Act of God (24 page)

The blue eyes widened slightly. “Do I have to think about that?”

“There are no guarantees here, Corey,” she cautioned him. “I’ll do the very best I can, but you never really know how a jury
will decide until they come back with a verdict.”

“But how could they convict me if I didn’t do it?”

Dana sighed. “I wish I could tell you there were no innocent men in prison,” she said. “But I know better. In the final analysis,
our justice system isn’t about truth. It’s about the
appearance
of truth. It’s about what can be proven, to a reasonable certainty, to twelve specific people, at a given point in time.”

“And I can’t prove my innocence?”

“Under the law, you don’t have to prove your innocence. On the contrary, the state has to prove your guilt.”

“That’s what I don’t understand. How can they prove something that isn’t true?”

“I don’t know,” she had to tell him. “But sometimes, they do.” More often than they should, she thought to herself, but she
would never say it aloud. He was already too fragile.

“Ms. McAuliffe,” he said suddenly. “I know you’re my lawyer, and you’re going to do the best you can for me at the trial,
but, well, I guess I ought to ask—do you believe me?”

Dana stared at him. There was a routine answer to that question, of course, that had something to do with it not being her
business to doubt him, but she knew it wouldn’t be adequate just to tell him that.

“I don’t normally think about guilt or innocence, Corey,” she said. “I think about the merits of the case, and whether I can
win it. In other words, I assume innocence, which is essential to doing my job. That’s why I’ve never asked you whether you
bombed Hill House or not. To be honest, I don’t want to know.”

“Why not?”

“Because, if I did ask you, and you told me yes, you had set that bomb and killed all those people, then it would severely
handicap my efforts to defend you.”

“How?”

“Well, let’s see,” she replied. “First of all, I could never put you on the stand to testify. It would be called subornation
of perjury, and I’m not allowed to do that. I can’t knowingly let you lie under oath. I could be disbarred.”

“Are you going to put me on the stand?”

“Absolutely,” she told him. “You’re the best witness we have in this case. And you’re going to tell the jury exactly what
you told me.”

“But you couldn’t do that if you were representing a guilty person?”

“No,” she told him. “If I knew for a fact that my client was
guilty, I would look for mitigating circumstances that I could present to the jury instead, such as diminished capacity.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s when the defendant admits he did it, but we say he did it under such extreme emotional distress that he didn’t fully
realize what he was doing at the time. In other words, at the time of the crime, he was not mentally capable of knowing right
from wrong. If there’s a good enough reason for the distress, and the state is trying him on just one charge—murder one—which
means a jury doesn’t have the choice of a lesser charge, then they might be inclined to return a verdict of not guilty. The
difference is, instead of trying to refute the state’s evidence, as we do for a defendant we believe to be innocent, we would
try to justify it.”

“You mean, if I really had bombed Hill House, you would tell the jury that they should acquit me since I wasn’t in my right
mind when I did it because I was so upset about the abortion?”

“Well, maybe something like that,” Dana replied.

“You don’t have to worry, Ms. McAuliffe,” he said firmly, his clear blue eyes looking directly into hers. “I didn’t kill those
people.”

She smiled a bit. “That’s good,” she said. “Because I might have had a pretty hard time convincing a jury that you were still
under extreme emotional distress three months after the fact.”

“You do believe me, don’t you?” he asked softly.

“Well, since it doesn’t really matter to the defense of your case,” Dana replied, “and I can see how much it matters to you,
the answer is, yes, I believe you. I don’t think you had anything to do with the bombing of Hill House.”

Corey let out a breath that was so deep and so long that it seemed as though he had been holding it for months. “Thank you,”
he said. “I’m ready for tomorrow now. I know everything will be all right. God is with me, and you’re with me, and if that
isn’t an unbeatable team, I don’t know what is.”

T
he King County Courthouse dominated an entire city block. The massive twelve-story, H-shaped building was separated from the
jail by the County Administration Building, but connected to it by a rather ingenious, if unattractive skyway, which was used
primarily to shuttle defendants safely back and forth.

Constructed of white brick and granite in Corinthian style, with a columned portico, traditional high ceilings, classic moldings,
and elegant marble interiors, the courthouse had opened for business in 1930.

Allison Ackerman had only a passing interest in architectural dinosaurs. It was shortly before eight o’clock on Tuesday as
she crossed the building’s portico, pushed through one of the revolving doors, surrendered her handbag for a security check,
and made her way to the seventh floor.

When the elevator opened into a dramatic oval-shaped lobby, she turned to the left, retracing her steps of four days ago to
Room C701, the room where prospective jurors were required to report. She had been told on Friday that one hundred and twenty
people, an unheard-of number, had been called in
for the Latham trial. It appeared that all but perhaps a handful had returned, and were now trying to cram themselves into
a space usually occupied by no more than fifty.

Allison checked in at the desk, giving her name and group identification number. In return, she was handed a white plastic
tag that classified her as a juror in big red letters, and assigned a number, 52. She dutifully attached the badge to her
jacket before squeezing herself into an empty chair along the wall.

It took a minimal amount of observation for her to conclude that those assembled came from every social stratum, every educational
level, every occupational category, and every age and income bracket that King County had to offer. She saw suits, dresses,
housecoats, and blue jeans, along with briefcases, tote bags, and lunch boxes. She wondered which twelve of these people would
end up serving on the jury.

A capital case was an interesting process, she decided, and one to observe carefully. When she had arrived at the courthouse
the previous Friday, only her fourth visit in nearly a decade, Allison was presented with a clipboard holding two separate
questionnaires that she was instructed to complete to the best of her ability. Flipping casually through them, she realized
she had never seen anything like this: page after page of repetitive requests for specific information that in some instances,
she was sure, bordered on being invasive. It would not have surprised her to find, buried somewhere in the fine print, questions
concerning her weight, her sexual preference, and whether she had ever been a member of the communist party. Her curiosity
thoroughly piqued, she had done the best she could with it.

It occurred to her now, as she waited for the next step in the process to begin, that she would be required to speak to those
responses, and so she sat there and tried to remember exactly what it was she had written, not sure that she could.

Nor was she even sure that she knew what she was doing here. It would have been so easy for her to get out of jury duty.
She had been excused three times before, each time for a legitimate reason. But there had been no ready excuse this time,
and something had stopped her from manufacturing one. She wondered whether the real reason she was here, and willing to participate
in the Latham trial, was because she had a specific interest in its outcome.

The Honorable Abraham Bendali was not, by any stretch of the imagination, what one would call a defendant’s judge, but he
had a twenty-five-year history of being unerringly fair.

“We couldn’t have done better,” Brian Ayres told Mark Hoffman when the assignment was posted. “He used to be one of us.”

“We could have done a lot worse,” Dana was quick to assure Joan Wills. “He may be tough on defendants, but he knows the law
better than anyone else on the bench, and he sticks to it.”

A massive man by normal standards, Bendali’s six-foot-four-inch frame was reputed to be supporting more than three hundred
pounds. It was the result of a childhood of starvation, which he understood intellectually well enough, but could never seem
to deal with emotionally. His doctors had long ago given up berating him. His wife had long ago traded their king-sized bed
in for twin beds. Out of fear of being crushed in the night, she said.

He was sixty-seven years old, and he had been fortunate to live most of those years in generally good health. The bulk of
his diet consisted of fruits, vegetables, and grains, if in gargantuan quantities. He had not touched red meat in over fifteen
years, and he regularly measured his cholesterol at a respectable two hundred and twelve. And every dawn, weather notwithstanding,
which was no small thing in Seattle, Bendali could be seen propelling his custom-made kayak through the waters of Lake
Washington; huge, authoritarian strokes that swept him miles away from the beachfront of his Kirkland home and back again.

Inside the King County Courthouse, he dominated the bench as he dominated the lake, ruling his courtroom with a firm hand
and a steely glance, demanding proper conduct and orderly proceedings, and tolerating minimal legal nonsense. It was said
that he had once reduced an unprepared attorney to tears by leveling an expectant gaze on him for five full minutes.

Magnified to enormous proportions by thick, gold-rimmed glasses, his deep-set brown eyes missed very little that went on below
him. His bushy brows were frequently used as a means of direct, albeit silent, communication. A fringe of gray, which he shaved
off as soon as it grew long enough to engage a razor, was all that remained of a once full head of hair. His appearance, added
to his reputation for both personal and professional integrity, had earned him the nickname Mr. Clean.

Bendali had not asked for the Latham case, but he had not refused it, either. He knew exactly why it had been assigned to
him—so that no hint of impropriety could ever be attached to the trial or its outcome, by either side.

“We’ve got to keep a tight lid on this,” the presiding judge told him. “We want it over and done with as quickly as possible.
We’ll give you all the security you need. We’ll take every precaution. We’ll back you up on any decision you make.”

Bendali nodded. He had handled his share of high-profile cases over the years, both as a judge and as a King County prosecutor
before that. Although nothing else quite rose to the level of Latham, he had a pretty fair idea of the media feeding frenzy
that was already in progress, and promised to overwhelm the proceedings, if left unchecked. His first action, therefore, was
to exercise his right to bar all cameras from his courtroom.

Members of the broadcast media were furious, trying every legal maneuver they could invent to force him to reverse his decision.
Their efforts failed.

“But the people have a right to know,” they protested.

“And so they will,” the five-term Superior Court judge, who over the years had rejected at least a dozen serious political
overtures, and several attempts to elevate him to a higher bench, replied. “The old-fashioned way.”

“But this case has historic merit,” they argued. “It could set legal precedent well into the next century. The essence of
it should not be diluted by secondhand evaluation, but should be accurately documented and preserved.”

“To the best of my knowledge, court documents are reliably accurate and always preserved.”

They tried persuading him with flattery. “The exposure will make you famous,” they said.

“Who do I look like?” he retorted. “Lance Ito?”

“You’re favoring some over others,” they claimed, resorting to petulance.

“Nonsense,” he declared. “I don’t like any of you.”

“He’s biased against the media,” they proclaimed, eventually jumping at any opportunity to discredit him.

“He’s using Hitler tactics!” one of the more careless thought it opportune to suggest.

Abraham Bendali, Holocaust survivor, did not bother to respond to that. He designated two rows at the back of his courtroom,
which would accommodate approximately forty properly accredited members of the press, to be seated on a first-come-first-served
basis, and then turned his attention to other matters.

Brian Ayres was philosophical about the ruling. He knew Bendali well, had appeared before him many times, and had anticipated
his decision.

“It would have helped us, of course, to keep emotions running on high,” he told his assistant. “But it won’t hurt us that
much.”

Dana McAuliffe was delighted. Since the jury was not
going to be sequestered, the less dramatic the recounting of the trial was on every evening newscast, the better it would
be for her client.