“You don’t need to tell us that,” Dean said. “We raised you. We know who you are.”
“It’s just a mistake,” Barbara said, taking the receiver from her husband. “And pretty soon, the police and everyone will realize that, and then everything will get sorted out.”
“Do you really think so?” Corey responded wistfully. “I don’t know. In here, after a while, you get to feel like you’ve fallen through the cracks. It’s like I’m in the Jackson at the bottom of the sea, the radar’s gone dead and I’m running out of air, and nobody’s going to get to me in time. Nobody’s listening to me. No one believes me.”
“Mrs. McAuliffe seems to be listening.”
Corey nodded. “Yes, she is,” he conceded. “But that’s her job. She’s getting paid to listen, isn’t she? It’s not like it’s someone objective—it’s not like a member of the jury.”
Dana liked the Lathams. They were good people, warm, sensible, and supportive. It was obvious that they loved their son, but they did not appear to be unduly blinded by that love.
After their visit with Corey on Saturday, she had whisked them over to the Hunt Club, where the food enjoyed a reputation for excellence, and the staff was used to shielding its patrons.
They talked all the way through dinner, about Corey, about themselves, about their values. They spoke of their hopes for their children, and their pride in their son and his accomplishments was obvious.
Dana came away from the evening convinced of their sincerity. There was so much in the news these days about parents abdicating their responsibilities, and about kids going berserk. If Corey Latham had gone berserk, it wasn’t because his parents had not been paying attention.
She had begun this case presuming innocence, but to be honest, assuming guilt. Less than a week later, she wasn’t so sure. She remembered her bold assurances to Paul Cotter that the prosecution’s case was circumstantial, and therefore, weak at best. Now she found herself feeling the first flutter of apprehension as she faced the possibility that she might be all that was standing between an innocent man and the gallows.
FIFTEEN
Brian Ayres was a senior deputy prosecuting attorney, criminal division, for King County, Washington, a job he had held for seven years. A slender man of slightly more than average height, possessed of an easy smile and an irrepressible enthusiasm for life in general and the law specifically, he reflected an ageless attractiveness that most people found difficult to resist.
At forty, there were gray streaks in his black hair and deep creases around his brown eyes. He blamed the streaks on the rigors of raising five children, and the creases on having to squint his way through mountains of indecipherable defense motions. However, neither seemed to lessen his appeal, or his considerable effectiveness in a courtroom.
Fourteen years earlier, he had been an ambitious young lawyer, fresh out of the University of Chicago, sharing a cramped office on the fifth floor of the King County courthouse with an equally ambitious Stanford graduate named Dana Reid.
“Hi, Punk,” he greeted her now as she poked her head in his office.
“Hi, Dink,” she replied.
They had given each other those nicknames years ago, after she had once observed that, without shoes, they were exactly the same height.
Once friendly associates, they were now friendly adversaries. Brian was already married with two children when they met. He sometimes thought things might have been different between them had he been single. Dana was the kind of woman one occasionally came across in the professional world, a woman who didn’t know how beautiful she was, and probably wouldn’t have cared if she did know. Her work was what mattered to her, and all she wanted to be admired for was her mind.
A couple of times a year, schedules permitting, they did lunch. It was their way of networking, of checking out life on the other side, of keeping in touch.
“Never would have thought this was your Kind of case,” he said. He had to admit, if only to himself, that he had been hoping for an easy ride on the Hill House bombing. And it had tweaked him more than a little to hear that the Latham kid had been able to bring in a firm with the track record of Cotter Boland and Grace.
“Neither would I,” she admitted.
“How did you get suckered in?”
She shrugged. “My number came up, I guess.”
He wagged his head. During the two years that they worked together, they had talked long and often about defense attorneys who walked with the devil. “You should have stayed on the side of the angels,” he told her.
“So we used to say,” she replied softly, reflectively. “Except that this time, I think maybe I am.”
Brian chuckled. “Always the optimist,” he observed. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
“Just happened to be in the building,” Dana said, which was true. Her stop at the fifth floor had been on impulse. “To be honest, though, I’m trying to figure out why you would risk your reputation on the prosecution of Corey Latham.”
“Good tactic,” he said with an approving grin. “Is this the moment for me to start quaking in my boots?”
“No,” she replied. “But I’d have thought you, of all people, would want to be pretty positive of a conviction before you exposed yourself in open court. I know you. I know how you hate to lose.”
“You think maybe I don’t know what I’m doing?”
“No. I think maybe you’ve let yourself be pushed into action a little too soon.”
“Ah, rush to judgment!” He raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “Am I hearing the first hint of a defense strategy here?”
Dana chuckled. “You never know,” she said, the first salvo having been neatly fired.
“Then let the battle be joined,” he suggested with mock gallantry.
She blew him a kiss and departed. The door had barely closed behind her when Brian grabbed for the telephone.
“I want to know that all our ducks are in order on the Latham case,” he barked into the receiver. “I won’t have it coming back on us. Bring me everything, and I mean everything. I want to know, step by step, exactly how we got to this guy.”
It was a good tactic, he conceded as he hung up, her trying to put him that quarter-inch off-balance just days before he was due to present to the grand jury, and he couldn’t deny she had succeeded.
Dana Reid McAuliffe was a very sharp lawyer, and Brian knew she was not above bending every rule and pulling out every stop in defense of a client. But he also knew, whatever else she might do, she wasn’t one to bluff.
The senior deputy prosecuting attorney went back and pored over the files. The case was far from being a slam-dunk, he knew, but he didn’t feel it would make him look ridiculous, and it would at least get the brass off his back. He didn’t know whether Latham was guilty or innocent, and truth be told, he didn’t much care. The evidence pointed at guilt, and his boss was champing at the bit to get to trial and to get the mayor and the governor and the media out of his office and off his telephone, and that was enough for Brian.
“I don’t know what McAuliffe thinks she knows,” he told his assistant finally. “But I’m okay going with what we’ve got.” He didn’t bother to add that he had been a lot more okay about it before he learned that he would have Dana McAuliffe sitting across the aisle.
“It may not be the strongest case we’ve ever taken in,” Mark Hoffman agreed. “But it’s not the weakest, either. We’ve got the ID on the vehicle. We’ve got the fibers and the trace materials. We’ve got the neighbors. We’ve got the doctor. I’ve seen a lot worse.”
One week later, a grand jury did indeed find probable cause to indict Corey Latham on, among a laundry list of other things, one hundred and seventy-six counts of murder in the first degree.
“We’re scheduled for trial in September,” he told the King County prosecutor.
“Good,” the prosecutor said. “Now maybe everyone will get off my back.”
“Don’t be discoura
ged,” Dana told her client. “All this means is that the grand jury found enough evidence to move forward to trial.”
“But how could they?” Corey demanded, his voice rising until it bounced off the purple wall of the interview room. “How could they find enough evidence to believe I killed all those people when I didn’t?”
“It’s because they only heard the state’s side of the case,” she explained. “Just remember that we’ll have a side to present, too, and there’s a mighty big gap here between probable cause and reasonable doubt. I promise you, this isn’t going to be any rollover for the prosecution.”
Craig Jessup was a nondescript man of medium height and weight, average looks, and indeterminate age. An exceptional mind for details, a chameleonic ability to blend into any circumstance, and a true gift for gaining the trust and confidence of others were what made him unique, and gave him a distinct advantage over many in his line of work.
For twenty years, he had been one of Seattle’s finest, advancing steadily, if not meteorically, up the ladder from foot patrolman to homicide detective to sergeant. It was known around that he was in line to make lieutenant. Then his partner was killed, supposedly caught in the crossfire between police and a black man. When it was quietly covered up that the black man had no weapon, Jessup retired.
Taking the best of what he had learned, he established himself as a private investigator, offering his services to attorneys who could afford to pay high fees for top-quality work. His biggest marketable asset was his skill at second-guessing the police with whom he had worked for so long. In less than a year, he was fully employed. For the last five years, his steadiest account had been the law firm of Cotter Boland and Grace.
“Let’s go on the assumption that Latham didn’t do it,” Dana told him the day after the indictments had been handed down.
“Is that for real?” Jessup questioned. He knew a little about the evidence, considered it sufficient, and believed himself to be pretty good at sizing up odds. “When I heard you’d taken the case, I figured you’d go for something like diminished capacity, and try to plead him out.”
“Not at this point,” Dana said, not bothering to add that the client was opposed to any kind of a plea.
“You really think the badges got it wrong?” the investigator asked, doubt written all over his face.
“I don’t know,” Dana told him. “That’s for you to find out. For now, as always, I’m assuming innocence. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But if I’m right, then there’s something out there that your friends down at headquarters missed. So, take a look-see, will you?”
“Okay,” he said.
She handed him a copy of the case file, which she had relentlessly flagged and redlined, and a sheaf of notes highlighting her own interviews and impressions. “Take all the time you need,” she said dryly. “You’ve got until September.”
“What if you don’t like what I find?”
“As always,” she said with a shrug, “I’ll have to live with it, won’t I?”
There were many in Jessup’s line of work who, for the right fee, would break the rules without thinking twice, on behalf of lawyers who both expected and encouraged it. But Dana knew he was not one of them. She knew he would bend the rules, if he could, and stretch an interpretation as far as it would go, as she herself would, but that was where it would end. He was, perhaps because of his background, perhaps in spite of it, incorruptible. Whatever way an investigation went was how he would present it. He could not be turned. It made him a formidable opponent, and an invaluable ally.
Jessup worked out of his Capitol Hill home, a compact brick house tucked between two huge gingerbread Victorians and unfettered by the trappings of children. He had taken the second bedroom as an office, overnight visitors being rare, in a move that turned out to be far more comfortable and economical than renting separate space had proven to be.
His wife saw to his bookkeeping, tracking his hours and expenses, preparing the monthly billings, and keeping a careful watch over the receipts and disbursements. It was part-time work for her, amounting to at most twenty hours a month, and she had no problem fitting it around her job as an administrative assistant at Providence Hospital.
“I can’t believe you’re working on this case,” Louise Jessup told her husband when he came home with the Latham file in his briefcase. “Why would anyone want to help that animal?”
“My job isn’t to judge,” he reminded her, “it’s to investigate.”
“But I know people who died in that bombing,” she argued. “Innocent people, friends.”
“I know you did,” he allowed. “But I still have a job to do.”
They ate dinner in silence. It was better than his trying to explain to her, for the millionth time, how important what he did was to the proper outcome of a trial. He had no trouble explaining it to himself. Holding the state to the highest standard of evidence was what made the system work. Checks and balances were what kept it honest. After all his years on the police force, Jessup knew that as well as anyone.
As soon as dinner was over, he retired to his office with a steaming mug of tea, and picked up the material Dana had given him. First, he scanned the pages to get the gist of what they contained. Then he went back to the beginning and read the file, word for word. This time, alongside Dana’s notations, he added some of his own. When he was finished, he sat back in his chair, a shabby recliner that his wife hated, but where he did some of his best thinking, and sipped his now tepid tea. After a while, he picked up a yellow pad, and began to write, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed as thoughts came to him. Every once in a while, he would stop and refer back to something in the file, and then he would continue his writing. After two hours of this, he read over what he had written, made a few changes, placed the pad and the file on top of his desk, and went to bed.
“What you find out,” Louise asked in the darkness. “Will it help convict Corey Latham or acquit him?”
“I don’t know yet,” he replied softly.
SIXTEEN
Margaret Ethridge’s home in Bothell, just north of Seattle, was immaculate and filled with an assortment of overstuffed furniture and framed photographs that spoke of years of continuity.
Craig Jessup was welcomed into the living room and sat in a huge wing chair by the fire with a cup of fresh-brewed coffee.
“We told Elise, you know, right from the beginning, that it was a mistake,” Margaret said.
“What was a mistake?” Jessup asked.
“Marrying him, of course,” she replied. “To begin with, he wasn’t Catholic. What chance did she have of making a marriage work with a Methodist? And as if that wasn’t bad enough, it all happened too fast. A matter of months, a few weeks, really. But would she listen? Not to a word of it. Oh, she knew exactly what she was doing, she said. We shouldn’t worry. We shouldn’t try to interfere. But of course, she didn’t know what she was doing, and now look what’s happened. She’s ruined her life, and not just here on earth. Her soul is going to burn in hell for all eternity.”
“You mean, because of the abortion?”
The woman, an older, heavier, faded version of her daughter, wagged her head in obvious distress. “This whole thing had disaster written across it from the start.”
“You didn’t approve of Corey Latham?”
“It had nothing to do with him, personally,” Margaret said. “The truth is, it was all so fast, we hardily had a chance to get to know him. He seemed nice enough, I guess, for a Methodist. No, it was her. You see, he didn’t know, she wouldn’t let us breathe a word to him about it. But my daughter was on the rebound.”
Much of what Craig Jessup did when he worked a case, and what made him so valuable, involved sifting through countless perceptions and impressions to reach reliable conclusions, and it helped clarify his thinking to be able to bounce his ideas off another person. The only person in the world he trusted enough to be his sounding board was his wife of twenty-eight years
. She had a sharp mind and a simple way of cutting right to the chase.
“Can you put aside your personal feelings about this case,” he asked her, “and just consider the possibility that Latham might be innocent?”
“I’m not going to tell you it will be easy,” Louise replied. “But since you’ve gone and gotten yourself involved in it now, I’ll do my best.”
He told her the salient points about his visit with Margaret Ethridge.
“I can understand the family’s disappointment,” she said. “The Catholic thing, and all that. But to cut her daughter off at a time like this, that seems pretty heartless to me.”
Jessup nodded. “I can’t decide whether the mother is a woman who’s trying to cope, or a woman who’s trying to control.”
“Or someone who’s afraid to get too close to what might really be there.”
“I’ve been renting rooms to naval officers for twenty years,” Evelyn Biggs confided on the front porch of her boarding house in Bremerton. “Corey Latham was one of my favorites. He used to come in for cocoa and conversation in the evenings, especially when he had a problem he needed to work out. He called me his surrogate mom. I was proud to have him and that nice Zach Miller rooming together in my house. Why, he couldn’t possibly have done what they say he did. You think I would have rented to a monster? Now that wife of his, that’s another story. You ask me, she’s the monster.”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Biggs?” Jessup inquired of the gray-haired landlady who was every bit as wide as she was tall.
“Because it was so obvious. Right from the beginning. She snared him like a piece of fish for her dinner. Got her hooks in so deep, he didn’t know up from down. How could he, him being so young and inexperienced, like he was? All the poor boy could do was wriggle, while she dragged him here and dangled him there. And then to kill his baby without a second thought? A long cold drink of water, that one.”
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