Act of God

by Susan R. Sloan

  “Would you put him on the stand?”

  “You’d almost have to,” she responded.

  “How would he do in front of a jury?”

  “I think he’d do just fine. He’s a bright kid, good-looking, clean-cut. He gives straightforward answers to direct questions, and comes across as quite sincere. Any mother’s dream.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  Dana had never let herself be much concerned about the guilt or innocence of a client, only with the merits of the particular case. As her father had told her, from the time she was old enough to understand what it meant, a defense attorney’s job was to defend, no matter what, and getting caught up in believing or disbelieving your client very often got in the way.

  Of course, a death penalty case might be different; she didn’t know. It was true that Corey Latham was unlike any of the clients she had so far come across in her career. He was young, and cooperative, and very vulnerable, and could easily be destroyed by a system that more often than not didn’t really care. But that wasn’t going to be her problem.

  “Let’s just say, if I were a member of the jury, I might be persuaded to give him the benefit of the doubt,” she replied.

  “It’s odd,” Cotter mused, toggling a gold pen between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. “I’ve looked at the file. What they’ve got may have been enough for a warrant, might even be enough for an indictment, but it’s far from being conclusive. Yet everyone’s running around the prosecutor’s office like this thing was open and shut.”

  “They’re under a lot of pressure.”

  “Yes, but they need a conviction here. An acquittal on a case this big would give them a black eye they’d never get over. If the kid’s got even half a story to tell, why are they so hot to trot?”

  “I’m no psychic,” Dana said with a shrug. “But maybe they’re counting on the emotion of the situation to sway the jury. Or maybe they figured they’d be going up against a public defender, and it would be a walk in the park. I don’t think they ever expected Latham to come in with a top firm.”

  “Or maybe we’re not totally in the loop?”

  Dana shook her head. “I checked,” she replied. “Brian Ayres is the prosecutor assigned to this case. I know him. I used to work with him. He doesn’t play games. Probably because he doesn’t have to. He’s been around awhile, and he’s one of their best. No, for whatever reason, I think he thinks he sees a solid case.”

  “And you see reasonable doubt?”

  “Absolutely,” she said without hesitation. “So far as I can tell, the evidence is wholly circumstantial, which makes it wide open to interpretation. Of course, it’s our job to see things that way, and their job to paint as convincing a picture as possible. But I don’t see any walk in the park here, not at all.”

  “Which brings us to the real issue, doesn’t it?” Cotter suggested, getting down to business. “You’ve spent some time with the boy. You seem to like him. At the very least, you’re apparently impressed by what you saw. And you know how big this case is, how important the right defense will be. We want you to lead it. We think you have what it takes. And hell, who knows—he may even be on the level. So, what’s your answer?”

  Dana had her answer ready, worked out during the early morning hours as she waited for dawn and Sam to rise. She was not going to take the bait. She was not going to be maneuvered into defending Corey Latham. Whether she liked him or not was irrelevant. Whether he was guilty or innocent was irrelevant. Despite having the full resources of the firm to back her up, as Cotter had promised, she knew enough to know, even if he did not choose to acknowledge it, that she was in way over her head. It was her reputation at stake here, not the firm’s. They could simply cut her loose if she became an embarrassment to them. No, it was her career on the line, and the small matter of the client’s life.

  She looked the managing partner directly in the eye, although she could not keep her stomach from churning. She had played the good soldier, agreeing to go to the jail, meet with Latham, and see him through the arraignment. But she had been resolved, even before she crossed Freedom Park, not to take this case, whatever she might find when she got inside. And in all honesty, as much as she felt for the young man—and she had to admit she did—nothing had transpired to alter that original decision. On the contrary, her encounter with Corey Latham had only strengthened her resolve.

  For at least half a dozen perfectly rational reasons, she knew this was not a case in which she wanted to be involved, and not a cause with which she wanted to be associated. Certainly not as first chair, and not even as second, should it come to that.

  Her plan was quite simple: do the groundwork she had been asked to do, and then go back to Cotter, report her findings, and sever all connection with the matter as soon as possible. That plan was still in place.

  She opened her mouth to tell him. “I’ll take the case,” she heard herself say.

  TWELVE

  There were cases that made headlines, and there were cases that made lawyers. As low-profile as her experience at Cotter Boland and Grace had been to date, Dana knew that the Latham case, whatever the outcome, was going to make both.

  “I don’t have a clue what I’m doing,” she was confiding to her father over the telephone half an hour later. “I don’t know if I’m thrilled or petrified.”

  “A good measure of each would probably be appropriate,” Jefferson Reid advised from his waterfront office in Port Townsend.

  “I feel like I’m three years old again,” she said, “and you’re about to throw me into Puget Sound.”

  “I remember,” he replied with a chuckle. “And I also remember that you not only survived, you went on to lead the high school swim team to the state finals three years in a row, and set four records along the way.”

  “So I did,” she conceded. “But this is different.”

  “Of course it is,” he agreed. “Because this time, it isn’t just about you.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Dana replied thoughtfully. “I didn’t want to take this case. I opened my mouth to say no, and yes popped out. I didn’t want to like Corey Latham, but I couldn’t help myself—I do like him. The whole country is out to crucify him for this bombing, whether he did it or not. I want to know that he’s got the right person in his corner. Someone who won’t just go through the motions, but will go to bat for him, you know what I mean? But why do I think that has to be me?”

  “I assume because it’s the only way you can make sure he gets the kind of representation you think he should get,” Reid suggested.

  “But what if I’m letting my ego get in the way? I have no experience here. What if I’m not good enough?”

  “You don’t need me to tell you you’re good enough,” he chided her. “Look into your heart, my girl. Ask yourself why you really took this case.”

  For a moment, there was silence at the Seattle end of the telephone, and the crafty, patient Port Townsend attorney leaned back in his chair to wait. He had taught his daughter well, and had little doubt she would work her way through to the truth of the matter. Without any help from him, she was perfectly capable of exploring her own motives and arriving at her own conclusions.

  “It has nothing to do with any kind of commitment,” Dana said finally. “I just felt sorry for him.”

  “That’s not an unreasonable place to start.”

  “Guilty or innocent, he’s scared to death. I mean, here’s this guy who serves on a nuclear submarine, which is about as scary as it can get, and he’s locked up safe and sound in the King County Jail, panicked to the point of paralysis. I just didn’t think any of the other partners at the firm would know how to deal with that.”

  “Then it would appear that the young man has himself the right attorney,” her father said.

  Dana did not respond. On the surface, it might appear that her father was right. But then, there were thi
ngs that he didn’t know about.

  “You’ve handled capital cases in your career, dad,” she said suddenly. “Legal shenanigans aside, if you thought there was a chance your client was being railroaded, how did you deal with it?”

  “Thankfully, that’s happened just once in my lifetime,” he replied. “And I must tell you, it didn’t end particularly well. To this day, I believe he may have been innocent. I know he was railroaded. He was also convicted and executed, and I couldn’t do anything to prevent it.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “There are no easy answers in a death penalty case, and not many sleep-filled nights ahead of you,” he told her. “As I think you’re about to discover, defending someone who is guilty is tough enough, for all the obvious reasons. But defending someone who may be innocent can be terrifying.”

  “We’d like an interview,” a reporter from the Globe said over the telephone, right in the middle of dinner. “We’re planning on a whole feature actually, in-depth, with pictures of you at the office, and at home with the family. And anything else you might want to include.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dana replied, horrified by the request. “I don’t do interviews.”

  “Are you sure?” the reporter asked, clearly dumbfounded. “Don’t you realize you’re going to be famous? The whole country is going to want to know everything about you. Why, you’re the new Marcia Clark.”

  “No, I’m not,” came the curt response.

  “Frankly, my dear, I’m giving you the chance to tell your own story, before someone else comes along and reaps the benefits of telling it for you.”

  ‘“I don’t do interviews,” Dana repeated with outward calm, even as the hand holding the receiver began to shake. “Please don’t call again.”

  “Who was that on the phone?” Molly asked. “Your face is all red.”

  “No one important, sweetie,” Dana declared, reclaiming her seat at the dinner table. “Just someone trying to sell me something I didn’t want to buy.” She picked up a bowl of potatoes and spooned a big helping onto her plate as though calls from tabloid newspapers were a regular happening in their cozy Magnolia home.

  “I think you’d better assume that was just the beginning,” Sam observed later, when they were getting ready for bed, and out of Molly’s earshot, and Dana had relayed the gist of the telephone conversation.

  “They’re like vultures, aren’t they?” she said with a shudder.

  Sam eyed her thoughtfully. “I guess this is going to be a pretty big case for you, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “The biggest,” she replied in a breathless mixture of regret, exultation, and fear.

  “Well then,” he said, “before you get buried in it, let’s find a way to store up some good times to tide us over. I have a few ideas. I’ll talk them over with Molly.”

  Dana looked at him—her comfort, her sounding board, her rock. If she sometimes took him too much for granted, she knew it was his sense of purpose, of balance, and of proportion that enabled her to be who she was and do what she did, and that meant more to her than she could ever express in words.

  “I’ve lost count of the times I’ve said it before,” she told him with genuine affection, “but I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  He grinned. “That’s okay, babe,” he said in his best Humphrey Bogart impersonation. “Just play your cards right, and you won’t ever find out.”

  Sam McAuliffe was a happy man. At forty-seven, he had the profession of his choice, the wife of his dreams, and a stepdaughter he couldn’t have adored more had she been his own flesh and blood.

  He may not have understood Dana completely, her drive, her intensity, her need to fight the good fight at every turn, but it didn’t matter. He loved her unconditionally. She was everything he had hoped to find in a woman, fantasized about finding, through the long, lonely years of singlehood. There were so many times when he had thought he would never meet someone like her, never marry, never know the joy of having a family of his own. Then one day, there she was. He knew he would always be grateful to her, for wanting him, for letting him into her life, for allowing him to become a part of something so special.

  If there was one small flaw in the otherwise perfect tapestry of their marriage, it was that he and Dana had so far been unable to give Molly the baby brother or sister that would have made their lives complete. They had often spoken of it, of how wonderful it would be if they could have a child together. It would be the ultimate expression of what they felt for each other. He knew Dana had never really had that with Molly’s father.

  But in six years, it hadn’t happened. The closest they had come was one false alarm shortly before Dana made partner at Cotter Boland. Sam knew that time was not on his side, and he so wanted a child while he was still young enough to raise one. After the false alarm, he took himself to a doctor, unbeknownst to his wife because it was embarrassing, to see if maybe he had a problem. However, the tests showed that he was just fine, and he was told not to worry, but to relax.

  “Things have a way of surprising you when you’re least expecting it,” the specialist said.

  Yet four years later, it was still just the three of them, and Sam was beginning to wonder if it simply wasn’t meant to be, and if it was time to put the dream away, and appreciate what he already had.

  Truth be told, he had enough to fill his plate. It was in holding hearth and home together that he truly excelled, filling in the holes of Dana’s absences when she was overwhelmed by work. The Latham case was going to be the greatest test of his abilities, and he fell asleep thinking up ways he could protect his family from the media invasion that was bound to come.

  “You must be out of your mind,’ Judith Purcell declared, the moment she heard. “You can’t take this case.”

  “I already did,” Dana told her.

  “But how can you defend him?”

  “I’m a defense attorney. That’s what I do.”

  “Oh, come on,” Judith persisted. “You know what I mean.”

  Dana fixed a level gaze on her friend. “Sometimes, we have to make hard choices,” she said in a soft voice. “We may not always make the right ones, but we do the best we can. And then we live with the consequences.”

  THIRTEEN

  Of all the single, separate moments in time that, for whatever reason, one was destined to remember for the rest of one’s life, Corey Latham believed he knew the worst.

  Certainly, there was the humiliation of being taken, in shackles, from his home, in broad daylight, for all his neighbors to see. Of course, there was the degradation of being marched into the county jail where he was stripped and searched, fingerprinted and photographed. Nor would he soon forget the frustration of being grilled for hour upon hour, until he felt that his brain was turning to oatmeal. But all that turned out to be merely a prelude to the sheer terror of being escorted to the eleventh floor of the King County Jail, thrust inside a cell that was little bigger than a closet, and hearing the heavy steel door slam and lock behind him.

  That was the moment. When he knew, no matter what he said or did, he could not get out. He had lost the right to freedom of choice.

  It was ten times worse than the Jackson, and that was bad enough. Even after three tours on the submarine, he was not even close to being comfortable with the claustrophobia or the dread of impending disaster. But he had chosen the Navy, and there were compensations aboard ship: the ability to move about, cramped though the quarters were; the camaraderie of his fellow officers; the knowledge that he was serving his country and fulfilling a vital mission.

  This was something else entirely. This was black panic that could take hold of him at any moment of the day or night. This was knowing that he was caught, like a rabbit in a trap, in a situation he could not control, with an outcome he could not predict. This was hearing his heart pounding in his chest so loud he feared it would explode inside him, like a bomb—and the irony did not escape him. This was
hour after hour, day after day, of nothing but his own thoughts, his own terror.

  Ironically, it was pretending he was back on the Jackson that got him through. Pretending that this was just another tour, and that, as before, if he took it one day at a time, it would soon be over. In his mind’s eye, his tiny cell became the missile stacks where he sometimes slept just to get out from under the prying eyes of his engineer. He ordered books to read, Ludlum, Clancy, Follett, and pretended that the dialogue in them was conversations with his shipmates. He likened the twenty-three hours a day that he was confined in the concrete coffin to the seventy-some days he spent submerged, and convinced himself how lucky he was to have a four-inch slit of window from which he could at least see the sky.

  During the twenty-fourth hour, he was given the run of the day room; an ugly place, with a metal picnic table and bench bolted to the floor, a chin bar, and a shower. Three days a week, he was allowed time in the recreation area, an indoor/outdoor space, with a basketball hoop and a jogging track.

  But always he was alone, in his cell, in the day room, in the recreation area. As a designated ultra-security inmate, he was not permitted contact with anyone other than his two escorts, whose purpose was not to make friends or conversation. It was the isolation that got to him the most.

  “This is worse than hell,” he told Dana the day after the arraignment, when it had sunk in that he was there for the duration. “I don’t know how much more I can take.”

  “I never promised you an ocean cruise,” she responded firmly. “So you call it anything you like—hell, war, survival—but do what you have to do to get through it. My best guess, we’re looking at months. The wheels of justice grind very slowly around here. So I suggest you consider it a test of strength, or a test of courage, or a test of faith. Whichever suits you best.”

  Corey liked Dana McAuliffe. She was smart and assertive in a very feminine way, and he considered it a stroke of genius for the law firm to have assigned her to represent him in this matter. It filled him with a sense of confidence that his nightmare would someday be over, and he clung to her words as a drowning man would to a bit of driftwood.