Mercy (50 page)

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Wharton let out his breath slowly. "It would not have been very probable." Audra smiled. "Nothing further."

Graham stood immediately. "I'll redirect. He walked in front of the witness stand. "Dr. Wharton, if Maggie had lived through September 19, 1995, would the quality of life she was experiencing have been equal to the quality of life she enjoyed before the onset of her cancer?"

Wharton glanced at the jury. "Absolutely not."

Cam told Hannah he was going to be reviewing the log sheets for the officers who'd been on the night shift the previous few days, and then he went into his office and locked the door behind him. He sat down at his desk and picke d up the small clock in the corner. He'd gotten it for opening up his first joint savings account with Allie five years back. For a thousand bucks, they could have gotten a hot-air corn popper. They'd only had two hundred and fi fty at the time.

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, the one that held the swinging gre en files with the mimeographed sheets of blank arrest reports, transfer-ofcustody forms, voluntary confessions, cruiser logs. He'd tucked the globe M

ia had given him for Christmas into the back.

He pulled it into his hands and spun it on its magnetic axis. "Where are you

?" he said aloud. He pointed to Turkey, which they had talked about, and wal ked his fingertips all the way across to North America. He spun the globe ag ain until all the colors and countries ran together in an indistinguishable rainbow.

Then he put the globe into the garbage can beneath his desk, and covered it with ctumpled blank arrest reports so it would be thrown away with the tra sh.

Pauline Cioffi should have been a stand-up comedienne. When Graham asked h er to state her name and address and occupation for the record, she said s he was Martha Stewart's stunt double, and that she'd be happy to be a witn ess for any other trials they had coming up since it got her away from her kids.

She wore a loud, flouncy dress with purple flowers all over it and she sat i n the witness box as if she were a queen. She made lots of eye contact with the jury, and when she wasn't looking at them, she was staring directly at J

amie with compassion.

Jodi Picoult

Graham thought he'd like to hire her.

"Mrs. Cioffi," he said, "how long did you know Maggie?" She rolled her eyes upward. "Let me see. It was before Alexandra and Justin

, but I'd already had the twins and I was pregnant with Chris." She beamed at Graham. "Eight years."

"How did you meet?"

"We were taking an aerobics class together given at the town church. Like I s aid, I was pregnant, so I tried to stay in the back where no one could see ho w stupid I looked in a maternity leotard. Maggie stayed in the back because s he said she was motor-dyslexic and always went right when the rest of the cla ss went left. We just hit it off, and we went out for coffee after the first class." She glanced at the jury. "Of course, I had decaf."

"How often did you two get together?"

"Twice a week, at first; after every aerobics class. Then I got to the point where I had too many kids for a sitter to take care of, so I dropped the cl ass. Maggie would come over to my house a couple of times a week, sometimes on a weekend."

"Were you aware of Maggie's illness?"

"Yeah, I was. First of all, she couldn't get around as well as she used to. She popped pain pills all the time, and you could see her eyes glaze over so metimes when there was an ache the medicine couldn't get rid of. She was a v ery different woman from the one I met eight years back." Pauline paused. "S

he talked about the cancer a lot with me. She said she needed to get it off her chest, and she didn't want to upset Jamie."

"Can you describe for us the nature of Maggie's marriage?" Audra raised her hand. "She's not a therapist, Your Honor."

"No," Pauline said cheerfully. "Just a household guru. I do therapy, but it comes awfully cheap."

"Rephrased. How did Jamie and Maggie act around you?" Pauline sobered. "Jamie was very attached to her, and she was very much in love with him. They were the sort of couple that could have whole convers ations by just looking at each other and raising their eyebrows and shrugg ing, you know? You always sort of felt like you were intruding around them

." She smiled. "I was extremely jealous. My husband's idea of devotion is picking up his underwear from the bathroom floor." The jury laughed, and J

udge Roarke shot Pauline a quelling look. "Well, I can't think of a time s he came over

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that his name didn't come up. She told me that the wotst part about dying w ould be leaving him behind."

"Did Maggie know that she was dying?"

"Yes, but she didn't know when. She told me once that what she really wante d was some control over it. And the same day, she said that she was going t o ask Jamie to kill her."

Graham glanced at Audra, trying to circumvent an objection. "To the best of your knowledge, Mrs. Cioffi, and at the time that Maggie told you this, di d you think Jamie would be capable of doing it?"

Audra remained quiet. For a moment, so did Pauline. She stared at Jamie, as if she was speaking to him with her gaze the same way his wife had. "I don

't know," she said finally. "He would have done anything Maggie asked, but he never would have hurt her. I guess if he thought that killing her would cause her less pain than what she was already suffering every day, he would have done it."

Graham stood in front of Pauline. "Was Maggie your best friend?"

"She was the sister I never had."

"Are you angry at Jamie for killing your best friend?" Pauline's eyes slid from Graham's face, over his shoulder, to rest on Jamie. She smiled at him, and Jamie's shoulders relaxed. A benediction. "No," she said. "Absolutely not."

For the cross-examination, Audra stood up and paced between Jamie and Pau line. "How very interesting. You wished your best friend dead?" Pauline glared at Audra. She didn't like her, not her tight-ass little designe r suit or her scraped-back hair or the way she talked through her nose. Well, hell, the prosecutor had yet to see the loyalty that was part and parcel of Pa uline Cioffi. When a bully beat on her little son, Pauline had gone to the kid

's house and slapped his mother. If this prosecutor bitch started to shred Pau line's relationship with Maggie--something sacred and fine, one of the bright spots in Pauline's life--she was going to get equal treatment.

"No," Pauline said. "Of course not. You don't know what she was going thr ough."

"Yet you feel that she was better off dead. What if, Mrs. Cioffi, they found a cure for her cancer this month? Or this year?"

Pauline leaned to the edge of her seat and fixed Audra Campbell with a stare

. "But they haven't, have they?"

Audra turned around, bested. "Nothing further," she said. o

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/t wasn't until Jamie lost a dollar in the soda machine outside the courtroom that he realized he didn't believe in the legal system. It was not right tha t twelve people he'd never laid eyes on in his life were going to have a chan ce to determine his future. It was not right that they would get to hear the details of his relationship with his wife that Jamie wanted to hoard, so they wouldn't lose their intensity and shine. In a perfect world, there might be justice. But in a perfect world, nothing ever went wrong. The people you love d didn't get cancer. The issue of euthanasia wasn't up for debate. The money you put into a Coke machine actually produced a Coke.

The buttons of his shirt were pressing into his flesh. He realized he'd put it on inside out this morning; he wasn't thinking clearly. Through the tiny Plexiglas square in the swinging courtroom door he could see the American fl ag. He remembered being a little kid, trying to say the Pledge of Allegiance

, and getting the words wrong. One nation, under God. Invisible. With livery and justice for all. But this was hardly a classroom.

He considered the first few days after Maggie's death, when the only thin g that had seemed important was finding someone who would punish him. He remembered wanting to go to jail as quickly as possible. He did not know how he had come to change

his mind so radically, so that the very thought of being locked away where h e could not walk with the grass beneath his feet and the sky stretching all around him made him feel sick.

He realized he thought of jail and of dying the same way: you were just gone

. It didn't really matter exactly where you went.

Through the Plexiglas, he saw Graham make a motion with his hand. Jamie M

acDonald walked through the swinging doors and swallowed the bitter taste of his future.

A Hie shifted on the hard wooden bench. They had just called Jamie to the stand; he was being escorted up to the tiny witness box. He was wearing th e olive suit she had bought with him, and with his height and his wide sho ulders, he looked like a man hunched over a grade-school desk. She glanced around. Ellen was sitting next to her, grasping her hand and p ressing a small round black stone between them. Yesterday she had given Ja mie a mantra, a word to take home with him and up to the witness stand and anywhere else he thought he'd need to pull himself to center. Angus, God rest his soul, was a few feet away from Ian in the Wheelock ceme tery. But Allie knew he was watching. She could tell by the way she had sen sed him sitting in the passenger seat of the car he hadn't used in years bu t which Jamie had unearthed and had taken to driving to the trial. The rest of the spectators in the courtroom were people who had heard about the case, or reporters. Maybe there were court groupies. People who loved a mystery, who sat in on criminal cases and tried to guess the outcome. She was beginning to turn her attention to the stand, where Jamie was being sworn in, when the flash of a badge caught her eye. Cam slipped quietly th rough the aisle and the back of the courtroom, taking a seat several rows b ehind her.

He had started coming to the trial the day they put Maggie's doctor on the st and. He said nothing about it, and they never discussed the case at home, but then they didn't discuss much of anything at all.

Allie liked to imagine the configuration of the courtroom spectators like gue sts at a wedding. Bride's family, groom's family--prosecutor's, or defendant'

s. Every day since the trial began

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she had counted the number of people on the prosecutor's side, and the numbe r of people on the defendant's. Jamie usually lost out by a handful. Allie realized that the people watching a trial would choose a side without considering the psychological statement that they were making, and that she was reading into it. But she glanced back at Cam, caught his eye, and smiled

. Today was the first day since he'd started coming that he'd sat in support of his cousin.

'raham loved it. He absolutely loved it. He turned to Jamie, then looked surre ptitiously at the members of the jury, who kept glancing at his client's shirt and letting their eyes slide away. "Jamie," he said, "since a lot of people a re wondering, could you tell us why your shirt is on inside out?" Jamie cleared his throat and flushed. "My uncle Angus told me it's an old Sco ttish custom: if you put on a piece of clothing inside out, you're not suppos ed to turn it around because your luck will turn with it. I wasn't taking any chances today."

The juror with the Mickey Mouse tie laughed out loud. A couple of spectator s tittered. Graham walked up to the witness stand. "Jamie, on behalf of the court, let me offer my condolences on the loss of your uncle."

"Thank you," Jamie murmured.

"Can you tell the court what your occupation is?" Jamie cleared his throat. As much as he'd practiced with Graham, he was st ill nervous. "I run my own computer company," he said. "A conceptual desig n firm. We create virtual worlds."

"Virtual worlds? As in virtual reality? Sci-fi gloves and headsets and all that

?"

"Pretty much."

Graham whistled. "Sounds awfully high-tech. Could you define virtual reali ty, Jamie?"

Jamie shifted a little. He wondered, not for the first time, why Graham was bothering with questions like these. No one in the jury had a problem with J

amie's business contract with Nintendo. "Virtual reality is the willing susp ension of disbelief," he said. "It can take the form of a dream, a book, a m ovie. The reason people associate the term with computers is because compute r technology exists to actually place someone in willing suspension." Jodi Picoult

"What does that mean?"

"That there are no distractions--the real world isn't visible anymore. The artificial world becomes all you can see, or hear, or feel." He paused, pul led by the implications and ironies of his own definition. Jamie MacDonald, who had been on the cutting edge of virtual reality theme parks and toys, who had designed the Mega-Stick for Sega, and who had reconstructed reality on a ten-inch monitor screen, had never been able to truly dismiss the rea l world. Not for his wife, and now, not for himself. Whatever he and Maggie had chosen to believe about their actions, it was not enough. Like a conce ptually designed toy, once the HMD came off, once the glove and bodysuit we re removed, once you shut off the computer, you were only back where you'd started.

Jamie covered his face with his hands. Alarmed, Graham stepped forward, anxi ous to recapture his client's focus. "I'd like to talk a little about Maggie

," Graham said, letting the light that came into Jamie's eyes stand for itse lf before he pressed on with a question. "How long were you married?"

"Eleven years."

"How did you meet her?"

Jamie smiled. "She was cleaning out a man-made duck pond at the park near m y house with a mop. I couldn't take my eyes off her, and I didn't really kn ow what to say, so I picked up one of the scrub brushes lying on the grass and pitched in."