jim hall, meanwhile, was ready to present the case against Stephen Barrow to a grand jury. The jurors, twenty-three strong, every one of them a standby volunteer who’d ignored the weather and jumped at the idea of earning $40 for an hour or two of work, were already seated in the courtroom, which on this Wednesday morning would serve as a grand jury room. They were laborers and mechanics, truck drivers and store clerks, homemakers and waitresses, as well as a number who, when asked to list their current employment, wrote down that they were “between jobs,” “looking for employment,” “receiving public assistance,” or “unable to work” for one reason or another. The youngest was Stacy Coombs, a nineteen-year-old student at Columbia Greene Community College in need of a little cigarette money; the oldest was Vernon Lassiter, an eighty-three-year-old farmer, for whom a $40 check in the middle of February was nothing less than a godsend. Of the twenty-three, sixteen were registered Republicans, four Democrats, two called themselves Independents, and one considered himself an “other.” All twenty-three were white. About the only other things they had in common were that all were over eighteen and residents of Columbia County, and none had a felony record.
Although Jim Hall had spoken the truth when he’d told Theresa Mulholland that the sheriff’s deputies had seized a bunch of goodies from Stephen Barrow’s home, he’d nevertheless decided against using any of those goodies at the grand jury presentation. For one thing, the items were still being inventoried. For another, there was so much stuff in the computer - huge manuscripts, hundreds of pages long, among other things - that they’d been forced to hire an outside technician just to download the hard drive onto disks, and the guy was going to need a few more days to finish doing it. So far, he’d said there was no indication that Barrow had put any photos of his daughter out onto the Internet, or exchanged correspondence with other pornographers. But you never knew.
So at 11:15, when Hall marched into the courtroom - now the grand jury room - it was with what he liked to call a bare- bones case. But that was just fine with Hall, who knew that somewhere down the road, the defense would be entitled to receive a transcript of whatever the witnesses said in the grand jury, at least those witnesses who also ended up testifying at trial. Therefore, the rule was the less said, the better. Consequently, the jurors were only going to hear from Emma Priestley, as to how she’d come across the pornographic photos while developing them in the ColorMaster 3000, and Investigator Todd Stickley, who’d arrested Stephen Barrow in possession of them the following day. Then they’d get to look at the photos themselves. Well, not all of them: no use wasting their time with the twenty or so that didn’t have anything to do with the case. Just the three or four of the kid naked, especially the one where he’d made her bend over and expose herself for all the world to see.
And that would be that.
No need for the girl herself to testify, one picture being worth 1,000 words, just like they said. No need for some fancy expert to come in and say the photos were lewd - the good people of Columbia County would be more than able to judge that for themselves. And since Flynt Adams hadn’t notified Jim Hall that he wanted his client to testify, there was no need to wait for him.
The entire presentation, from start to finish, took forty-one minutes. Given the opportunity to suggest questions of their own, the jurors declined, except for one man, who wanted to know if Mr. Barrow was locked up in jail, where he belonged.
“Not at the moment,” Jim Hall replied. “But we aim to take care of that.”
There was a ripple of approving laughter. Then Hall - who, in the absence of a judge, not only served as the prosecutor, but acted as the legal advisor to the grand jury as well - read the applicable law to the jurors, inviting them to consider four different charges, before excusing himself from the room, so they could vote in secret.
But he knew not to go far. He stood right outside the closed door for just over ninety seconds, at which point the sound of a buzzer summoned him back inside. The foreman of the grand jury promptly handed him four pieces of paper, each bearing a signature and a check mark in a box, right next to the words true bill. What the signatures and checks indicated was that the grand jury had formally returned an indictment against Stephen Barrow on each of the four counts submitted to them: Possessing a Sexual Performance by a Child, Promoting a Sexual Performance by a Child, Use of a Child in a Sexual Performance, and Endangering the Welfare of a Child. The first three of these charges were felonies, carrying maximum prison sentences of four, seven, and fifteen years, respectively. The fourth charge was a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail. And although New York law contains certain technical restrictions on when a defendant may be sentenced to consecutive terms, a lot of folks unfamiliar with those restrictions would fall back on simple mathematics and calculate that for what he’d done, Stephen Barrow was looking at twenty-seven years in the slammer. And as far as most of them were concerned, that sounded just about right.
Even though Stephen Barrow had no address listed in the phone book, and used a post office box instead of a street number, Theresa Mulholland had little trouble finding out where he lived. Theresa was, after all, a reporter, and all she had to do was drive through a light snow to the office of the town clerk in New Lebanon (New Lebanon being the township in which East Chatham was located), and look in the index book until she found the entry she was looking for.
Barrow, Stephen 14 Hilltop Drive, East Chatham 12060, it said. People thought they had privacy, but they were wrong. It was all out there, everything you wanted to know about anybody -address, phone number (whether listed or not), Social Security number, bank balance, annual income, credit rating, party registration, arrest record, videos rented, cars owned, tickets received, library books overdue.
You name it, she could find it.
But when it came to Stephen Barrow, Theresa didn’t need any of that stuff, just his address. Next she walked over to the far wall, where a large map of New Lebanon Township hung. From a street index, she located Hilltop Road in East Chatham. It was off Route 295, up the hill from Bristol Road.
The next question was whether to phone ahead or simply drop by unannounced. Phoning ahead was certainly the polite thing to do, particularly in light of Stephen Barrow’s earlier reaction the moment he’d found out she was a reporter. But if she phoned him, asking his permission to meet with him, chances were pretty good he’d say no. He’d either refuse outright or insist on first calling his lawyer, who’d then refuse for him. She could try for a phone interview, but phone interviews were no substitute for face-to-face meetings; they never were. So it became a no-brainer: She had to go see him in person, without calling ahead.
That’s all there was to it.
Except for one thing: Getting Stephen Barrow to actually talk to her was going to take some doing. It was going to require a plan, a strategy.
Shortly after noon on that same Wednesday, Flynt Adams was served with an order to show cause drawn up by the lawyers for Ada Barrow. It required him to appear in Supreme Court in Hudson on Friday and to convince the court that certain temporary relief should not be granted to Stephen Barrow’s ex-wife. Specifically, they were seeking an order that would grant Ada Barrow “sole and exclusive custody of the minor child” (Adams despised lawyers who deliberately used redundancies for no discernable purpose) “at least until the resolution of the felony charges currently pending” against Stephen (this came as no surprise, and was certain to be granted); an increase in the alimony and child-support payments Stephen was sending Ada each week (the surprise here was that Stephen had been paying her any child support at all, since he was the one who’d been taking care of Penny; still, now that Ada had her, the court was sure to agree she needed even more money); and additional money so that Penny could “receive psychotherapy to assist her in attempting to cope with the profound trauma caused her” by Stephen’s actions (again, a sure bet).
Adams hated to call Stephen, to break the news to him. He’d been on the p
hone with him half a dozen times the day before, explaining that the sheriff’s deputies who’d come to Stephen’s home Monday night had indeed had a search warrant (Adams had checked with Jim Hall), didn’t have to knock before kicking in the door, and might or might not be willing to pay for the damage they caused to it. No, he couldn’t get his computer back right away, even if it meant he wouldn’t be able to get back to his writing. Yes, they were allowed to take his mail, and that meant they could open it and read it, too. No, there was no indictment yet that he was aware of, but there was every reason to believe there’d be one in a day or two.
The conversations had not been fun.
Still, being a lawyer meant you had to say you were sorry sometimes, and Adams knew he had to call his client. He dialed the number, which he’d already committed to memory. He listened as it rang three times before an answering machine clicked on, signaling a reprieve from having to deliver the bad news in person.
“Sorry,” said the voice of a young girl, “we’re not home right now. But if you leave us a message, we’ll call ya soon.”
“Cute message,” said Adams, before realizing he probably shouldn’t have commented on it. “Stephen, this is Flynt. Give me a call at the office when you get a chance, okay? Thanks.”
The reason why Flynt Adams missed Stephen Barrow was that at the moment Adams called, Stephen was out shivering in his unheated garage, gathering up the tools he figured he was going to need to repair his front door and reattach it to its hinges. Walking back to the house, his boots left deep prints in the snow. Stephen’s house was not only on Hilltop Drive, it was at the very top of Hilltop Drive, making it virtually the highest point in the county. And it was a sudden height, in the sense that the drop-off to Route 295, only three miles to the south, was a full 1,500 feet, making for an incline of nearly 10 percent. The result was a phenomenon quite familiar to downhill skiers: It can be raining when you get onto a chairlift at the bottom of a mountain, and snowing by the time you reach the top. And if it happens to be sleet or wet snow that’s just beginning to stick down below, up top it’ll already be piling up.
With nothing but a thin storm door to keep the weather out, Stephen had decided he couldn’t put off his repair job any longer. Flynt Adams had suggested he take photographs of the damage, or call in a contractor to fix the door so he’d have a receipt to show for it. But Stephen’s camera had been taken in the search, and he knew better than to expect a contractor to come out in the snow for such a small job. So he’d decided to do it himself, the best he could, even if it meant doing a lot of the work out in the cold.
As soon as Theresa Mulholland made the turn off of Route 295 and began the climb up Bristol Road, she noticed that the snow suddenly seemed to be falling more heavily and was definitely deeper. Still, her Honda was pretty good on snow - not as good as a four-wheeler, of course, but good. She downshifted to second gear in order to deal with not only the snow but the incline, which was a lot to contend with all by itself.
She’d been thinking about strategy on the way over, trying to come up with some ruse to get Stephen Barrow to talk to her. She’d considered offering him the opportunity of having his side of the story printed in her follow-up, without editorial change. She’d toyed with the idea of suggesting a trade, swapping her knowledge that the DA was presenting his case to the grand jury today in exchange for some comment from him. She’d even flirted with making up a mystery witness, an enticing source she couldn’t reveal, except to hint that he or she could prove helpful, if only Stephen would grant Theresa an interview.
Now, however, all thoughts of tactics vanished as Theresa was forced to turn her full concentration to maintaining her speed in the deepening snow. According to the drawing she’d made from the township map, she was on the second of three dirt roads she’d have to climb simply to get to the beginning of Hilltop Drive.
It occurred to Theresa to give it up, to make a U-turn and head down the hill while she still could. But she was afraid if she even slowed down enough to look for a place where it was safe to turn around, she’d get stuck. So she plowed ahead stubbornly, the front wheels of the Honda slipping occasionally, but for the most part crunching through the snow. The road was narrower now and bordered closely on both sides by tall trees that blocked some of the falling snow and made for a little better visibility. Still, she almost missed the turnoff onto Hilltop Drive, and the Honda skidded frighteningly before getting its head again and resuming the climb.
She made it the rest of the way up to the top, and had already pretty much decided on first gear for the downhill stretch that lay ahead of her, when she spotted a small number 14 on a birch tree at the beginning of a long driveway. Just her luck: Even the driveway went up. She gunned the engine as she made the turn, and the Honda valiantly plowed forward for another twenty feet before finally coming to a stop and stalling out.
“Jesus!” she muttered. “There must be three feet of snow up here.”
Actually, there was less than half that much. Stephen Barrow knew, because he’d just walked through it, coming back toward the house from the garage. But with no place else to go, he was hardly in a hurry to begin shoveling. He’d listened to the radio, and they were predicting somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two inches, not so much that you had to shovel in stages just to keep up with it. No, he’d wait till it was over, whenever that might be, and do it once. Better to spend his time fixing the door. If he put that off until it started getting dark, not only wouldn’t he be able to see what he was doing, but his fingers would grow so numb from the cold that he wouldn’t be able to do what he was seeing, either.
He couldn’t decide if the symmetry of that idea was extremely clever or just plain wordy. Normally, when he came up with something like that, he’d find paper and pen and jot it down, save it somewhere, and decide later on whether or not it was worth incorporating into whatever he was writing. But now whatever he was writing was gone, seized by the sheriff’s deputies along with his computer and all his disks. And because he hadn’t printed out the seventy pages, it looked as though he wasn’t going to be writing anything for a while. So there was no use jotting anything down and saving it.
He jammed a couple of toothpicks into the top screw hole in the doorframe, then broke them off flush with the surface. He did the same with the three remaining holes for the first hinge. Next he filled the holes with wood glue. He was waiting a moment for the glue to begin to set when he thought he heard a car door slam.
Now the thing was, from Stephen Barrow’s house, he couldn’t hear a car door slam. Not unless it was parked on his own property or right down on the road at the bottom of his driveway.
His first thought was that it might be police of some sort, coming to pay him another visit. But that didn’t seem likely: There was simply nothing left for them to take. He positioned the hinge, inserted the first screw, and tightened it down. With the toothpicks narrowing the hole, it held nicely. He repeated the process with the three other screws before stepping back to appraise his handiwork. Satisfied, he reached into his jacket pocket for his gloves, pulled up his collar, and headed down the driveway to see if someone down on the road needed help.
Because the snow was falling pretty heavily, he was about three-quarters of the way down before he saw the car. It was red and looked to be a Toyota, or maybe a Honda. And it seemed as though the driver had gotten stuck trying to turn around in Stephen’s driveway. That was the trouble with front-wheel drive: As you went uphill, the car’s weight shifted to the rear wheels, and the front ones lost traction. You were okay as long as you kept moving, but as soon as you slowed down, you got into trouble. Well, he could lend a hand. How hard could it be to push the thing back down to the road? Although, from the look of things, both right wheels seemed to be off the driveway, and more in the drainage ditch that ran alongside it.
So focused was Stephen on the car that he didn’t see the man standing off to the side of it until he was almost on top of him.
“Hey, buddy, can I give you a hand?”
“I guess so,” said a voice too high to be coming from anybody’s buddy.
“Sorry,” said Stephen. “I’m afraid I couldn’t see you too well.” He waved one arm in the air by way of explanation.
“Tell me about it,” said the woman. “It was barely snowing at all down below.”
“I know. We seem to have our own weather system up here. I’m Stephen Barrow, by the way.”
“I know who you are,” said the woman. “I’m Terry Mulholland, and the thing is, I was stopping by hoping to apologize to you. And now I’m stuck, and I feel like an absolute idiot.”
“Apologize to me?” He squinted to try to make out her face, but in the blowing snow, it was hard to see much of anything.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m the reporter who tried to talk to you Saturday, over in South Chatham, right after you’d come out of court. You walked off when you found out who I was.”
He remembered, sort of. “So you thought you’d give me another chance to refuse to talk to you?”
“I thought I’d apologize for being insensitive the first time.”
Stephen said nothing.
“I apologize,” she said.
“I accept your apology,” said Stephen. “But I’m still not going to talk to you.”
“Can you at least give me a push and help me get out of here?”
She was about the last person in the world Stephen wanted to help, but the thought of getting her out of there did have some appeal. He walked around to the right side of the car and kicked some of the snow away from the tires. Just as he’d suspected, she’d managed to find the ditch. With his Renegade, it would have been no problem. The four-wheel drive would have allowed him to push her out from above, or even pull her out from below, if he could have gotten around her. But with the Ford Fiesta, there was no way.
“We can try to shovel you out,” he said, “but you seem to have done a pretty good job there.”
Best Intentions Page 12