Presumption of Guilt

by Rachel Sinclair

  When she said the words that he was good at computers, it triggered something in me. I instantly started wondering if maybe he was the one who had been sending threatening messages. That would make sense. After all, I was defending the woman who was accused of murdering his sister. That would give him a reason to threaten me.

  “So you say that he lives in a group home?” I asked her.

  “He used to, but not anymore. He doesn’t work much. He collects social security. He can barely make ends meet, but he is really brilliant. Especially on the computer. He can do things on the computer that experts can’t even do.”

  For some odd reason, as this woman was speaking, chills were running up and down my spine. I thought about the guy, or woman, who had stalked me, coming to my house with a knife. I wondered if he was the kind of person who would do that.

  “Does he know about me?” I asked her.

  “You mean, does he know that you are defending Esmeralda Gutierrez?” she asked.

  “Yes. Does he know that?”

  “Yes. He definitely does know that. I talked to him about it. We’ve talked about this case. He’s not very easy to talk to, not all the time. He does have some areas of his life that he knows what’s real and what’s not. In other areas, he doesn’t have that same line. I have to admit that I’m the same way. Or, rather, with me, I have periods when I know what’s real, and other periods where I don’t. It kind of goes like that with both of us. But yes, when he and I have both been thinking rationally, and living in the real world, we talked about this case.”

  “And you tell me that he is a computer genius? Is there anyway that he would’ve known that Christian here was going to be second-chairing Esme’s case before Christian had even put a notice in with the court that he was on this case?”

  “Yes. We talked about that too. He told me that he came into your house one night, and he had a knife in his hand. He wanted to scare you. He told me that that’s all he wanted to do was scare you off of Esme’s case. And he said that you had a business card that was on your kitchen table when he came in. The business card was for this Christian person. He said that there was writing on the business card, on the back, and the writing was about calling him to work this case with you. So, he figured that this Christian person was going to be your help on this case. So yes, he did know before Christian put in a notice with the court that he was going to be working with you.”

  My heart started to race. This woman was giving me more answers than I ever thought was possible. All of a sudden, I knew who was sending me those threatening messages, and who had broken into my home.

  “And is he dangerous?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “I thought he was at one time. I thought he killed my daughter. I thought that until just a few days ago. That is, when I wasn’t thinking that my daughter was still alive. I would go to the beach and still see her. I’ve had very confused thoughts. But, like I said, I am more lucid today than I’ve been in a long time. And, I have to tell you everything, before things go back to the way they were before. I don’t know how long I have before I go back into my, what I call, my shadow self. So, I have to tell you that I don’t think that my son is dangerous. I don’t think he is, but I do think that my ex-husband is. Jacob.”

  Chapter 26

  “What do you mean, your husband, your ex-husband, is a killer?” I asked her.

  “I just believe that he is. You see, my daughter Aria, she was murdered. Years ago, she was murdered. She was beaten to death.” She hung her head, and then she wiped away some tears. “Her father, he never wanted her. He never liked her. He only wanted boys. So he really doted on Brad, and didn’t even know that Aria was alive. She was very shy, quiet. Didn’t have any friends. I felt sorry for her. I wanted her to make some close friends, but she never did. She was always trying to get her father’s love. She had my love, but she desperately wanted her father’s love. And he would never give it.”

  I felt like I was holding my breath as I waited for her to go on.

  “When Aria was only 14, something happened. Jacob told me that it was Brad who did it, and I believed him. I believed him, because Brad had always had so many problems. But I didn’t believe it, at the same time. I mean, Brad had his issues with delusions, voices, things like that. Hallucinations where he thought that people were talking to him in his bedroom, when they really weren’t. But he was harmless, I thought. But my husband, Jacob, he convinced me otherwise. Aria was in her bedroom, and she had been smacked over the head with a rock. She had this rock that she got from this geological field trip she went to. It was this beautiful rock, had little crystals in it. Very shiny when held up to the light, would sparkle like diamonds. She was laying on the floor when I went up there and the rock was right next to her. And Jacob, he came running up the stairs, and he immediately started screaming at Brad about what he did. He was screaming at him about how could he do this to his sister. You know, Brad was only 12. He was only 12, and he had been in and out of institutions for most of his life. He just happened to be home that weekend.”

  “So wait,” I said to her. “Are you positive that Jacob was the one who killed her? And not your son, Brad?”

  “I think so. Like I said, he never cared for her in the first place. He never wanted her to be around. And, there’s also one thing that was kind of peculiar that I think might have been related to the reason why he would’ve killed my daughter. I was helping her do a genetic test. She was doing it for school, you know, she went to a private school, where the kids in her class can afford things like genetic tests they do online. You know when you swab your cheek, and you send it in. And then you get this report telling you about all kinds of stuff, like if you tolerate caffeine, if you like cilantro, what kind of genetic diseases you might be prone to. That sort of thing. But it also tells you a lot about who your relatives are.”

  I knew what she was talking about. Everybody knew what she was talking about. Those genetic tests were ubiquitous anymore. Everybody was doing them. But, this was seven years ago that Aria was doing them. They weren’t as common back then, as they are now, but I knew that they were still around.

  “So I helped her do this DNA test,” Lauren said, her blue eyes wet with tears. “And I told Jacob what she was doing, and he went absolutely crazy. I mean, he’s always had a hair-trigger temper, but I had never seen him the way he was when I told him about that genetic test. He was screaming at me about how I could let her do that? Was I trying to ruin him? I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought it was a fun thing. You know, a lark. Everybody wants to know where they came from. Everybody wants to know their unique characteristics. And it was a school project.”

  As she spoke, my mind was turning over. There was something about that DNA test that really freaked out Jacob. That was for sure. I had to wonder what it was. I had to wonder what he was trying to hide.

  I wrote down on a piece of paper that I wanted to talk to Christian after Lauren left, and see if he could hack into the database and find out the results of that DNA test. I had a feeling that doing that would illuminate a lot.

  “Did you ever find out exactly what it was that made them freak out about her doing that 23 and Me test?”

  She shook her head. And then she dabbed her eyes. “No. All I know is that when I told him that she had sent in her DNA to be examined, he completely melted down. I don’t even know if she got the results of the test. You know, it takes about six weeks to get the results. She was dead before those results came in. By that time, I was out of the house, so I wasn’t able to get the mail to see if I could find out what the results were. But there was something obviously that was in there that really upset him. I still think that whatever it was in those test results were what made him kill her. I think that now.”

  “But he accused your son of killing her, right? Your son who was only 12 years old at the time?”

  She nodded her head. “Right. He accused him, and because he was having problems any
way, I believed him. He was very impressionable anyway, and plus he was having delusions, in and out of the hospital, so it was very easy to convince Brad that he killed his own sister. I remember him crying hysterically, apologizing over and over. My husband was beating him. He kept slapping him on the face, and shaking him. He boxed his ears, and even punched him a few times. The whole time, my son was just crying. All he wanted from his father was his love and approval. Just like every 12-year-old boy. So it was devastating to him to be accused of killing his sister, and to believe that that’s what happened. And I believed it, too, for the longest time. Because I have had a hard time with trying to stay in reality. I’ve never really understood in my life what’s been real, what’s but not real. So I just assumed that Brad was the one who killed her.”

  “You remember what happened that night? That night that you found your daughter dead in her room?”

  She shook her head. “No. When I saw her, I lost all sense of reality. And I never quite accepted that she was dead. For the next few weeks, I just saw her coming to me in the backyard. It was weird. There was a part of me that knew that she was dead, but there was a part of me that was still seeing her talking to me. I didn’t really know what happened to her. I couldn’t remember what happened to her. And then my husband started giving me LSD. He knew that I was having problems with having visions of my daughter, and seeing my mother, and talking with both of them. I kind of knew that they weren’t real, but I kinda thought that they were real at the same time. My husband told me that if I started taking LSD that it would cure my mental problems. He gave me an article that he had cut out of a magazine. I think it was Time, or Newsweek, or something like that. This magazine said that people were being treated with LSD for their mental problems. I didn’t really read the article itself, I just read the headlines. I believed my husband. I believed everything he told me. If he told me that the sky was green, I was gonna believe it.”

  While she was talking about the LSD thing, I saw that Regina was on my computer. Her head popped up. “When she was talking about the LSD thing, it sounded familiar to me. And she’s right. LSD is being used to treat some kinds of mental problems. But it’s used in microdoses. That means very small doses. Let me guess, Lauren, your husband gave you a shit load more than a microdose. How close am I?”

  Lauren smiled wryly. “Pretty close. He gave me a lot more than what he was supposed to. And he dosed me all the time. I started hallucinating, more than ever. At some point, I lost complete touch with reality. Full-blown psychosis. I went into an entire alternate reality where none of it had ever happened. My daughter was alive, and she was with me all the time. And I don’t know, I was told that later on, I tried to kill myself. I started hearing voices, and the voices were not of my daughter, but of somebody else. I don’t really know who. And I heard the voice tell me to kill myself. So I tried to. I slashed my wrists, and the next thing I know I’m in the mental hospital. The whole time I was in a mental hospital, I really was not living in this world. I didn’t have any periods of lucidity like I have right now. It was six months of just living in a world where my daughter was with me, next to me, the entire time. And the whole time, I was hearing the voice. I was hearing the voice that not only was telling me to hurt myself, but it was also telling me things about myself. Like, the voice would tell me that I was supposed to warn the president that aliens were going to be attacking the United States. And I guess that, according to my chart, which I was able to read before I got out of the hospital, I was lucid at that point, I ran around the hospital screaming that I needed to get out of there because I needed to go to Washington to talk to the president. I needed to save the world.”

  “What happened when you got out of the hospital after six months?” I asked her.

  “Well, as I said, I was fairly lucid at that time. I was lucid enough that I could read my chart and understand what had happened. So I got on a bus. I went to my house. That’s when I saw her. She was Aria, but, at the same time she wasn’t. She looked like her. But she really didn’t. Then I saw a neighbor, and she told me that Aria had been in the hospital in Mexico, that she had had plastic surgery, and that was why she looked different. And that’s when I started to lose my grip on reality again, because I again remembered that Aria had been killed. I was very confused. Then my husband told me that I had to leave, because he had a restraining order against me. I couldn’t be around the house, I couldn’t be around the kids. So, I left. I was so broken, so beaten down, I just didn’t have the will to fight. I just got back on that bus, and I left. I didn’t have a place to go, so I lived on the streets. I’ve lived on the streets ever since. And, as I said, I’ve had good days and bad days. This has been a good day. This has been a very good day. But I know that it’s not going to last. I know that at any moment, I’ll just cave into what I call my shadow self. It’s that part of me that takes over, and my reality will be fragmented. At best. That’s why I’m here talking to you now. I have to tell you my story, before I lose touch with what my story is.”

  I felt for her. I knew what she was going through. She was feeling isolated, like nobody was there for her. Nobody had her back. She had lived in a world that was of her own making, and not always a good one. I had lived in a prison. I had wished that when I was in the prison that I could somehow go to another world.

  “Would you be willing to testify in court?” I asked her. “Or would that be too much for you?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “As I said, I have good days and bad days. Mainly bad days. Or, at the very least, not good days. I don’t usually have a day where I’m this aware of my reality. So I can’t guarantee that I will be in any kind of shape to testify in court. But, if I’m feeling good, like I am today, then I certainly will testify.”

  I had to game out exactly what she was saying to me, and exactly how it was all going to fit. I suddenly realized that if what she was telling me was true, I not only had a new direction to go in this case, but that I was going to have a difficult time trying to prove it to a court of law. I was going to have a hard time trying to even show exactly why this woman would be a necessary witness. I was just going to have to put together a theory of what had happened, but I had no idea if I could prove it.

  But there was one thing I knew I had to do.

  I was going to have to ask for a new autopsy. In the previous autopsy, there was no need to identify the body. That meant that there were no dental impressions that were compared to previous dental records. That also meant that the fingerprints were not processed. I was definitely going to have to go to court, and show exactly why it was that I was going to need those things to be done.

  I only hoped it wasn’t too late.

  Chapter 27

  After Lauren gave me the information she gave me, I knew that I just couldn’t turn her back out onto the streets. She told me, the next day after she talked to me, that she was not quite living in reality. I let her stay another night, giving her my bed to sleep in, and I slept on the couch. I knew that she probably had not had a warm bed to sleep in for quite a while. Then, when she woke up, she didn’t know who I was. She was afraid, because she didn’t know where she was.

  I had arranged for her to go to a much nicer place than she was used to. I found a place called Bridges to Recovery up in the Pacific Palisades in the Los Angeles area. I found it online, and it looked like the perfect place for her. It was a luxury mental institution where she could hopefully try to really recover. The place featured acupuncture, massage, yoga, meditation and personal training, in addition to the usual services that a mental institution might provide - psychiatry, psychotherapy, medication management. And it was all administered in a beautiful Los Angeles neighborhood, in a luxury home.

  The whole thing was going to be costing me $50,000 a month. I was not going to be able to foot the bill for too long, maybe for six months, but I hoped that I could at least get her on the road to recovery. What she gave me was invaluable information, so the least that I
could do was to make sure that she was well taken care of. I arranged for transportation to take her up there. I knew that she was scared, but I hoped that they would be able to bring her to reality, and really take care of her.

  And after she left, I got to work. I went into the office, and I met with Christian there. “Okay, the first thing we’re going to have to do is –”

  He smiled. “I know, we’re going to have to make a motion to the court to have the autopsy reopened. We’re going to have to ask for dental records and fingerprints. But there are some major issues with that. The first issue is that you have to understand one thing. This imposter, this person who took the place of Aria, she took her place when she was 14 years old. Probably the dental records are going to match the body, because we’re probably going to get the dental records of the imposter. We can’t very well ask for the dental records for when Aria was a child, because those dental records are not going to match the ones on the body, nor should they. The prosecutor is going to make a good case that the reason why that don’t match is because they’re too old. They were taken when she was a child. I mean, I understand that you’re probably going to ask for the dental records, and I would too. But just be prepared that the prosecutor’s going to shoot that down.”

  “I understand. And the fingerprints –”

  “They probably won’t be dispositive, either. You have to understand that after the imposter was autopsied, her body was released. Presumably, Jacob and Colleen had her buried in a funeral, but she might have been cremated. We don’t know that. If she was buried, we’re going to have to have her exhumed, and we’ll be lucky if we can get good fingerprints from her.”

  I sighed. “So, are you telling me that we might not be able to prove that the woman who was murdered was not Aria?”