In Self Defense (29 page)

“I was right about her,” Sundstrom stormed.  “Right from the start, when the police brought me nothing, I had a hunch about her.  I told those detectives what to do, where to look -- damn it, I made their half-assed case for them.  And now I’m stuck with it. “

“And now you have to focus,” Colby said a trifle sharply.  “You were right.  She did mean to kill her husband.  She as good as admitted it.  So you’ve got her.”

“Yeah,” the prosecutor muttered, “and now all I have to do is figure out how to get the jury not to think about what a screw-up I am and nail her for it.”

“Let her talk,” Colby proposed.  “She obviously wants to tell all.  Let her.  Let her hang herself with her own words.”

“That’s risky,” Sundstrom said, but it was clear he was intrigued by the idea.  The question was -- could he figure out a way to trip her up?  “Johansen is no slouch.  He won’t let me turn her.”

Colby shrugged.  “She opened the door.”

***

“So, Mrs. Durant,” Sundstrom began the following morning, “just how do you think your husband was trying to kill you?”

“It started with arsenic poisoning,” Clare replied.  “I started getting sick a couple of months after two attorneys, the chief financial officer of Nicolaidis Industries, and I all told Richard what would happen if he chose to divorce me.”

“Arsenic poisoning?”

“I know it sounds melodramatic,” she said, “but since experiencing it firsthand, I’ve learned that this kind of poisoning can be very effective if done properly.  It’s undetectable and insidious the way it eats through your whole system.  I used to drink a particular brand of bottled water.  I had it delivered by the case, and I was the only one in the house who drank it.  When I was the only one to get sick, and none of the medications my doctor prescribed worked, he performed some tests on me that confirmed the presence of high levels of arsenic.  Then he requested that the water be tested, and sure enough, it tested positive for arsenic.”

“Water frequently contains arsenic,” the prosecutor suggested reasonably enough.

“Yes, but it’s usually a low, relatively harmless level,” she reminded him.  “The level found in the water I was drinking was thirty times higher than normal.  After the arsenic was discovered, the water company recalled hundreds of cases from the same lot, and reported that all of them tested negative.  Only my cases were contaminated.”

“That could be coincidental, you know.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I thought at the time,” Clare conceded.  “After all, I couldn’t think of anyone who would have any reason to want me dead.  But just a few months later, after I went through treatment, and my tests came back indicating that I was finally clear of the poison, came Father’s Day.”

“Father’s Day?” the prosecutor echoed.

“My husband, who had successfully climbed Mount Rainier, and considered anything less a waste of his time, suggested we spend Father’s Day in the Olympic Mountains.  And then he insisted on taking us down a remote route designated for only the most experienced climbers, which the children and I certainly were not.  And during that descent, and within talking distance of my children, I might add, I found myself unceremoniously helped off the side of the mountain and only by the grace of God did I end up clinging to a rock for dear life.”

“Are you sure?  Couldn’t you be mistaken?  Couldn’t you have simply tripped?”  The prosecutor knew he wasn’t getting what he wanted, but he was now hopelessly intrigued.

“You have no idea how badly I wanted to believe that I’d tripped, or maybe even that Richard had slipped and accidentally tripped me up,” Clare said tremulously, as memories of that day flood over her.  “And I probably could have gotten away with convincing myself of it, I was well on the way, in fact, but then, not four months later, when I was finally getting back on my feet and feeling whole again, a man in a black truck, who somehow knew exactly where I’d be and what car I’d be driving on a Saturday morning, deliberately ran me off the road.”

“Deliberately?”

“Two eyewitnesses said they believed it was deliberate.  And the man in the truck didn’t stop to contradict them.”

“And how exactly did you connect that to your husband?” Sundstrom asked.

“I found a check, made out to cash, from one of the children’s trust accounts,” Clare explained.  “It was dated two weeks before the incident.  It was for fifty thousand dollars.  We’d never taken that kind of cash out of that account before.  There’d never been any reason to.”

“Did you ask your husband about it?”

“Yes, of course I did.  He told me something about a surprise, for the children and me, for Christmas.  But, by then, I didn’t believe him anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I guess you’d just have to have known my husband as well as I did,” Clare replied.

“I assume you tried to trace the check?”

“I tried.  I found out it had been cashed at a branch of our bank in Tacoma the day it was written.  But the endorsement was too scribbled to make it out.  The only thing I could tell for sure was that it wasn’t endorsed by Richard.”

“If you truly believed that your husband was trying to kill you, Mrs. Durant,” the prosecutor asked, “why didn’t you go to the police?”

“And tell them what?” Clare asked him in return.  “I had no real evidence.  What could I say?  ‘I know my husband, and I know what he’s trying to do to me, and why he’s trying to do it, but I have no proof, so just take my word for it and arrest him before he succeeds’?”  She shook her head.  “The detectives working on this case were good people, but they were so focused on their stalker, they wanted to believe that he was the one who ran me off the road.”

“But you knew he wasn’t.”

Clare shrugged.  “As I’m sure you’re well aware, what you know and what you can prove are sometimes two very different things,” she said.  “I lived with Richard Durant for fourteen years, and I probably knew him better than he knew himself.  But the police didn’t know him.  They didn’t know him at all.”

Sundstrom decided to go for it.

“So, let me see if I have this straight,” he declared.  “What you’re now telling this jury is that you did intend to kill your husband, because your husband was trying to kill you -- in a very interesting array of ways, I might add -- and you knew the police wouldn’t do anything about it without something as inconsequential as proof.  So instead, you decided to take matters into your own hands, and make it look like you mistook him for a stalker?”

“No, that’s not how it happened,” Clare protested.

“All right then, what was it?” the prosecutor pressed.  “You couldn’t identify the shape of the man entering your room?  You couldn’t see he was carrying a suitcase?  You didn’t know it was your husband and not the stalker?”

“Don’t you get it?” she exclaimed.  “It didn’t matter who it was.  They both wanted to kill me!”

“So you say,” Sundstrom declared.  “But then, we have only your word for it, now don’t we?”

“I loved my husband very much.  And now he’s dead, and I have to live with that.  What reason would I have to lie to you?”

“Anger . . . humiliation . . . retribution . . . actually, I can think of quite a number of reasons.  Trying to stay out of jail also comes to mind.”

Clare squared her shoulders.  “Think what you like, Mr. Sundstrom,” she said.  “You have a job to do.  I understand that.  And if ridiculing me will help you do it, go right ahead.  I’ve already been betrayed, in the worst possible way, by a man I was supposed to have been able to trust.  Do you really think there’s anything you can do to me that could even come close to that?”

The prosecutor blinked.  That was not the response he had been expecting.

At the defense table, David sat calmly, his chin in his hand, and watched and listened.

“All right, then let’s talk about the night you shot your husband,” Sundstrom said, hoping to shift the jury’s focus.  “You say you couldn’t tell who was entering the bedroom, is that correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct,” Clare confirmed.

“And you were shocked when you turned on the lights and found it was your husband you had shot?”

“Yes.”

“And you also maintain that it didn’t matter who you’d shot, because whoever it was had come to kill you?”

“More or less.”

“Which is it, Mrs. Durant -- more or less?”

“My husband wanted me dead, and according to the police, so did the stalker.”

“And what weapon was your husband carrying?”

Clare looked perplexed at that.  “I don’t know,” she replied  “I didn’t see one.”

“Well, you claim you shot him in self-defense,” the prosecutor pressed.  “To support that claim means you had to have reason to believe you were in imminent danger.  If your husband wasn’t carrying a weapon, what were you in danger of?”

“I didn’t know it was my husband until I turned on the lights,” Clare reminded him.  “As far as I knew, he was in Vermont.”

“You didn’t see the man holding the suitcase silhouetted in the doorway?”

“To be honest, I didn’t see much of anything,” Clare replied.  “I heard the stairs creak.  I heard someone coming toward the door.  I saw the door open.  I saw it was a man.  I was terrified.  I thought I was going to die.  I don’t really remember anything else.”

“So, what is it you want this jury to believe -- that you didn’t know it was your husband, and that you made a perfectly reasonable mistake?  Or that you did know it was your husband, and since he wanted to kill you, anyway, it really wasn’t such a mistake?”

“There were two men who wanted to see me dead, yes,” Clare clarified.  “But when I pulled the trigger, I assumed I was shooting the stalker.  That’s what the police had led me to expect.”

“So, in other words, you simply made a mistake?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you hide the suitcase before the police got there?”

Clare sighed deeply.  “I’ve asked myself that question a hundred times,” she said.  “I don’t know why.  I don’t even remember doing it, and yet I know I must have done it because I was the only one there.  But I honestly don’t know why.”

Sundstrom paused.  “And this elaborate ruse was all because your husband was going to divorce you?”

“You still don’t understand, do you?” Clare said.  “My husband wasn’t going to divorce me -- he was going to kill me.”

“So you say.”

***

David rose slowly from his seat.   “You say you loved your husband?” he asked.

“Yes,” Clare said.  “I loved him very much.”

“And you loved him all the years of your marriage?”

“Yes.”

“Despite his numerous infidelities?”

Clare sighed.  “I know that’s hard for some people to understand, but I guess I figured that was part of what ‘for better or worse’ meant.”

“Did you threaten your husband with dismissal from Nicolaidis Industries if he divorced you?”

Tears began to fill the corners of Clare’s eyes.  “Yes, God help me, I did do that.”

“And shortly thereafter, you began having a series of life-threatening accidents?”

“Yes.”

“The night your husband died, did you know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the man you emptied your husband’s gun at was Richard Durant?”

Now the tears began to slip down Clare’s cheeks.  “No,” she whispered.  “I didn’t know who it was until I turned on the lights.  All I knew was that the police were supposed to have been there, to stop anyone from getting into the house, from getting to me, only they weren’t there, and they didn’t stop him, and I was alone, and I was scared, and I had the gun, and I apologize -- to you, to everyone -- for wanting to live!”

***

“I think you made a number of good points on cross,” Tom Colby observed.  “But I have to say, I think that redirect is going to be a hard act to follow.”

Mark Sundstrom shook his head.  “So it was all the police’s fault,” he said.  “If they’d done their jobs right, this would never have happened -- except that it was exactly what she wanted to have happen.  How convenient.”

“Still, she has a point,” his second chair said.  “The police blew it.  And how could she have known they would?”

“Crap,” Sundstrom said.  “I think she was counting on them blowing it.  She as good as said it herself -- she was going to kill whoever walked into that room.  I don’t care how many accidents she survived.  She made up that story about her husband trying to kill her, probably right after she hid the suitcase.”

***

Erin Hall sat on the sofa in her studio apartment, nursing her third shot of whiskey.  She wasn’t much of a drinker, an occasional cold beer or two after hours on a hot summer night being her preference, but this night was different.  This night she was questioning everything she had ever done in her entire career.  Because, contrary to everything good police work told her she should believe, she believed Clare Durant.

It was the only thing that made sense.  The only thing that tied everything together the way it should.  The stalker hadn’t changed his MO.  He was nowhere near Mercer Island that Saturday morning.  And he certainly had no hand in the arsenic, nor was he lurking on a mountain trail in the Olympic National Park.