Premeditated Murder (26 page)

“Shit,” said one of the kids quietly.

“Anyway, apparently she and some friends had gone to a bar, and were drinking, and a fight broke out. Natalie was involved.”

“Natalie was in a fight?” asked the boy Julie was writing on.

“That's right,” Pete replied. “Not what you expected from Natalie, I guess.”

“No way,” the kid responded. “She was like, I don't know. She just wasn't into that,” he insisted.

“Well, alcohol can change people,” Pete said. “It sure changed Natalie that night.”

“I thought she just fell,” said another.

“She did fall,” Pete said, “but probably not like you think. The bartender who was there said that in the middle of the fight, Natalie decided to climb up on a table, I guess to jump on somebody or something. Anyway, she steps onto a chair, and then puts her foot on the table, and it's wet, and her foot slips off the table, and she falls backward and lands right on the back of her head on the ceramic tile floor of the bar. It fractured her skull.” The kids were hypnotized. “I must have gotten there just after that, because even though she got up from the fall, about a minute later she lost consciousness, and we rushed her to the hospital. That's when she went into the first coma.”

Julie's eyes looked like they were too big for her face. Was she scared? Was this what Natalie had hoped would happen? “Anyway, as you probably can tell, I don't usually do these talks. Officer De Luca runs the D.A.R.E. program out of our station, and she's the expert on this kind of thing. I can tell you this, though. I spoke to Natalie at the hospital, and I know that she is a brave, smart young woman. And I know that when she started drinking that night, she knew she was making a mistake, but she never thought she'd end up in a fight, or in the hospital, or in a coma. Nobody ever does.”

Pete wasn't quite sure how to end, but it didn't seem to matter. As he looked out into the troubled eyes of the teenagers, he felt for the first time in a long time a sense of real accomplishment. He was getting through to some of them. Out of the corner of his eye, Pete saw somebody come into the room and hand Pastor Reid something, and then saw Pastor Reid approaching him. He stepped back, assuming that the pastor would have something to say to conclude the meeting.

Instead, he came over to Pete and solemnly handed him the phone message that he had just been given.

Natalie Reggio was dead.

Wilton, Massachusetts

TERRY NUDGED THE SPEEDOMETER OF HIS LEXUS up to eighty. He and Zack were on their way out to meet with Leon Lamere. For such an obviously hopeless case, they were sure doing a lot of driving.

“It's jury nullification, isn't it?” he asked. “That's all we've got.”

Zack was quiet for a minute. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling loudly. “That's it, unless we can convince Cal to let us try insanity. There's no way we're going to stop O'Neill from proving that Cal murdered those people. But if we can show that they were terrorists, then maybe we've got a shot at having the jury look the other way.”

Look the other way.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we all know that our client is guilty, but he killed some very bad people, so can you please vote not guilty?
“That is so fucked up,” Terry said, “even for us. The value of human life, the rule of law … Is there anything we aren't taking a potshot at in this case?” He flashed his brights at the idiot driving sixty-five in the left-hand lane. “If we win this thing, something is very, very wrong.”

Zack remained silent. The idiot switched lanes.
Thank you, God.
“Oh, come on,” Terry continued. “Don't tell me you actually believe we should win. You know I don't think Cal should be executed. But he's about as guilty as you can be. And according to the Constitution-bashing psychos at
The Boston Post,
about ninety-three percent of the world agrees with me.”

“Yeah,” Zack replied. “I know. But I've got to tell you, something happened when Justin and I were down in Florida, and it's been bugging me ever since. I was getting him an ice cream, and when I looked up, he had disappeared. For about thirty seconds, I thought I'd lost him.” He took a deep breath. “And that feeling, when I thought he was gone … I've been thinking a lot about how Cal must have felt when he lost his little boy.”

Terry couldn't imagine ever even having kids. The idea of losing one was so far out of his experience that thinking about it made no sense. He'd seen the haunted look of families who had lost a child to crime. It was as close as he ever expected, or wanted, to get. “Yeah, but, Zack, we can't just start handing out Get Out of Jail Free cards to the parents of every missing child so they can go hunting for bad guys. That's crazy.”

They drove in silence for another minute. Then Zack asked quietly, “Is it any crazier than blowing up a five-year-old boy and his mother?”

IF LEON LAMERE WAS A TERRORIST, HE WAS THE frickin' jolliest terrorist Terry had ever met.

They had tracked down the address from the check used to rent the apartment. It was the home of Leon Lamere, in Wilton. Leon was the owner of Lamere's Furniture Palace, a gigantic furniture and carpeting outlet, and he had agreed to meet them at his store. He was a short, stocky man in his forties, who wore an expensive suit over a patterned silk shirt that was open at the neck. Leon never seemed to stop smiling. And he really liked gold jewelry. Loads of necklaces, bracelets on both wrists, a Rolex, rings on both hands. But despite the disco-king aura, Leon had a very friendly, genuine manner. Go figure. “Have you ever been to my store?” he asked, somehow smiling even more. “Come on in, I'll show you around while we talk.”

The place was mammoth, and a lot of the furniture actually looked decent. They were only there for a couple of minutes before Zack's eyes began to glaze over. He didn't know a Stickney rocker from a Barcalounger. And couldn't care less. That was okay. Zack would live. Terry had been looking for a half-round end table for his living room for a long time. This just might be the place.

“So,” Zack said, “we were hoping that you might be able to tell us whatever you could about Marianne Duhamel and Helene Ghazi.”

A puzzled look crossed Leon's face. “I don't recognize either of those names—” he began, but then a cell phone rang. Lamere made an apologetic gesture and pulled a phone out of his pocket. “This is Leon,” he said.

While he spoke, Terry walked a few steps away with Zack and sat down on an impressively uncomfortable couch. “Tall, skinny, and weak-looking. You think Mr. Tough Guy Manager was jerking us off?”

“I don't know,” Zack replied. Another cell phone rang, and while still speaking on the first call, Leon reached into his other pocket with his free hand and pulled out another phone. He looked pretty embarrassed as he tried to juggle two phone calls and somehow indicate to Zack and Terry that he would be right with them. “He said it before he saw all the forgery stuff and got scared. I don't think he had any reason to lie. Maybe he just forgot what Leon looked like.”

“Forget a guy who hands him a check for thirteen thousand bucks? I don't think so.”

“Maybe Leon wrote the check, and some other guy delivered it,” Zack said.

“Nope,” Terry said. “I looked at the signatures on the check and the lease. They're identical.” He reached into his jacket pocket and fiddled with a little electronic gadget. “You know, besides ads for Viagra and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to refinance my home, I get more e-mail from Judge Cottonwood than anyone else,” he said, handing the thing over to Zack.

It was a BlackBerry, a portable Internet device, and it was displaying an obviously bogus e-mail from someone purporting to be the judge, inviting Terry to clarify his position on some of the issues on the case, “so the trial would run with maximum efficiency.” Zack handed it back. “Good thing you have one of these,” he said.

Terry turned it off and said, “I'm telling you, one of these days, you're going to thank me for buying all this shit.”

Finally, Leon was through with his calls. He came over to them, still holding the phones. “I'm so sorry,” he said, sitting on a chair across from them. “I am turning them off.” He put the phones back in his pockets. “Now, where were we?”

Zack held out a copy of the check and the lease to Leon. “We were hoping you could tell us anything you knew about this apartment lease, and the two women who signed it with you.”

“Apartment lease?” Leon repeated, taking the papers. If he was lying about his confusion, he was a whiz at it. He looked exactly like somebody who had never signed an apartment lease with two women who forged passports. He reached into his jacket pocket to put on a pair of small, rectangular reading glasses. He looked first at the check and then at the lease. Then he shook his head. “Will you come with me to my office?” he said, standing. “I did not sign these things, but I think I know who did.”

NINETEEN

DR. HAAS:
Victim One suffered six gunshot wounds. One bullet entered his right thigh from the rear, one entered the area of his right pelvis, one entered the right side of his rib cage from the rear, piercing his right lung, and three entered in a very small area in the center of his chest from the front.

DIST. ATTY. O'NEILL:
Were you able to determine which, if any, of these gunshots caused the victim's death?

A:
Well, two of the bullets that entered the front of his chest shattered his sternum and struck him directly in the heart. Either would have caused death within a matter of seconds. The third bullet that entered his chest severed his aorta, the principal artery carrying blood from the heart. That wound would have caused death within three to four minutes from exsanguination—basically, bleeding to death. Essentially, any one of those three wounds was the cause of death.

(Trial Volume IX, Pages 70–71)

May 12—Wakefield, Massachusetts

AS SOON AS ZACK SAW CAL'S FACE HE COULD SEE that his client wasn't expecting any good news. That was fine, because he and Terry didn't have any.

They were visiting Cal in one of the tiny attorney/client rooms at MCI-Wakefield. Usually, by this time in the process, even in the most hopeless of situations, Zack had turned up something that he felt he could use to create a chance, even if just a slim chance, of some success at trial. This case was proving to be the exception.

“So,” Cal said, sitting down at the table across from them. “Where are we?”

Terry snorted and looked away. Zack looked over some notes he had made. He spoke first.

“Well, we're pretty much in agreement that at this point, the only thing we can argue is jury nullification.”

Cal nodded. “Tell them the whole story and hope that they won't convict me, even if it is technically murder.”

“Yeah. Technically,” Terry said.

“So have we hired one of those experts on picking juries?”

Terry closed his eyes, shook his head, and said, “Experts on picking juries. Oh my God.” He looked like he had a headache.

“That kind of thing shows up on TV a lot more than in real life,” Zack explained to their client. “We're court-appointed lawyers. I get fifty-four dollars an hour for working on your case, Cal. Because he's helping, Terry only gets thirty an hour. We had to beg the court for the five hundred dollars we spent having that tape translated into English. Defendants without tons of money don't get to hire jury selection experts.”

“You don't, by any chance, still have tons of money lying around?” Terry asked. His eyes looked bloodshot.

“No,” Cal answered cheerfully. “I gave it all away after I found the terrorists and decided what I was going to do.”

Terry sighed. “Of course you did.”

“So how do we pick the jury?” Cal asked.

“We look at the questionnaires they fill out, look at their faces, and guess,” Zack said. “For what it's worth, I'm pretty good at picking juries,” he added. “But in your case …” He trailed off. He didn't need to say that whatever jury was picked wasn't going to make the slightest difference.

Cal got the message. “Won't it matter who's on the jury when we start to talk about why I killed these people?”

“Well, we've been having a little problem running down the evidence that these people were who you said they were.”

“What happened when you checked into how the women paid for their apartment?” Cal asked. “I actually never knew about that.”

“Yeah,” Zack said. “We went to see the person who we thought had paid, but it turns out it was probably his son.”

“I don't understand,” Cal said.

Terry jumped in. “The guy who we thought had signed the check has got so many bank accounts he can't keep them straight. He owns this mansion in Wilton, and this monster furniture store. He's like the king of the sofa beds. He's also the king of the shitty fathers. His wife's an alcoholic, his daughter's in some rehab halfway across the country, and his son, last time anyone saw him, was some religious freak wandering around Egypt.”