Trial Run

by Anne Metikosh

  Tears stung my eyelids. I couldn’t speak.

  “Anyway,” David said wearily, “I got here as quickly as I could, but I was working on a project literally in the middle of nowhere and it took a few days to get back. By then the funeral was over.”

  I remembered the lilies I had seen in the woods and the ones he had laid on her grave. At least when my men died, I thought, I was there to say goodbye.

  “Is your family in Kingsport, then?” I asked.

  David shook his head. “Concord. My folks went back right after the funeral. Somehow, my mother has managed to persuade herself that Sukie’s murder was God’s will. Tracey’s death was part of some divine plan. She’s retreated into a kind of religious stupor, dragging Dad to church with her all the time. It’s one of those places where they do a lot of wailing and chanting. Dad just follows her like some kind of zombie. I don’t know, I guess if it helps them deal with the pain, it’s okay. At least they have each other, and their God, whoever he is, to cling to. It’s Ian I’m really worried about. My brother-in-law. He was devastated by the murders, but what’s been going on in the press since is beyond bearing.”

  “The ‘Susie’ articles?” I asked.

  “Those, and the centerfold pictures. Ian never knew that Sukie posed for those. She didn’t see any harm in a few nude pictures and the money just about put her through college. But Ian’s pretty much of a straight arrow and she let him believe she’d made it through with waitressing and a small scholarship. Seeing her like that on the covers of magazines, hearing people talk, it’s killing him. He’s afraid it’s all people will remember about her, that maybe they’ll think she was some cheap tramp who got what she deserved.”

  David’s arm lay across my shoulders. I reached up and gently drew his hand down against my cheek, and kissed it. I wondered if he knew about the tape Ian Forrester had sent to my sister.

  I asked how he had come to be part of the mock jury. “Obviously nobody knows you’re Susan Forrester’s brother, or they wouldn’t have let you within a mile of Kerrin’s office. Or the Reid’s house, for that matter.” I sat up suddenly, pushing away from him so that I could see his face. “You did that on purpose. You deliberately set out to meet Max so you could get yourself invited to the Party. Why did you do that?”

  David’s voice was cool, casual, hard. “I want to see that justice is done,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  On Monday morning, I took care of some of personal bookkeeping. The level of organization I maintained in my client’s records didn’t seem to apply to my own. As a result, it took me as long to pick my way through my little maze of bills and remittances as it did to sort out any of theirs, which was absurd considering the relative complexity of our affairs. I left the house at twelve-thirty, giving myself time to make a quick stop at the bank before meeting Dr. Natalie Reeve at one.

  Though I hadn’t consulted Natalie professionally for over two years, we still touched base every few months. She had been key to helping me deal with my mother’s illness and, to a lesser extent, with the car crash. Even with her, I had been unable to open up completely about my feelings for Brian and Rory.

  I always enjoyed our get-togethers, especially when we got together at Lotty’s. Lotty cooked seafood like no one else could. For years, I had tried working my way through the menu but it was impossible; Lotty was constantly devising new recipes. The only thing that never changed was the clam chowder. If Lotty had ever tried to replace it with something else, she would have been lynched on the spot.

  The restaurant was crowded. Natalie was already seated at a table in the far corner. She waved when she saw me, and the line of people waiting impatiently to indulge themselves reluctantly shuffled aside to let me pass.

  I threaded my way around tables set with printed cloths and colored glassware. They were well spaced, which made life easy for the wait staff and gave customers at least the illusion of privacy. Halfway across the room, I noticed a group of teenaged girls, unremarkable except for the fact that one of them was Simone Outray. She glanced up as I passed and our eyes locked briefly. I smiled politely. She did not. But the dull flush of embarrassment on her cheeks told me she remembered where we’d met.

  Natalie greeted me with a hug and said, “Well, don’t you look great. Where did you get that fabulous sweater?”

  We spent a half hour on soup and social niceties before the conversation swung, as it inevitably did these days, to the Outray case.

  “I heard Kerrin’s involved in that one,” Natalie said. “I sure don’t envy her.”

  She and Kerrin had trained together and, at one point, they had even talked about going into partnership, but then Brian had come along and Kerrin’s focus had shifted away from clinical psychology.

  I said, “What’s your opinion of a defendant hiring a psychiatrist and pleading insanity or diminished capacity or whatever? Professionally, I mean.”

  Natalie is the sort of plump, fair, flyaway woman you expect to find baking brownies and running the PTA rather than counseling troubled teens for a living and rock climbing in her rare time off.

  She shook her head at my question. “Criminal responsibility is never a medical call, Nina, it’s a legal one. A psychiatrist goes into court to try to describe the defendant’s state of mind at the time a crime was committed — though that’s sort of like trying to reconstruct a dream you had the night before. Of course, the prosecution hires a different psychiatrist, who usually shoots her down. It’s up to the jury to decide which one is more credible, and whether the person they’re talking about is, in fact, responsible for the criminal act in question.”

  “But most jurors have no more medical background than I do,” I objected. “How can they be expected to take complex medical testimony and apply the law to it?”

  “That’s the crux of the problem exactly. Can a lay jury reasonably settle a scientific argument? It’s one thing if they’re presented with a well-established organic illness, like epilepsy. But when you get into a more controversial diagnosis, like stunted emotional development or personality disorder, things get a lot more uncertain. The question always arises, has the defendant made this condition up in order to get away with murder? It makes a tough case for a lawyer to win. Which is why they turn to people like Kerrin for advice.”

  The waitress came over to clear plates and pour coffee. While Natalie added cream and sugar to hers, I said, “But aren’t there some kind of tests to measure a person’s mental health? Surely there must be some basic guidelines to follow in coming up with a diagnosis in the first place. It wasn’t that tough to figure out Mom had Alzheimer’s.”

  “No, in her case it wasn’t.” Natalie stirred her coffee. “And sure, there are tests in place for mental disorders. But you need someone to measure the test results and that’s where you can get a lot of disagreement. I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago in New York. One of the key speakers was a forensic psychiatrist and the case study he presented included a diagnostic tool called the PET scan. Positron emission technology. It’s a functional brain scan that gives you pictures of the activity in a living, working brain.”

  “What? How does that work?”

  “Okay. You know that a brain requires glucose to function.”

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling at the slab of chocolate cake the waitress reverently placed in the middle of our table. Natalie grinned and forked up an inelegant mouthful. I waited while she swallowed and dabbed her mouth with her napkin.

  “So,” she said. “You inject radioactive glucose into the subject, and the PET indicates where in the brain sugar is being used. If the pictures show decreased glucose use, then the brain is not functioning normally. Seems straightforward, right? The problem is, scientists are still trying to decide what the pictures they get actually reveal. I mean, how do you evaluate judgment or remorse or impulsiveness in a person?�
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  I said, “Maybe you can’t measure them specifically, but isn’t the decreased glucose use enough to determine that something is out of whack in the person’s brain?”

  Natalie pointed her fork at me. “You have just hit on the very point this psychiatrist was making. In his case study, he showed us the PET scans for two stroke victims. The pictures were nearly identical, which would lead you to expect that the clinical findings for the two people would also be similar, right? They’d have the same problems. In fact, they weren’t even close. The one guy was paralyzed on his right side and had practically no speech. The other one looked clinically fine.”

  I nodded. “So even though the pictures indicated some kind of trauma or malfunction or whatever in the brain, it wasn’t clear what the problem was.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If you took that kind of evidence to court, you’d have experts on both sides arguing that it proved their case. In fact, all you’d be presenting the jury with is a scientific dispute.”

  Natalie said, “And as we all know, to a jury, conflict among the experts means a reasonable doubt. They’re forced to err on the side of caution. So all the scientific evidence that should prove a case one way or the other ends up being used as nothing more than a prop to create confusion in the courtroom, rather than to clarify something technical.”

  I signaled the waitress for a coffee refill. “Aside from this PET scan aren’t there any established tests that are more reliable? Less disputable?”

  “Sure. But you have to remember that any kind of testing can be a double-edged sword. Any defense lawyer worth his salt is going to be pretty selective about it; he’s only going to present the bits that are beneficial to his case. He’s going to take his best shot at linking his client’s mental disorder to the criminal act, preferably by establishing some kind of pattern of behavioral abnormality, and the psychiatrist is going to provide him with the bullets. But the lawyer has to be careful, because test results that ‘prove’ a mental disorder could also indicate potential future dangerousness. Is dangerousness a word? Anyway, you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I’m afraid I do. Both sides get so preoccupied with scoring points that somehow the facts get lost.”

  Natalie gave me a look I recognized from my sessions in her office. “Are you worried about Kerrin in this case,” she asked, “Or something else?”

  “Kerrin,” I said. “And something else.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  I shook my head.

  “So what’s new?” she said. “You’ve got my number. Use it if you need an ear. I’ve got to run. I’ve got a patient at two-thirty.”

  It was my turn to pick up the check, so Natalie hurried off to her appointment while I settled in to one more cup of coffee and a mental debate over the remaining hunk of cake, which my bad angel won with the argument that I never eat dessert at home.

  Guilt sharpened the edge of pleasure as I spooned up the rich dark chocolate. I was savoring the last delicious mouthful when Simone Outray flopped down in the chair Natalie had vacated.

  Without preamble she said, “What were you talking to her about?”

  After her behavior at the Party, neither her rudeness nor her abrupt question came as much of a shock. I said merely, “Her, who?”

  “Dr. Reeve.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “You were talking about me, weren’t you? Why? Did she hire you to spy on me?”

  “What the … ” I set my coffee cup very carefully back in its saucer. “Look, Simone,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Dr. Reeve is a friend of mine. We were having lunch, that’s all. I didn’t know you two knew each other, I don’t know who she is,” — though I thought I could hazard a guess — “And, frankly, I don’t want to know.”

  Simone sat stiffly opposite, radiating rage. I was beginning to wish Natalie hadn’t left. She would know how to handle this, how to defuse the hostility that was backed up like a sewer in this girl. Simone had to be one of Natalie’s patients. Nothing else could explain the girl’s anxiety at seeing us together. She stared at me for a moment longer then slumped abruptly in her chair, like a puppet whose strings have been cut, as she accepted the truth of what I was saying.

  She was wearing a thin gold bracelet on her right wrist and she began to turn it, straightening a kink in the chain. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she mumbled. “Nobody does. Not even Dr. Reeve. It’s all so awful, and I just don’t know what to do.”

  She looked on the verge of tears. I stared at her helplessly, wishing myself anywhere but there. “Simone, I’m not … ”

  A tear slid down the girl’s cheek and she raised an impatient hand to brush it away. Her tone hardened. “Oh, what the hell. What difference does any of it make? Nothing ever changes anyway and it never ends.”

  She pushed away from the table and got up. I opened my mouth to say something, but the waitress appeared at my elbow with the bill and an offer of yet more coffee, and by the time she fluttered off, Simone was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Goddamn it!” Mel Deloitte hurled a paperweight against the wall. It was heavy crystal and it shattered. The cleaning lady would be picking fragments out of the carpet for weeks.

  I had stopped by on my way home from Lotty’s, hoping to catch up on some paperwork. I had expected the lawyer to be in his downtown office and I was surprised to find him pacing his study in a fury.

  He smoothed a hand over his hair, struggling for control. “That was a damn useless thing to do. Is it too early for brandy?”

  In view of his performance with the paperweight, I thought I’d better pour. He emptied the snifter in one gulp.

  “Okay,” he said. “Damage control.”

  As Kerrin’s sister and a member of the mock jury, my status with Deloitte had been upgraded from factotum to almost equal and he seemed to regard me as a member of the team. The damage he referred to was splashed across the front page of the Daily Express. He flapped the paper at me, inviting me to read the story.

  It was not good journalism. The story was biased, emotional, and escaped being libelous only by its generous use of questions. Factual references were made to both the Kennedy Smith acquittal and the Menendez brothers’ mistrial. It was noted that in the O.J. Simpson case, the attention of the court had been successfully diverted from murder and refocused on race issues. In detailing the case against Randy Outray, the author was careful to stick to the facts but even the most perverse reader could not fail to draw the intended conclusions.

  “The stakes are high in this one, folks,” he wrote. “If he is found guilty, Randy Outray faces the death penalty. But at Max and Sonja Reid’s Christmas bash on Saturday night, he didn’t look as though he had a care in the world. Could it be he knows something we don’t? Do heavyweight lawyer Mel Deloitte and his iron lady consultant Kerrin Adams have the muscle for a knockout?”

  The article reduced a murder trial to a spectator sport whose outcome seemed as predictable as a staged wrestling match. In terms of rallying support to the victim, nothing could have been more effective. No sentimental biographies or gruesome murder scene photos would engender the same outrage and hostility as the gossipy sports motif. The unsubtle allusion that the rules of the game were different for rich players would only add fuel to the fire.

  The sidebar made my stomach ache. Throughout were echoes of my confidences to David Maitland. I couldn’t believe he’d shared them with a reporter but where else could the information have come from? A players’ roster of the defense team highlighted Deloitte’s — and half the state judiciary’s — membership at the Clubbe, speculated on steam room “negotiations” and, most painfully for me, gave a bio of Kerrin that pondered the hardening effects of personal tragedy. Far from bein
g sympathetic, it lambasted her for heartlessness. I could just imagine her reaction.

  As if on cue, the front door banged open and Kerrin stormed in waving a rolled-up newspaper in Deloitte’s face.

  “Have you seen this?” she demanded. “I found it on my doorstep, with my name underlined in red.”

  Carefully, I folded the paper I had been reading and placed it in the middle of Deloitte’s desk. Belatedly, Kerrin noticed me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I work here. At least, part of the time.”

  “Have you seen this?”

  I nodded.

  “It has to be that damned Ian Forrester again.”

  Deloitte raised an eyebrow. “Again?”

  So Kerrin hadn’t told him about the videotape after all. From her initial reaction, I’d expected her to rush right down to the courthouse and file an injunction, but she had let it go. She wouldn’t this time.

  “It’s defamatory,” she raged. “What does my private life have to do with anything?”

  “It’s no worse than what the Barker printed about Susan Forrester,” I pointed out.

  Kerrin rounded on me. “What the hell do you mean? I’m not on trial here, nor is Mel. And so far, neither is Randy Outray. The Daily Express has no business trying this case in print before it even gets to court.”

  I shook my head in amazement at her attitude. “Sorry, Kerrin, that argument won’t wash with me. You haven’t said boo about all the defamatory comments that have been leveled at Susan Forrester in the papers, and she shouldn’t be on trial at all. She was the victim.”

  Deloitte eyed me narrowly. “Just whose side are you on here, Nina?”

  “I don’t have a ‘side’, Mel,” I said. “I can see what you’re thinking: Nina’s on the mock jury, she was at the Reid’s. Maybe she planted the story. You know, I almost wish I had. It was insufferably arrogant of Randy Outray to be out partying on Saturday night. Don’t you think, as his legal counsel, you should have advised him against it?”