Act of God

by Susan R. Sloan

  “No, he couldn’t, but still, you have to admit it’s a coincidence that you just happen to drive a vehicle similar to the one that was seen, and it just happens to have a military sticker on it, isn’t it?”

  “I guess you could look at it that way,” Corey granted with a little frown.

  “And there’s the fact of your being in the Navy, isn’t there? And not just in the Navy, mind you, but a weapons officer with training that assuredly qualifies you to make a bomb. Another coincidence?”

  “I think it was established that you don’t have to have military training to be competent to make a bomb,” Corey said.

  “Point well taken,” Brian allowed. “But then there’s poor Joshua Clune. He testifies that he saw someone deliver packages to the basement of Hill House the night before the bombing, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Further, he says the man he saw wore a windbreaker and a seaman’s cap, just like two items of clothing that were retrieved from your home, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And finally, he identifies the man he saw as you, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Corey said. “But he was mistaken.”

  “Yes, of course, but a coincidence nonetheless, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Now, add to that an anonymous letter that tells the police there’s an officer at Bangor who’s very angry over the fact that his wife had an abortion at Hill House while he was out to sea, and what do we have but another coincidence, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then there are all those trace materials found in your car and in your garage. True, you justified every single one of them—aspirin, sulfuric acid, fertilizer, and duffel bag fibers—but here we are again, faced with coincidences, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, but that’s exactly what they are.”

  “As, I’m sure, is the fact that two people from two different auto parts stores both identified you as having bought a car battery at their shop within a four-day period, right?”

  “The second man was mistaken,” Corey said, and although it was cool in the room, Dana noticed little beads of perspiration forming on his brow.

  “And your neighbor, Mr. Ram, was he also mistaken when he said he heard your car start up around midnight on the night before the bombing?”

  “I think my wife showed in her testimony that he could have been mistaken.”

  “Oh yes, which brings us to another coincidence: Your sleeping wife is your only alibi. Do you see what I’m getting at here, Mr. Latham? You had motive, you had means, and your wife notwithstanding, you had opportunity, which no one else under suspicion did. How do you explain that?”

  “Maybe you didn’t have the right people under suspicion,” Corey suggested.

  “You might have a point,” Brian said, “except that an investigation is a process of following leads, of going where the evidence takes you, not the other way around, which isn’t always scientific, but usually gets you to the right place.”

  “Except this time it didn’t.”

  “How do you feel about abortion, Mr. Latham?”

  “I’m opposed to it.”

  “For yourself, or for everybody?”

  “For myself, certainly. I cherish life, as God wants us to. But I can’t really speak for anybody else.”

  “You don’t have any burning desire to see Roe v. Wade overturned?”

  “I’m not very political.”

  “But you’re pretty religious, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” Corey replied.

  “You said earlier that you pray every day, and that you depend on God to show you the way, is that correct?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I assume that means you pretty much follow God’s way, is that true?”

  “I would hope so.”

  “Well, let me ask you this, if you were pretty sure that God wanted you to go in one direction, even if you thought maybe you should go in another, would you follow Him?”

  “Man may be fallible,” Corey replied with a smile, “but God isn’t.”

  “So you would be inclined to go in God’s direction?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Every time?”

  “Probably.”

  “But what would you do if, say, God wanted you to go in a direction that might require you to do something, commit some act that was in conflict with the laws of man?”

  “I believe that, by its very nature, an act of God can’t be wrong,” Corey told him, without thinking. “I also believe that man should strive to live harmoniously with God. So if there is truly a conflict, then maybe man’s laws should be reexamined.”

  A brief murmur fluttered around the courtroom, and several of the jurors looked a bit uncertain.

  “Thank you,” Brian said, satisfied. “That’s all I have for this witness.”

  “Corey,” Dana asked on redirect, “the prosecutor just asked you, in essence, if you would be willing to commit an illegal act if you thought it was the will of God. Did you intend to say you would?”

  “No,” he replied, startled. “I thought he was speaking in generalities about my beliefs.”

  “Then let me ask you in the specific. Did God direct you to kill all those people at Hill House?”

  “No,” he replied. “Of course not. I would never have done that, and God would never have asked me to.”

  “In that case, Your Honor,” the attorney declared with an elaborate shrug, “the defense rests.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Abraham Bendali rarely discussed a trial outside the courtroom, and even more rarely did he discuss one with his wife.

  “I wouldn’t want to be on that jury,” he said at the dinner table that night. “Not for anything.”

  “Don’t worry, no one would ever let you,” Nina Bendali reminded him with a chuckle. “You know too much.”

  “Judges are supposed to safeguard the presumption of innocence,” he told her. “But so many of us just pay lip service to that. We’re supposed to be impartial. Well, at least we’re supposed to maintain the illusion of impartiality. But most of the time, we know exactly what’s what.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Well, not this time. This time I’m as confounded as everyone else. And it’s giving me a headache.”

  “I’ll make you some chamomile tea,” Nina offered.

  “I’m tired,” he told her. “I’m so tired.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why this is going to be your last trial.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “How did you know that?”

  “What?” she replied. “Did you think I could be married to you for forty-three years and not know everything there was to know about you?”

  “Everything?” he questioned, knowing such a notion should dismay him, yet feeling oddly comforted.

  “Everything,” she declared, looking him directly in the eye.

  Dana and Joan worked late into the night on closing arguments, ordering dinner in, bouncing ideas off each other, polishing, perfecting. Although both attorneys knew that the jurors probably didn’t need any further persuasion, the final word was considered almost as important as the whole rest of the trial.

  It was past ten when Dana finally dragged herself home to Magnolia. The crowd of media people had dwindled to almost manageable proportions, and were now more interested in her take on the trial than in the state of her personal life.

  She gave a polite “No comment,” and closed the front door firmly on the cries of protest. In the dark, the red light on the answering machine blinked.

  Finally, there was a message from Sam. It was brief, giving her his new address and a telephone number, and asking about Molly. But Dana couldn’t believe how good it felt just to hear his voice again. Without thinking of the time, she reached for the receiver and dialed.

  “Hi,” she said when he answered.

  “Hi,” he replied.
r />   “How are you?”

  “I’m doing okay,” he said. “How about you?”

  She opened her mouth to tell him about the trial, to tell him how Corey’s testimony had gone. “I miss you,” she said instead. “I miss you so much I don’t know what to do.”

  She heard him sigh at the other end. “I miss you, too,” he said, and there was no mistaking the pain in his voice, even over a telephone line. “How’s Molly?”

  “She’s fine,” Dana told him. “She’s still with my folks. I thought it would be best to leave her there for a while. My fifteen minutes of fame appear to be over, but just in case, there’s no reason to expose her to any of it.”

  “I think that was wise,” he said. “Would it be all right if I went out to see her?”

  “Of course it would,” she told him. “She’s been asking for you.”

  “I’ll go tomorrow then,” he said. “If it’s clear, maybe we’ll go up to Hurricane Ridge.”

  Dana caught her breath. Hiking in the Olympic Mountains was something the three of them had always loved to do.

  “Sam,” she said tentatively, “could we talk?”

  “Yes, we’ll have to talk,” he said. “But not yet.”

  “Okay,” Dana said, her heart soaring, although his words were hardly committal. “I won’t push. When… whenever you’re ready will be just fine.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Standing before the jury in his best charcoal gray suit and crisp white shirt, Brian Ayres looked every inch the confident, dedicated public servant that he was.

  Like a seasoned actor, he had rehearsed his closing argument in front of the bathroom mirror for over a week, until he had memorized every word, refined every nuance, practiced every change of tone. Now all he had to do was interpret the script for the jury exactly as he had performed it for his reflection.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this has been a very difficult trial for me, as I’m sure it’s been for all of you,” he began in a somber tone. “I didn’t lose a loved one in the bombing of Hill House, but it isn’t hard, looking over at that special section of spectators who have courageously insisted on coming to court each day, to imagine how horrific it would have been.”

  It was ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, and for the next six and a half hours, interrupted only by the customary breaks, he went back over the evidence, piece by piece, showing how neatly it all fit around the person of Corey Latham.

  He dragged out some of the slides used by the medical examiner, just as a reminder, although the jury needed no reminding. Dr. Pruitt’s testimony was still as vivid in their minds as it had been on the day it was first presented.

  He brought into court the ingredients of the bomb, as had been determined by the FBI, set them up on a table in front of the jury, ordered the windows opened, and then donned a mask and two layers of surgical gloves. As he began to grind aspirin tablets into fine powder, he spoke about the death of Corey Latham’s unborn baby.

  “Abortion is a very personal issue,” he said. “When two people come up against it, without the proper foundation having been laid for their relationship, the results can be explosive. But make no mistake about it, this trial isn’t about abortion. And it doesn’t matter which side of the issue you’re on. This trial is about the cold-blooded murder of one hundred and seventy-six people, sixty of them innocent babies, and there can be no justification for that.”

  As he mixed the powdered aspirin with the methyl alcohol, he spoke about Milton Auerbach’s sighting of the SUV.

  “The man reported what he saw,” he said. “He didn’t make it up. He had no reason to lie. Without knowing whether it meant anything or not, he simply told a policeman that he had seen a dark-colored sport utility vehicle, with a military sticker on the windshield, parked in front of Hill House on the night before the bombing.”

  As he drained the sulfuric acid from a car battery into a glass beaker, he brought up the anonymous letter.

  “Someone who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be identified, knew something that he or she thought the police should know. If you had lost a loved one in that horrible tragedy, would you have wanted the police to discount the information just because they couldn’t authenticate the source? No. You would have wanted them to do their job, which was to follow up on everything that might have been connected to the Hill House bombing.”

  As he combined the acetylsalicylic acid crystals with the sulfuric acid, warmed them in cooking oil, and carefully added the sodium nitrate, he spoke about Joshua Clune.

  “That young man saw something on the night of the bombing. He almost certainly saw the man who planted the bomb. He identified a windbreaker and a seaman’s cap, owned by the defendant, as being consistent with what he saw the delivery man, as he called him, wearing. He says he saw the defendant. Now, whether you accept his testimony or not, he gave it, under oath, and to the best of his ability.”

  As he dumped the aspirin mixture into a bowl of crushed ice, and waited for the bright yellow crystals to form, Brian detailed the trace materials found in the defendant’s possession.

  “How many coincidences must we have before they stop being coincidental?” he asked.

  As he pulverized the yellow crystals into powder, he talked about redirected anger and frustration.

  “How do we get rid of real anger? We vent it, that’s how. But the defendant couldn’t take it out on his wife, because he loved her. So he looked around for something that would serve as a surrogate target, and give him that needed sensation of triumphing over his humiliation. Because that’s what Corey Latham’s anger was all about, humiliation. His wife had taken something away from him, without his permission, and he was powerless to do anything about it. She had destroyed his seed, without a second thought, and he was furious. Carl Thorson told you how furious he was. So furious that he couldn’t simply forgive his wife and forget it ever happened, as he would like you to believe. No, he had to do something with that anger. And we know what he did with it. He redirected it at Hill House.”

  And finally, as he mixed the powder with the proper measures of wax and Vaseline, he turned to religion.

  “You heard the defendant, ladies and gentlemen. He said it himself. In a conflict between God’s will and man’s law, God wins. He as good as told you, not just that he did it, but why he did it. Who knows what he thought, in his anger and frustration? Who knows what twisted logic his mind must have followed to convince himself that God wanted him to destroy Hill House, and that he’d get away with it? We may never know. But what we do know, what all those grieving people over there in the spectator section know far too well, is the result.”

  He picked up the plastique he had created, and held it out to the jury. “Make no mistake about it, ladies and gentlemen, Corey Latham did it,” he said slowly, deliberately. “And this is what he did it with. Make him pay for it. Find him guilty as charged.”

  The jurors stared in fascination at: the yellowish blob. The Hill House survivors wept softly. Brian Ayres took his seat. Dana McAuliffe sighed. Court was adjourned for the day.

  Abraham Bendali cleared his throat. It was Thursday, and it was November. The skies were heavy with rain, and the trial of Corey Latham was drawing to an end.

  “Ms. McAuliffe, are you prepared to begin your closing argument at this time?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Dana replied.

  “You may proceed.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor.” Dana rose, buttoning the jacket of her burgundy suit as she walked slowly toward the jury.

  “It occurred to me during the prosecutor’s argument yesterday what he and I are really doing here,” she began, looking each juror right in the eye. “We’re spinning.”

  She noted confusion in several of the jurors’ expressions.

  “That’s right, we’re spin doctors,” she told them. “We’ve taken identical pieces of information, and we’ve twisted them and turned them, and painted them, and dressed them up until we think we’ve g
ot them supporting our particular position. Now you may ask, how is that possible? How can the identical information be interpreted in two such totally opposite ways? And of course our answer would be: because there are always two sides to a story. And just like politicians who want your vote, we try to put the most convincing slant we can on our side of the story. Because, in a way, we’re asking for your vote.”

  Understanding replaced confusion and Dana even caught a slight nod from John Quinn.

  “Do we have two sides to this story?” she asked. “You bet we do, and they’re about as opposite as they can be. Yesterday, the prosecutor told you the state’s side. Today, I’d like to speak for Corey Latham. And don’t worry, I’m not going to divert your attention from the facts by standing up here and making a bomb while I talk. On the contrary, I want your total concentration to be on what I’m saying. Because it’s the cold, hard facts that should decide this case—not some sleight of hand.”

  The jurors, with perhaps a modicum of relief, seemed to relax in their seats.

  “The prosecutor has suggested that the police followed the evidence where it led them. But I suspect it was just the opposite. After all, there they were, Seattle’s finest, working for a solid month on the biggest case in the city’s history, with nothing to show for it. The truth is, ladies and gentlemen, sad and frustrating though it may be, not every crime has a resolution. Sometimes, there’s just not enough evidence to make an arrest or to get a conviction. But they couldn’t let that happen here. No, this crime was different, and the public and political pressure on the police to solve it was enormous. Then one day, from out of the blue, an anonymous letter conveniently arrives. And from that moment on, this case had nothing to do with following the evidence, and everything to do with finding the Navy officer the letter referred to, and selecting the evidence that would best fit around him.”

  With a twinge of regret, Brian noted that the jury seemed just as caught up in his opponent’s presentation as they had been in his. Karleen McKay’s eyes were fairly popping.

  “Did they have a perfectly good candidate already at hand in Jack Pauley?” Dana asked. “Of course they did, but somehow he just seems to have slipped through the cracks of a shoddy investigation. And he’s just the one we happened to find out about. There could be others. But no, the police zeroed in on Corey Latham, decided they could make him into a viable suspect, and stopped looking.”