Old City Hall (13 page)

“Daddy!” she yelled in a voice so filled with pain that even the journalists, who’d snapped their heads around to look at her, hesitated with their pens. “No, Daddy, no.”

Kennicott looked back at Kevin Brace. The fog that seemed to surround him appeared to lift as he looked out at his daughter.

“Order in court!” the clerk shouted, rising to his feet.

One of the court officers put an arm around Brace and pulled him toward the prisoners’ door.

Kennicott turned back to Brace’s daughter. She had the same deep brown eyes as her father. The people in the second row had all moved out of the way, clearing a path for her. She waddled with great difficulty down the narrow row. Tears streamed down her face, and the black mascara under her eyes was running.

It didn’t seem to bother her. Despite her public display of emotion, Kennicott’s first impression was that this was a woman who could handle herself very well.

M
ost Crown Attorneys said it was the hardest part of the job, and Albert Fernandez knew he wasn’t very good at it. Meeting with the family of the victim. Listening patiently. Being a shoulder to cry on. Every family was different, and you never knew what to expect.

Two years before, in his annual review, Fernandez was told that he needed to work on his empathy skills and was sent to a Dealing with Grieving Families seminar. He’d spent a whole day in a hotel conference room listening to speaker after speaker drone on, flipping through pamphlets with such horrible titles as
Closure and Contentment—Helping Families Turn the Page.

Near the end of the afternoon, when he was on his fourth cup of watery coffee, a slight woman had taken the podium. She was well dressed in a stylish business suit, a string of pearls around her neck.

“Closure,” she said, pausing a moment to make sure she had the attention of the room. It had been a long day, and people were restless. “Is bullshit.”

Fernandez immediately sat up in his chair.

“We waited ten years for a DNA match to find the man who raped and killed our daughter.”

The room went absolutely silent.

“There was no ‘closure’ the day he was convicted. It wasn’t a magic pill. This isn’t a Hollywood movie. Forget all that psychobabble.
What we’re talking about here is grief—hard-core grief. My husband and I beat the statistics—we stayed together. I think we did it because we weren’t looking for easy answers. News flash, folks: There aren’t any.”

When the seminar was over and he was waiting in the coat-check line, Fernandez found himself standing in front of the same woman. “If I may introduce myself,” he said, extending his hand. “Albert Fernandez. I’m a Crown Attorney.”

The woman regarded him cautiously. “You here for empathy training?”

“My bosses say I need it,” Fernandez said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not great at hand-holding.”

“Good,” the woman said. “I hated all the false sympathy. People talking to me in whispers. All the brochures with pictures of flowers and sunsets. We were lucky. Our Crown Attorney was a straight shooter.”

“Who was it?”

“Jenn Raglan. You know her?”

“She’s my boss.”

“Tell her we say hello. And try to be like her, Mr. Fernandez. Don’t sugarcoat anything.”

If management had hoped Fernandez would come back from the one-day seminar a more touchy-feely Crown, they were sorely mistaken. In his subsequent meetings with victims’ families, he was not warmer or more overtly sympathetic than he’d been before. But something had changed. And the forms that the families filled out at the end of the cases turned from negative to positive.

Crown Attorneys at Old City Hall met their families in the Victim Services office on the third floor. It featured a small waiting area and a big room inside that was once the city clerk’s office. Fernandez hated everything about the place: the soft-focus photography posters on the wall, the doily-covered cookie trays displayed on the big oak side table, the soft brown chairs. The place was insipid, and the people who worked there were worse. They dressed as if they were on their way to a folk music concert and wore big smiley-face
VICTIM SERVICES
badges
with their names on them and the slogan
REMEMBER YESTERDAY, SURVIVE TODAY, LIVE FOR TOMORROW
.

To make it even worse, the huge old metal radiator in the corner of the inner office was totally unregulated. Sometimes it froze overnight. In the morning the room would be at subzero temperature, and the knocking of the radiator was deafening until it warmed up. Other days it would steam out of control, making the room insanely hot. There was only one small round window at the top of the wall near the ceiling, and it had been painted shut for decades.

It was lunchtime and the inner room was still boiling. Fernandez opened the door and started yanking it back and forth in a fruitless attempt to fan some of the heat out. The things I do in this job that nobody sees, he thought to himself. He finally gave up and simply opened both the inner and outer doors and waited.

A few minutes later Detective Greene walked down the wide hallway with an elderly, fit-looking couple. It was standard procedure to meet the victim’s family in the presence of the officer in charge of the case. Beside them was a large woman in a billowing dress and Birken-stock sandals. She was carrying a plastic clipboard with a sticker of a big red heart on the back, and her
VICTIM SERVICES
badge was pinned just above her large left breast. Her name tag said
ANDY
.

“Dr. and Mrs. Torn,” Fernandez said, extending his hand and greeting them at the door.

“Call us Arden and Allie,” Torn said, giving Fernandez a firm handshake. “We don’t stand on ceremony.”

Torn was taller than Fernandez had expected, and his hands were strong. He wore a bulky sweater, and a three-quarter-length leather coat with a wool lining was slung over his left arm. He looked Fernandez straight in the eye—a good sign.

Mrs. Torn was not much shorter. She carried a heavy wool coat and wore a conservative long-sleeved dress. A bright red shawl was wrapped around her shoulders and neck. Her handshake was tentative.

“Thank you for coming in to meet us,” Fernandez said. “Hope the traffic wasn’t too bad.”

“There’s always traffic,” Torn said. “You’d never know it down here, but up in King City we’ve got tons of snow. Took us an hour on the tractor to clear the driveway.”

“Please come into our room back here and sit,” Fernandez said. “I’m sorry it’s so hot. This is an old building, and we can’t control the heat.”

“Our old house is the same,” Torn said. “Freezing or boiling, you never can tell.” Clearly he was the talker in the family.

This was good, Fernandez thought. Simple chitchat to start the conversation. He looked at Mrs. Torn. “Can I take your scarf?”

Her eyes flicked toward her husband.

“Allie’s darn shy,” Torn said. “I hope you don’t mind, she’s asked me to do the talking today. I’m sure you understand. Kate was her only child.”

“Certainly,” Fernandez said. You just never knew with families. Some brought photos, letters, even videos, and wanted to talk for hours. Others were chatty, eager to discuss almost anything but the case and their lost loved ones. Still others were silent. It was the silent ones who were the hardest to deal with, the depth of their pain impossible to measure or comprehend.

One thing they all had in common: they clung to every word you said, like a patient listening to his surgeon before a major operation.

“I want to assure you that we’re taking your daughter’s case very seriously,” Fernandez said, fixing his eyes on Torn as everyone was seated. There were two facing couches, with a wooden coffee table between them. Greene and Fernandez sat across from the Torns. Andy, the victim lady, hovered to the side. “I always start by asking victims’ families the same thing: What questions do you have?”

This could be a revealing moment. People often had a prepared list. Usually they wanted to know how long the trial would take, what sentence the accused would face, whether they had to testify. Things like that.

Torn looked quickly at his wife, then back at Fernandez. He hesitated
for a moment, took in a deep breath. Fernandez caught Greene’s eye. At the end of the table, among a pile of law books, he’d strategically placed a box of Kleenex, not so close as to be obvious, but not far from being at hand.

Reaching into his coat pocket, Torn pulled out a piece of paper. Here it comes, Fernandez thought, probably photographs of their daughter when she was a girl. But it wasn’t a picture. It was a small, rectangular piece of white paper.

“Where the hell can you park around here,” Torn asked, slamming his receipt down on the coffee table in frustration, like a poker player with a losing hand, “without spending thirty bucks a day?”

W
e know you start work very early, so thanks for coming in to see us this afternoon,” Ari Greene said to Donald Dundas, the radio-show host who’d replaced Kevin Brace on
The Dawn Treader
. Greene had never met the man or even seen a photograph of him, but he’d heard his voice on the radio many times over the years when Dundas was a guest host of the show. The broadcaster looked younger, thinner, than Greene had pictured him. Funny how that worked. You hear a voice on radio for a long time and you build an image of that person in your mind. One that’s invariably wrong.

They were in the video room of the homicide bureau. It was a long, narrow room, with a table running down the middle and three chairs at the far end. Greene and Kennicott had been interviewing witnesses—mostly from the radio station for a few hours.

“Glad to help out,” Dundas said. “I teach a class at seven tonight, so I have to be out of here by six.”

Greene looked back at the clock on the wall closest to the door. It was coming up to five o’clock. “Won’t be a problem,” he said as he guided Dundas to the chair at the end of the table. Greene sat next to him. He’d strategically placed his chair very close, right by Dundas’s side. Since the video camera was at the other end of the room, up on the wall looking down at them, it wouldn’t show just how close Greene was to Dundas. But he was right there, deliberately not observing
the normal social distance. The subconscious message Greene wanted to convey to every witness right from the get-go was “I’m here. I’m not going away. I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Your choice.”

Dundas wore a brown turtleneck jersey under a corduroy sport jacket, wool pants, and round tortoiseshell glasses, the kind architecture students used to wear years ago. He looked more like an aging graduate student than a radio personality. But then again, Brace, with his disheveled clothes, certainly never looked like anyone you’d think was famous. Perhaps that’s what attracts people to working in radio: they don’t have to worry about what they look like.

Greene sat down, squaring his shoulders to the table. That way the video camera would hit him directly from the side, minimizing his size and making him look much less intimidating on tape than he was in person.

“This room is equipped with a video recorder. You can see it up there on the far wall facing us,” Greene said, keeping his voice gentle. He turned his head to indicate the camera just below the ceiling, pointed down at them. “Everything we’re saying is being recorded.”

Dundas nodded. The man seemed totally devoid of emotion.

“I want to confirm that you’re giving this statement voluntarily,” Greene said as he moved closer. “The door is closed as a matter of convenience and privacy. It’s not locked. You understand, Mr. Dundas, you can leave this room at any time.”

Dundas cleared his throat and looked at the closed door. Was the man nervous or, like some media people Greene had met, surprisingly quiet once he was offstage?

“Yes, I’m making this statement voluntarily,” Dundas said. His voice sounded startlingly familiar, which of course it was. “I understand that I can leave whenever I want.”

Kennicott handed Greene a beige file folder. The name
DUNDAS
was written on a black-and-white label at the top of the file and in bold black letters on the front page. Greene had instructed Kennicott
to make up a folder for each person they were going to interview and to pass it across the table in front of the witness. The folders were filled with background material, and then extra blank pages were added to make sure it was nice and thick. Important-looking.

Greene had also asked Kennicott to take a few empty storage boxes labeled
R.V. BRACE
and stack them in the corner of the room, near the door, where the people they were interviewing would see them when they came in but so that the camera would not pick them up.

“You’re only as good as your props,” Greene had explained to Kennicott, when they were setting up the interviews.

Greene opened the file, pretending that he was looking at it for the first time. In fact, Kennicott had highlighted the key points and then gone over the material with him before the interview. Greene could feel Dundas’s eyes on him and could see him picking at his worn-down fingernails.

“Fine,” Greene said at last, snapping the file closed. “Formally, for the record, I’m Detective Ari Greene of the homicide squad. With me is Officer Daniel Kennicott. Officer Kennicott is here principally as what we call a scribe. Even though this interview is being taped, he’ll take notes so we’ll have a record right away and won’t have to wait for this to be transcribed.” Greene smiled at Dundas. “We’re still a little old-fashioned. All this technology is fine, but it’s real people and what they tell us that solve most crimes.”

“I see,” Dundas said.

“I’ll ask you to identify yourself for the record, sir. Your full name and your date of birth.”

Dundas coughed. “My full name is Donald Alistair Brock Noel Dundas. Date of birth is December 25, 1957.”

“A Christmas baby,” Greene said.

Dundas barely smiled.

Greene ran through the usual background questions to get Dundas warmed up. His education, his print-journalism career, a little personal history. Dundas was single, never married, had a small house in the Beach area of the city, with his own radio studio in the basement.