Golden State (35 page)

I tried to think, to say it simply. “You wrote a letter to our mother that had some similar ideas to the Cal Bomber’s manifesto. When a bomb killed three people in Berkeley, I needed to know that it couldn’t have been you. That I wasn’t hiding anything that could help catch this person.”

“So what did you do?”

“I took the manifesto and the letter to my husband at his office.”

“At the law firm of Sterling, Talbot where he was a partner?”

“Yes.”

“Does his firm represent the University of California among other well-known clients?”

“Yes.”

“What did your husband do?”

“He read what I brought him, then he consulted with another lawyer from the firm.”

“What did this lawyer do?”

“He arranged for the FBI to meet with us at the firm.”

“Hmm,” Bobby said, as if there was something ominous in what I just said.

“Did you speak to them alone?”

“My husband and his partner were present.”

“Did you identify me to the FBI as the Cal Bomber?”

“I did not,” I said, strength in my voice at last.

“Did the FBI indicate to you that they thought the bomber could be me?”

“No. They said they were pursuing many leads in the case. That you didn’t fit their profile.”

”Did you speak without any preconditions?”

“No,” I said. “We needed the FBI’s assurance that if our information led to your conviction, the government would not pursue the death penalty.”

“Why was that so important to you?”

“We were coming to them freely without any obligation to do it. We were providing them with information they couldn’t get anywhere else. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it if that information were to lead to your death.”

“Did the FBI agree to your precondition?”

“They gave us their word.”

“Their word,” he repeated. “Did you have any other preconditions?”

“Yes, that our tip would remain completely anonymous.”

“Why was that important to you?”

“I wanted to protect my family, and safeguard my children. I didn’t want to break our mother’s heart. I didn’t want you to bear the hurt that I could have suspected you.”

Bobby flinched ever so slightly at my last sentence, his eyes showing surprise or maybe it was anger. Then he regained his footing. “Did you remain cooperative with the FBI after I was arrested?”

“No.”

“And why was that?”

“Because they betrayed us. They’d lied to our faces.”

“The government lied,” Bobby repeated.

I looked at my brother and he smiled. “Thank you. That’s all.”

Bobby walked back to his table. I tensed, waiting for my cross-examination. The lead prosecutor looked up. “No questions, Your Honor,” he said. He didn’t have to ask me any. I’d already given him everything he could hope for. I’d made Bobby seem perfectly sane.

I went back to my seat. I had nowhere else to go. Sara refused to look at me. My mother was crying quietly.

My brother called his next witness. A trim, bald man in a dark suit took the stand. He was the FBI special agent who had written the affidavit for the warrant to search Bobby’s cabin. Bobby asked for permission to read from it.

“In other words,” he said after reading aloud a brief section, “you claimed here that you possessed definitive DNA tests pointing to me as the Cal Bomber?”

“Yes.”

“Does it say anywhere in your affidavit that seven million Americans might also be the Cal Bomber based on the same DNA tests?”

“No,” the agent said.

“Does it say anywhere in this document that the FBI had other suspects for these bombings?”

“I don’t believe so,” he said.

Bobby read from a section that said Eric and I had provided strong accusatory statements that Robert Askedahl was the Cal Bomber. “But in fact, my sister and her husband did not identify me as the Cal Bomber, correct?”

He hesitated. “Yes,” he said.

“In other words, the government lied to get their search warrant.”

The prosecutor was on his feet objecting. The judge had the statement stricken.

“No more questions, Your Honor,” Bobby said as if he were a lawyer on television.

The prosecutor, tall and steadfast, his light-colored, thinning hair combed back, rose from his seat. He held up the full bound document that Bobby had read from so we could see just how thick it was. He showed the file to the agent to establish that it was the affidavit used to request the search warrant in question.

“How many pages long is it?”

The agent knew without looking. “It is ninety-five pages long.”

“Ninety-five pages of probable cause that implicate Robert Askedahl as the Cal Bomber.” The prosecutor showed the agent a section, and asked him to describe what was detailed on the page.

“It is a list of canceled checks made out to Robert Askedahl from his family, and the dates he deposited them.”

My mother stiffened beside me, her gasp so quiet I barely heard it.

The prosecutor went through the checks one by one. My mother had sent the majority, but I had sent two and Sara one. Each check was posted a few weeks before a device was planted or a bomb went off. I had sent the last one. My brother had cashed it six weeks before the Berkeley bombing.

The lawyer worked his way through the other documents, one by one, each more damning than the last. He ended with my own statement to the FBI of when I’d last seen my brother before his arrest: the accidental meeting at my mother’s with the girls in their fancy Christmas dresses. A mail bomb had been sent from Sacramento the same week.

My neck ached from holding up my head. I glanced at my watch. Ten forty-five.

Bobby called his next witness, the sheriff of the county where my brother had lived. The sheriff, a big, rugged man with a silver mustache—he could play his own role in the TV movie of the trial—testified that the FBI had kept his department in the dark when they staked out Bobby’s cabin.

“Is it unusual that an outside law enforcement agency would not inform local enforcement of a stakeout of this kind?”

“Unusual? Disgusting is more like it. They violated law enforcement protocol.”

“So the FBI could have done anything they wanted at the cabin without being observed?”

The prosecutor objected and the judge agreed, but it didn’t matter. Bobby had finished with his surprisingly sympathetic witness.

The prosecution declined a rebuttal and it soon became clear that Bobby had no other witnesses to call to the stand. The judge brought down his gavel against the buzz in the courtroom, then ordered both sides to be ready with closing arguments at eight the next morning. Moments later, he adjourned the court.

The room seemed overly bright. There was commotion all around me, a reporter appearing at my side.

“I can’t talk,” I said, wondering how I would make it through the rest of the day.

chapter forty-nine

R
AIN STRIKING
the windshield, I drove my mother home in silence, my body aching as if I’d taken a fall. When we got there, my mother hung up her coat and put a chef’s white apron over her dress. I watched as she measured coffee into the percolator she still used, and made little sandwiches out of soft dinner rolls.

“How did everything go so wrong?” she asked, her back to me.

I didn’t know if she meant Bobby’s defending himself, my testimony, or something much greater.

“Bobby was only a year old when Sara was born,” she said. “It wasn’t good for either of them.”

I didn’t answer because she wasn’t talking to me.

“His brilliance meant too much to me,” she said.

An odd relief flooded me. She wasn’t blaming me for what I’d done.

“Your father had his life’s work establishing the educational system of California,” she said. “I made Bobby my life’s work.”

Yes, and Bobby made his life’s work destroying what both his parents had built.

I asked her when she first suspected Bobby might be mentally ill.

“Things were different then,” she said. “People didn’t have the understanding of mental illness they do now. There were these tragic souls in asylums, and there was everyone else.” She looked away. “Your father was so disappointed in Bobby,” she said quietly. “He had such high hopes for him. Maybe I went too far in the other direction.”

“But when did you first suspect?” I pressed.

“The day they arrested him,” she said, her voice breaking. “When I saw his picture on the news.”

A part of me thought she couldn’t possibly be serious. She had to have known something was wrong with Bobby long before then. But what right did I have to judge? I’d spent a lifetime choosing the story I wanted to be true over the one that was. If the ground hadn’t collapsed beneath the life I lived, I never would have stopped.

My mother set three places, poured coffee for the two us, and set a sad little ham sandwich in front of me. She sat down in her white apron, her long legs still shapely, and took a dainty bite. I wanted to say something, to protect her somehow, but I had nothing left to give. We sipped our coffee and picked at our sandwiches in silence.

I sensed Sara’s arrival before I heard it, my mother and I both looking toward the door. Then she was in the kitchen, her curly hair damp around her face, her coat wet.

“Get out of that coat,” my mother fussed, but Sara’s eyes were on me.

“You tell me,” she said, “because I don’t understand.”

I’d braced myself for her rage, but this was something else. I rolled my eyes in the direction of our mother in a plea for Sara to wait, but she’d have none of it.

“How in the name of God could you get up on the stand and ambush us like that? How could you undermine everything we’ve done to save Bobby’s life?”

Still in her wet coat, she sat down next to me. I forced myself to look at her, her face drawn, her mouth set in a thin line of pain.

“I did it because he asked. Because he didn’t have anyone else. Because he’s our brother.”

“You did it because he asked you to?” Sara slapped her head. “He’s a paranoid schizophrenic. He may be holding himself together right now but it won’t last. You gave the government just what it wanted. You handed them Bobby to kill.”

My mother stifled a sob. I stared at the barely eaten sandwich on my plate. Mother pushed back her chair. “I’m going to my room,” she said.

“Did you ever think of her,” Sara said after she’d gone. “Or just yourself?”

“You didn’t meet with Bobby in jail, Sara. You didn’t have those conversations.”

“Bobby saw you because he knew he could manipulate you,” Sara said. “You had all that guilt he could play on.”

“I know that,” I said.

“You know what you’ve done? You’ve destroyed any possibility we had of saving him.”

“We blew any chance of saving him years ago.”

“So that’s it?” She flung her hand against the air.

“Sara, I used everything I had to reason with him. But Bobby’s brain doesn’t work like yours or mine. He’s not going to get treatment. He’s not going to find redemption. His whole philosophy is an elaborate defense against knowing that his perfect mind is gone, that his possibility for greatness is gone, that he’s no more than a pathetic, crazy killer.” I looked in Sara’s eyes. “There’s no way I could save him. His delusions are all he has. I could only help him keep his dignity.”

Sara’s jaw was rigid. She must have been cold in that wet coat, her eyes overflowing with tears, but she ignored it all. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “The government is condemning a mentally ill man to death just so a bunch of politicians can act tough on crime. You could have stood up to that.”

“Yes, but the only way I could have done that was to humiliate Bobby.” I grabbed Sara’s hand. Even as she tried to pull away, I held her in my gaze. “I knew what I was doing. And if it comes to that, I’ll be there with him when he dies.”

Sara dropped her head. She was crying. We both were. I put my arm around her, and leaned my head forward until it rested next to hers. “I will not stop fighting,” Sara said. “I will not stop until the death penalty is overturned in every state in this country.”

“And I will do everything I can to support you,” I said.

* * *

W
E MOVED SLOWLY
, inexorably, leaving the house before the sun was up the next morning. We parked under the courthouse and went through security. We rode up in the elevator, Sara and I on either side of our mother. The bailiff opened the courtroom for us. The first to arrive, we took our places behind the defense table, looking straight ahead.

At eight ten, the lead prosecutor, looking confident in a fresh suit, walked over to the jury. He paused before speaking, as if weighed down by the burden he carried. His voice steady and commanding, his words plain, he spoke for the victims in the courtroom, and he spoke for the dead, the seven innocent people who had been fully alive one moment, gone the next. When he spoke about Olivia, I heard the muffled sounds of weeping. I did not move for fear of sounding my own grief.

When Bobby stood to give his closing statement, his eyes sought me out. Without thinking, I nodded. My reassurance was a gift I’d offered all my life to the people I loved.

“Something’s gone wrong in the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He faced the jury without notes, speaking with quiet passion, the great professor he might have become.

“You know it,” he said, looking in turn at each of them. “You feel it in your exhaustion as you work harder and harder just to stay in the same place. You see it in the disappearance of the outdoor life you knew as a kid, and every time a green pasture gives way to another concrete store selling junk from China.” His voice was not angry but grieving. “You feel it in your home as the assault of mindless television and the gadgets of technology rob you of your family life. You know it in your own mind when so much information comes at you from so many sources that you can’t make a clear decision.”

He paused. “And, you’ve seen it in this courtroom.”

My father had delivered his speeches in a rich baritone. He could thunder if he had to. But apart from Bobby’s tenor voice, the rest was all there: my father’s cadence, his choice of simple words, the passion held in check, the argument from the heart delivered in the second person. Like my father, he knew just when to pause to look his listeners in the eye.