until you have heard all of the evidence.
Howard felt restless. It was hard to come down from the adrenaline high of being here. His eyes flicked around the courtroom, which was smaller than he expected. He and his fellow jurors were seated in blue cushioned chairs inside the jury box. The two counsel tables were placed side by side, barely six feet away from them. He thought it strange to see the prosecutor and defense attorney seated next to each other, like colleagues rather than adversaries. Judge Edblad’s platform, inside a wooden enclosure at the front of the courtroom, was only slightly elevated. There were tables and computers for the clerk and court reporter. Everyone was close together.
The room was narrow but very tall, with twenty-five-foot walls broken up by dark wood panels and white stone blocks. The chambered ceiling featured sculpted trim painted in gold and green. One set of double-wide doors led in and out to the marble hallway of the courthouse. Behind the counsel tables, a few rows of spectator benches were completely filled by the media.
You should rely on your own judgment and common sense to evaluate the testimony of each witness. You will need to decide for yourself whether they are sincere, whether you believe them, whethe
r what they say is reasonable or unreasonable.
His fellow jurors looked as ordinary as he did. Eight women. Six men. Twelve of them white, plus one black man and one black woman. The youngest juror couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. The oldest, a woman in a blue dress with her hands in her lap, was at least seventy. Howard was seated at the end of the front row, closest to the counsel tables. The lone black woman, who was in her mid-thirties and wore a burgundy pants suit, sat next to him. She had a pleasant smile.
While this trial is going on, there are things you shouldn’t do. Remember, you aren’t investigators or detectives, so you shouldn’t go looking for information about this case. Your family and friends are likely to be curious about what you’re doing, but you should not discuss the case with anyone else. You shouldn’t read articles about it in the newspaper or online or watch news reports.
Janine Snow was directly in front of him.
She was seated at the end of the counsel table beside her attorney, Archibald Gale. If she’d reached out her hand, if Howard had reached out his hand, they could have touched. She wore a light blue suit with a rose blouse underneath. Styled blond hair, each strand in place. An expressionless, enigmatic face. He could see her blue eyes as she watched the judge. She kept her hands folded primly in front of her. He was close enough to her that he could see the small birth mark near her mouth and the pale pink shade of her lipstick. As beautiful as she was, she wasn’t completely ageless. He could see tiny creases in her skin, hiding discreetly under her makeup.
He knew he was staring and that he should drag his eyes away. She must have felt him studying her, because her head swiveled slightly, and their eyes met. It felt to him just as it had in the mall that day. There was something intimate and extremely erotic about it. Her eyes didn’t smile or beg him for mercy; she simply answered his own stare, human to human, woman to man. He looked down at his lap, embarrassed.
He hadn’t lied in the juror interviews. Not really. He’d acknowledged that he was aware of the case, but that was true of anyone in Duluth. No, he hadn’t formed a conclusion about Dr. Snow’s guilt or innocence, and that was true. For everything he’d read about the murder, and for all the time he’d tried to divine the truth in pictures of her face, he really had no idea if she killed her husband. He was an ordinary man with no connection to anyone involved in the crime. The perfect juror.
‘Mr. Erickson,’ Judge Edblad said, ‘do you wish to make your opening statement?’
‘Thank you, your honor,’ Dan Erickson said, standing up.
The county attorney remained behind the counsel table, but he spoke directly to the jury. Howard listened as the prosecutor laid out the elements of the case and what they would need to decide. The legal questions. The evidence questions. It all began here.
‘This trial is about a relationship that went badly wrong,’ Erickson told them. ‘It’s about a marriage where the wife wanted out and her husband refused to let her go. This wife – the defendant, Janine Snow – saw only one way to be free of her husband. Only one way to escape. Murder. That’s the story of this case. And the witnesses and physical evidence we show you in the next few days will make the details of that story very clear. When we’re done, you will conclude beyond any reasonable doubt that, on January 28 of this year, Janine Snow shot her husband, Jay Ferris, in the head and intentionally caused his death.’
Erickson was serious and confident. He didn’t smile; he wasn’t their buddy. He wore an expensive suit, not an everyman suit, as if he wanted Howard and the other jurors to believe that he was just a little smarter than they were, knew just a little more, had been down this road enough times that you could trust whatever he said.
‘Most of what happened on January 28 isn’t in dispute,’ Erickson continued. ‘We have an eyewitness who saw the defendant and Mr. Ferris together, and we have the defendant’s own statement to the police that night. She was alone in the house with her husband on the night of the murder. They argued. Minutes later, Jay Ferris lay dead of a gunshot wound to his head in the living room of their house. Not in dispute.
‘So what led these two people to that terrible moment? Multiple witnesses will testify that the defendant wanted to end her marriage but that her husband was determined not to grant her a divorce. That the relationship between them was volatile and that each tried to inflict psychological damage on the other. That the defendant’s husband, Jay Ferris, knew about his wife’s addiction to prescription pain medications and was threatening to expose this information and destroy her medical career. He held her whole future in his hands, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the situation Janine Snow faced on January 28. That’s why she used a gun to murder her husband.
‘Did the defendant know how to fire a gun? Yes, she did. We’ll show you a photograph of her firing a gun similar in kind to the gun used to murder Jay Ferris.
‘Did the defendant have access to a gun? Yes, she did. You’ll hear a witness testify that the defendant knew that her husband owned a gun and that she concealed that knowledge from the police. Her husband’s gun has since disappeared.
‘Did the defendant take steps to conceal whether she fired a gun on January 28? Yes, she did. By her own statement to the police, she took a shower and washed her clothes that night before the police arrived. So she made it impossible to run chemical tests on her body and her clothes that would have confirmed that she had fired a gun.
‘This story isn’t hard to understand, ladies and gentlemen. You won’t need anything more than your common sense to know what happened that night. Janine Snow caused the death of Jay Ferris.’
Howard felt the blank slate of his judgment fill with suspicion as Erickson spoke. Judge Edblad had already warned them that nothing an attorney said was evidence, and yet if the evidence revealed what Erickson promised, it was hard not to believe that the case was exactly as he stated.
Then Archibald Gale stood up.
He was warm where Dan Erickson was cool. He was like Santa Claus in a two-piece suit, with his curly hair, peppery beard, and twinkling eyes. He reminded them that Janine, sitting in that chair beside him, was innocent, and that the entire burden of proof rested with the state. With each sentence, delivered with a sad shake of his head, he cast doubt on that proof.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, pay attention to what you do not hear from the state in this case. You will not hear any evidence that Dr. Snow owned a gun, because there is no such evidence.
‘You will not hear any evidence that Dr. Snow fired a gun that night, because there is no such evidence.
‘You will not hear any evidence about the gun used to murder Jay Ferris, because that gun was never found. Think about that. Whoever killed Mr. Ferris took the gun away from the crime scene. On that basis alone, it’s reasonable for you to doubt that Dr. Snow could have committed this crime. But there’s more.’
Gale took a sip of water.
‘You will learn that Jay Ferris wrote things in his job as a columnist at the Duluth News-Tribune that offended people. Outraged them. Cost them their jobs. It’s reasonable to wonder whether one of those people killed him.
‘You will learn that an unknown vehicle was parked in the neighborhood not far from Jay Ferris’s house on the night of the murder and that the police never located this vehicle or who was driving it. It’s reasonable to wonder whether that person killed him.
‘You will learn that Jay Ferris took pictures of an armed man while hiking in a park near Duluth and that the police never identified this man or interviewed him about his whereabouts on the night of the murder. It’s reasonable to wonder whether that dangerous man killed him.’
And so it went on.
By the time Archibald Gale sat down, Howard was back to where he’d started. A blank slate. He had no idea about Janine’s guilt or innocence. All he could do was stare at her face and wonder. This time, her face wasn’t a photograph on t
he computer screen in the basement of his house. She was real. She was so close that he could smell her perfume.
She was waiting for him to decide.
‘Mr. Erickson,’ Judge Edblad said, ‘call your first witness, please.’
21
Cindy felt physically ill on the witness stand.
At the counsel table, Janine offered her the tiniest of smiles. They were still friends. There were no hard feelings, even though Cindy was the first witness, pounding in the first nail.
Dan Erickson stood up to address her. Cindy knew exactly the kind of man he was. Inside the courtroom, he played his role, leading the jury down the path he wanted them to follow. Outside the courtroom, he was vain, self-absorbed, and manipulative. He was good-looking, and he knew it. He was married, but his eyes and hands wandered over every pretty woman he met.
He took her through introductions. Established who she was. And who her husband was.
‘Mrs. Stride, where were you on the evening of January 28 of this year?’
‘I was at a birthday party for Deputy Police Chief Kyle Kinnick at the Radisson Hotel.’
‘Was the defendant there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was the defendant’s husband Jay Ferris there?’
‘No.’
‘During the party, did you speak to the defendant?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Did you see her consume any alcohol?’
Cindy hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘How much?’
‘I don’t know exactly. She was drinking white wine. She had several glasses.’
‘Did the defendant subsequently ask if you would drive her home?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘And do you remember exactly what time it was when you drove her home?’
‘I remember that the clock in my car read 9:32 p.m. It’s not far. We would have reached Janine’s house just a few minutes later.’
Goodbye to the Dead (Jonathan Stride Book 7) Page 14
