Primal Fear (18 page)

“How about the knife drawer?” Venable asked. “Any prints?”

“Oddly enough, no,” Woodside said. “We lifted some fibers off the drawer but we haven’t matched them to anything yet.”

“It would be nice if we could prove he came in the back door and carried the knife to the bedroom,” Venable said. “It would help to establish, premeditation.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Woodside said.

“Very good,” Stenner said. He looked back at Venable with what passed for a smile. “Anything so far?” he asked.

“It’s looking good,” Venable said, walking to the front of the room. “But we need two more things to lock this case.”

“Motive?” said Stenner.

“That’s right,” she answered. “I feel sure the shrinks will let him stand trial but that doesn’t rule out a possible insanity plea by Vail, it just means Stampler’s competent to stand. Let’s just hope our shrinks don’t decide he’s a mental case. Which reminds me, Vail’s also got himself a shrink.”

She flipped open her notebook.

“Molly Arrington. Thirty-four, graduated magna cum laude from Indiana State, been working with deviant mental cases at the Justine Clinic in Indiana for six years or so. She’s supposed to be damn good, so you can bet she’ll come up with something to counter the state psychs. Hopefully we can overcome that obstacle. But, if we get Stampler for trial what we need is a motive, Abel, something that’ll put the jury’s teeth on edge, otherwise Vail may try to use the nature of the crime itself to prove his client’s a fruitcake.”

“Well, then,” Stenner said stoically, “I guess we’ll just have to find you a motive, Madam Prosecutor. What’s the other thing?”

“Prove to me nobody else was in that room when the bishop was sliced and diced,” she said.

At a few minutes before noon, Vail collected the defense team in his office. Molly Arrington was the last to arrive, looking harried and almost out of breath.

“This is Dr. Molly Arrington, our resident psychiatrist,” Vail introduced her with a smile. “Sorry to pull you back from Daisyland so soon but I wanted everybody to get to know you and I want you to hear what Tommy learned in Kentucky.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet all of you,” she said quietly.

“I’ve already explained the rules of the game. We all say what we think, no holding back. Naomi, you’ve read the autopsy report. Anything we
don’t
know at this point?”

“You noticed the 666 carved in Rushman’s stomach?”

“Yeah,” said Vail. “We’ll have to check to see if Aaron or any of these kids was into devil worship.”

“There’s something else. We don’t have this picture but according to the report ‘B32.156’ is printed in the bishop’s blood under his hair on the back of his head.”

“B32.156? What the hell could that mean?”

Naomi shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Probably a symbol,” Molly suggested.

“What kind of symbol?” the Judge asked.

“I don’t know,” said Molly. “Symbols are universal language. To the ancient Egyptians, the dung beetle or scarab was the symbol for resurrection. The cross is the symbol for Christianity. The triple six on the bishop’s stomach is a symbol for the devil. It’s a conundrum. It’s a symbol to whoever put it there.”

“There’s something else we need to talk about,” Goodman said.

“Okay, shoot,” said Vail.

“It’s these pictures,” said Goodman. “I thought a lot about them on the trip. Seems to me they set up a pretty good case for premeditation.”

“Oh?” Vail said with a vague smile. “Prove it to me.”

“First, the knife. The perp must’ve carried it from the kitchen. I mean, what would a carving knife be doing in the bishop’s bedroom?”

“I don’t know,” Vail said. “But it
could’ve
been in there. They have to prove the knife
wasn’t
in the bedroom, we don’t have to prove it was.”

“Pretty skimpy,” Goodman said.

“Tommy, at this point it’s all skimpy, but we have to start somewhere. Remember, we’re working on the assumption he’s innocent so everything we do must lead to that conclusion. It’s their problem to prove he’s guilty.”

“There’s something else,” Tom said. He went to the photo board and perused the pictures, stopping at the photos of the bloody footprint and the medium shot of the kitchen with bloody smudges on the floor. Naomi walked over beside him.

“What do you see?” Vail asked.

“Well, he definitely went out the back door,” Naomi said.

“That’s a given,” said Vail.

“Look at this close-up,” said Tom. “That’s not a footprint, it’s a smudge. Now look at the other shot. The smudges end here, at the corner of the counter. No smudges the last six feet to the door.”

“So?”

“So my guess is, the smudges are from his socks. I think he had his shoes off. He comes in the kitchen door, takes off his shoes so the bishop won’t hear him, takes a carving knife out of
the sliding drawer, walks eighteen feet down the hall, enters the bedroom and gives the bishop forty whacks.”

“Seventy-seven, according to the autopsy,” Naomi said. “Which, incidentally, is almost as bad as the photos.”

“We’ll bypass it in testimony,” said Vail. “Admit to the number of wounds, location, cause of death, et cetera. That’ll take the edge off. The report will be admitted as an exhibit but most likely the jurors won’t read it, they’ll have other things to occupy their time.”

“Anyway, the shoes seem to indicate premeditation,” Goodman said. “Not sudden anger, not temporary insanity. Careful planning and execution.”

“If in fact it happened that way,” Vail said.

Naomi said, “How else could it have happened? He lied about it to you and the cops. Says he came in the front door and was scared by somebody when he left so he ran out the back. Obviously he came in the back door to start with.”

“Maybe. But they can’t use the interviews and we don’t have to. What we
do
have to find out is if he lied and why.”

“Why did he—if he did?” Goodman asked.

“Could have been confused. Scared. Intimidated,” said the Judge. “Could be innocent but afraid to tell the truth because he looks guilty.”

Vail shrugged. “Once again it depends on whether somebody else was really in that room with him. Look, suppose he came in the front way, took off his shoes and stuck them in his coat pocket or held on to them. When he left he got scared by somebody downstairs, went to the kitchen and then put his shoes back on before he went out in the cold.”

“C’mon,” Goodman said skeptically.

“Can you prove it didn’t happen that way?” asked the Judge.

“No.”

“Then we’re talking reasonable doubt and the shoes and bloody footprints become moot,” said Vail. “Neither choice can be proven so either choice is possible.”

“And in most cases,” added the Judge, “the jury will discount both rather than make an assumption on which way it really happened.”

“Same thing with the knife,” said Vail. “We admit he left with it, we don’t admit he brought it with him from the kitchen.”

“That’s good,” the Judge said. “Let them prove otherwise.”

“Fingerprints on the tray?” Goodman suggested.

“We’ll know that when we see the forensics report.”

“Maybe he was wearing gloves,” Naomi suggested.

“Maybe he danced with the Bolshoi Ballet, too, so what?” the Judge offered.

“In other words, immaterial unless they can prove it,” explained Vail.

“Fibers from the gloves on the tray?”

“Once again, let’s see what forensics says.”

“How do you think Shoat will rule on admitting the photographs?” Naomi asked.

Vail looked at the Judge and raised an eyebrow. Spalding scratched the bridge of his nose with a forefinger while he pondered the question.

“Tough call for him,” said Spalding. “Personally, I think they’re germane. But if he lets them in, it could become grounds for an appeal.” He thought a moment more. “My guess is, he’s going to permit them.”

“Jesus!” Naomi said.

“Hold on,” said Vail. “It could work for us.”

“How?”

“Depends on motive,” the Judge suggested.

“Exactly,” Vail answered. “You can bet the loyal opposition is working overtime on that one. If they don’t come up with one, we can make a pretty good case for McNaghten by using the pictures.”

“Who’s McNaghten?” Molly asked.

The Judge offered the answer. “McNaghten shot and killed a member of the British Parliament in 1843. The court found him not guilty by reason of insanity and the public went berserk, so the Queen’s Bench—that’s the British appeals court—formulated the McNaghten Rule. It says that in order to acquit, it must be clearly proved that at the time the act occurred the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, caused by a disease of the mind, that he did not know the nature and quality of the act he was committing.”

“Or even if he knew it,” Vail added, “he didn’t know it was wrong.”

“Translation: Only a nut case would do something like that without a reason,” said Goodman. Molly winced at his use of the term
nut case.

Vail stood up and began pacing. “Then we have the concept of irresistible impulse,” he said. “People who know the difference
between right and wrong but can’t control their actions because of some mental disorder. There are a lot of ways we can go with this—we’ve got to determine which is the most convincing—and the one that we can logically whip the D.A. with.” He smiled at Molly Arrington. “Which brings us to the good doctor. I realize you’ve only talked to Aaron once but…”

“I’d like to defer until after I hear Mr. Goodman’s report,” she said.

“It’s Tom,” Goodman corrected with a smile.

“Fair enough,” said Vail. “How about it, Tommy?”

“Look, I’m not a shrink, okay? It’s just what I learned and what I think. In fact, I’m not real sure what I think.”

“What the hell did you find out down there?” Vail asked.

“It’s not that, exactly, it’s just, uh …”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know, Marty. This kid really got fucked over when he was growing up. I’ve got mixed feelings about him.”

“We all do, Tommy.”

Goodman stared at the photographs as he talked, as if the horror of the pictures somehow grounded him in reality. He described Stampler as a misplaced child who had grown into a gifted but frustrated young intellectual, his accomplishments scorned by a stem and relentless father determined that the boy follow him into the hell of the coal mines and a mother who considered Aaron’s education akin to devil’s play; a boy to whom the strap and the insults of his parents had done little to discourage from a bold and persistent quest for knowledge, abetted by Miss Rebecca, who saw in the lad a glimmering hope that occasionally there might be resurrection from a bitter life sentence in the emotionally barren and aesthetically vitiated Kentucky hamlet; a loner, attracted to both the professions and the arts, who had wanted—as do most young people at one time or another—to be lawyer, doctor, actor, and poet—and whose dreams were constantly thwarted except by his mentor, Rebecca.

And he talked about Rebecca, who appeared to be Crikside’s only beacon, a lighthouse of lore and wisdom in an otherwise bleak and tortured place mired by its own stifling traditions; a woman whom some of the townsfolk regarded as a necessary evil; a woman who threatened the bigotry of their narrow and obdurate heritage, a notion possibly vindicated by Rebecca’s
“education” of Aaron Stampler. And finally he talked about the sexual liberation of Aaron Stampler.

Goodman checked his little black notebook, the one in which he always kept copious notes.

“There’re a couple of other things,” he said. “On the table in her living room there were half a dozen pictures of Aaron at various ages—reading a book, sitting beside the creek, fishing, a class picture showing eleven children of various ages with Rebecca in the center, all standing kind of stiffly in front of the schoolhouse, you know how those pictures go, they all looked so serious. But there were no pictures of Rebecca and Aaron except that group shot.

“He also marked a lot of quotations in books. He stuck slips of paper in them and wrote down the references. I wrote down two of them. ‘Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.’ And there was a Chinese proverb: ‘There are two perfect men—one dead, the other unborn.’”

Goodman had written some questions to himself.
Was Stampler physically or sexually abused in the legal sense? Was his sexual orientation as perverse as it might seem? Did these two factors alone contribute to an inner rage that led Aaron to Bishop Rushman’s bedroom and the mutilation killing of the prelate?

Perhaps, he suggested, Molly Arrington could answer these questions.

“You know what I’m beginning to wonder?” Goodman concluded.

“What?” asked Vail, who had listened without emotion, his eyes narrowed, as Tom Goodman detailed the short, unhappy life of Aaron Stampler.

“If maybe he didn’t escape from one set of frustrations in Crikside and end up with a different kind of frustration here. Maybe … maybe it all just fell in on him.”

“You think he did it?”

“Christ, I don’t know, Marty. That kind of background? Shit, that’s enough to screw up anybody’s head.”

Vail didn’t answer. He turned instead to Molly.

“Okay, Doc, you’re up,” he said.

“Let’s watch the tape first,” she said. Her voice suddenly became sterner, authoritative, commanding.

And Vail thought,
My God, she’s taking over the meeting.

“Okay,” he said, and wheeled over to the tape machine and slipped Molly’s video interview into the slot.

“Before it starts,” Goodman said, “how can you tell somebody’s got a mental disorder?”

“It’s a very structured procedure just like medicine,” Molly said. “You look for symptoms, manifestations, influences—the same way a physician identifies a physical disease.”

“Is there some kind of standard for all this?” Vail asked.

“Yes. It’s called the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
DSM3 for short. The American Psychiatric Association publishes it and it’s our bible. It’s to psychiatry what
Gray’s Anatomy
is to physiology.”