Conviction

by Richard North Patterson

  Nor did they now. Liz Shelton's testimony seemed to have driven home to Payton how desperate were his circumstances, displacing his look of anger with a dead-eyed stare at nothing. Rennell simply scribbled on his yellow pad.

  * * *

  "Those questions about blood type," Carlo said now, "Mauriani was covering for the defense lawyer's screwups."

  Nodding, Terri put down the felt-tipped pen she used to underline key questions. "Mauriani didn't want a verdict based on prejudicial error, or a record so bad that the verdict might be reversed for ineffective assistance of counsel. You can almost feel him wishing James were better, then deciding that the only certain answer is self-help."

  "Not so certain," Carlo answered. "James's cross-examination was terrible, pretty much all the time. Like the stupid way he climbed all over Thuy Sen's mother."

  Terri made a wry face. "If terrible and obnoxious were enough, our job would be a whole lot easier. At least James was awake—too awake, probably, because he was all coked up. Aside from constantly wiping his nose, grandiosity and lack of judgment are the hallmarks of a cokehead.

  "But that's our take. The Attorney General's Office will call his tactics the aggressiveness of a dedicated advocate fighting for his clients' lives. In fact, they did say that, on appeal, and our state Supreme Court agreed. The Court also said the evidence was so overwhelming that nothing James did or didn't do would have changed the verdict."

  "Amazing."

  Terri gave him the jaded smile of a lawyer who had seen far too much of this. "Only mildly amazing," she rejoined and tossed him another transcript. "Take a look at James's defense."

  NINETEEN

  THE SOLE WITNESS FOR THE DEFENSE WAS TASHA BRAMWELL.

  In Lou Mauriani's estimate, she made a good impression. Neatly dressed, well-spoken, and unusually composed, Tasha, by her relationship with Payton, suggested a man very different from the menacing crack dealer the jury saw before it. In a manner quiet but unequivocal, she told the courtroom that the brothers had been with her on the day Thuy Sen had vanished.

  "So you're completely confident," James summarized, "that Payton and Rennell spent the afternoon of September twenty-seventh inside your home."

  "Yessir," Tasha answered and addressed the jury with her first hint of passion. "The very next night, at work, I saw that little girl's picture on TV. I'll never forget that as long as I live. I can tell you two things—Payton would never do that, and Rennell and him couldn't have done it. We were together."

  Rising to cross-examine, Mauriani could read the jury's puzzlement. The task before him was delicate—though Tasha Bramwell could not account for the evidence placing Thuy Sen in the brothers' living room, her certainty must give the jurors pause, and her demeanor created sympathy. It would not do to attack her.

  He stood some distance from the witness, amiable and pleasant, hands in the pockets of his suitcoat. "The afternoon of September twenty-seventh," he began, "the three of you watched TV."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Do you remember what programs?"

  "Soap operas, mostly. I remember Days of Our Lives and General Hospital—Rennell likes those."

  At the defendants' table, Mauriani noted, Rennell smiled to himself. "Did the brothers hang out with each other a lot?"

  "Yes, sir. I mean they lived together."

  "Would you call them inseparable?"

  Bramwell seemed to turn the question over in her mind. "I'd call them close. Where Payton went, there'd usually be Rennell."

  "So even though you were Payton's girl, Rennell spent time with both of you."

  Bramwell nodded. "He liked being with us, and Payton didn't seem to mind. So I didn't either."

  With this answer, Mauriani had created an assumption that buttressed Flora Lewis's testimony—where one brother was, so was the other. He chose not to solicit Tasha's admission that, for an hour of private lovemaking, Rennell was left alone: it did nothing for Mauriani's case, directed at both brothers, and James had chosen not to raise it.

  "Every Tuesday," Mauriani asked, "you had a bookkeeping class. Correct?"

  "Yessir. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. At three o'clock."

  "But that Tuesday, you chose to skip it."

  "Yes."

  "How many classes did you skip that semester?"

  "Just the one."

  Approvingly, Mauriani nodded. "I guess you're pretty diligent about attendance."

  "I am that," Tasha affirmed. "I want to do my best."

  "But you felt comfortable cutting that one class."

  "Yessir." Pausing, Bramwell smoothed her skirt, then looked back at Mauriani, adding with satisfaction, "I got an A for the semester."

  Mauriani cocked his head, feigning curiosity. "On what basis did your professor grade you?"

  "Mostly the exams."

  "How many were there?"

  For the first time, Bramwell hesitated, puzzled by the level of Mauriani's interest. "Two," she answered. "A midterm, and a final."

  "And were these take-home exams? Or did Professor Lee give them to you in class?"

  The name of her professor, slipped into Mauriani's question with seeming casualness, caused Bramwell to pause yet again. "In class."

  "In class," Mauriani repeated. "How'd you do on the midterm?"

  Now Bramwell stared at him. "An A, I think."

  "A minus," Mauriani corrected genially. "But close enough." Turning, he walked over to the prosecution table and then paused, asking over his shoulder, "You don't happen to remember the date, do you?"

  Suspicion formed in Bramwell's eyes. Tersely, she answered, "No."

  Reaching into a file folder, Mauriani withdrew a document, three photocopied pages, stapled together at the left-hand corner. Courteously, he showed the document to Yancey James, noting the glassy look appearing in his opponent's gaze. Payton's eyes narrowed to slits; only Rennell seemed unaffected. As Mauriani completed the ritual of marking People's Exhibit 27, he spotted Henry Feldt following its progress back into Tasha Bramwell's hands.

  Turning, the prosecutor walked toward Bramwell. She slid back in the witness chair, her slender body suddenly appearing frail. When he held out the document for Bramwell to take, she hesitated before accepting it. "Can you identify this document?" he asked.

  Silent, she seemed fixated on one corner of the paper. "Yes."

  The smile had vanished, Mauriani noted. "Is that your midterm exam?"

  "Yes."

  She looked stunned, almost sick. Evenly, Mauriani said, "I draw your attention to the upper-right-hand corner of the first page. Can you tell the jury what you see."

  "A date."

  "Would you mind reading it aloud?"

  Bramwell exhaled, a slow release of breath. "September twenty-seventh, 1987."

  "September twenty-seventh," Mauriani repeated. "If Professor Lee says that this date is correct, and his grading records confirm that, do you have any concrete reason to believe that was not the date you took the midterm?"

  Bramwell's lips parted slightly. "Just my own recollection," she answered softly. "Nothing else."

  Mauriani nodded. "And if your recollection's wrong, then you were in class that afternoon, and couldn't have been with Payton and Rennell the afternoon when Thuy Sen disappeared."

  Bramwell glanced toward Payton, as though in silent apology. "No, sir."

  "In that case, you don't know where they were, do you? Or what they might have done?"

  Briefly, Tasha's eyes closed. "No, sir. Except Payton would never do that."

  With a chivalrous air, Mauriani took the document from her hands. "You care about Payton, don't you?"

  "Course I do." Bramwell's voice held a renewed strength. "I love him."

  "Enough to visit him in jail?"

  "Yes, sir. Every day I can."

  Gravely, Mauriani considered her. "During those visits, Tasha, did Payton ask you to tell this story?"

  Tasha folded her arms, unable to look at anyone. Before she could form an a
nswer, Mauriani decided that showing mercy, and even pity, would be better than forcing her to lie. Turning to Rotelli, he said, "I'll withdraw the question, Your Honor. I think we've done enough."

  * * *

  "That was the defense?" Carlo murmured.

  "Yup." Terri unwrapped her tuna sandwich. "One bad alibi witness whose story James never checked out. Not much to show in exchange for Eula Price's house. Plus, Mauriani sandbagged James. His motion to exclude Bramwell was a charade. He already knew that she was lying—he intended to lose the motion, and then let James hang both his clients."

  "Good, wasn't he?"

  "Mauriani? The best. Shameless, too." She passed across the deli bag with "roast beef on rye" scrawled across it. "Eat your sandwich, then take a look at his final argument."

  * * *

  "Thuy Sen's death," Mauriani told the jury, "was the culmination of all you've heard. The witness who saw the brothers abduct her off the street. The sad traces of her last moments alive—a green thread, a fingerprint—in their living room. Semen and saliva, the residue of her anguish, on the defendants' rug and Eddie Fleet's car. The body which washed up where Fleet's testimony suggests it should have.

  "What terrible luck these two must have. What an unhappy series of coincidences it is that every piece of evidence points to their guilt." Pausing, Mauriani looked into Candace Bender's eyes. "If all that's not enough," he said with muted anger, "remember the man Payton asked to murder Eddie Fleet."

  Candace Bender glanced at the defendants, sitting mutely with their lawyer, and Mauriani chose this moment to stop and then nod toward Yancey James. "Mr. James," he continued, "is deeply experienced in capital cases. If a lawyer of his skills had any decent evidence casting doubt on his clients' guilt, don't you think you would have heard it? But all he had to offer was a misguided young woman who chose to tell a lie. As if," Mauriani added with quiet scorn, "the lies of a single witness would expunge the shocking and disgusting acts which took this child's life."

  With this tacit reminder that neither brother had testified on his own behalf, Mauriani paused to survey the courtroom. Meng Sen was still and pale; across the gulf which separated them, Chou Sen covered her face to hide the tears Eula Price did not bother to conceal. But Payton looked defiant, and Rennell's face had become an emotionless mask. Mauriani could not have offered a more chilling depiction of their indifference to the torment of Thuy Sen.

  "You see her murderers before you," he told the jury. "In the name of an innocent, find them guilty."

  * * *

  James's final argument took seven minutes. Mauriani had offered no witness to the death, he reminded the jurors, no physical evidence to prove that his clients caused it. All the prosecutor had was an old lady who despised them, a crack dealer who admitted disposing of the body, and a jailhouse snitch trying to get in good with the police.

  He never mentioned Tasha Bramwell. Less than two hours after receiving Judge Rotelli's instructions, the jurors convicted Payton and Rennell Price of the felony murder of Thuy Sen. All that remained for them was to choose between life and death.

  TWENTY

  BY THE TIME TERRI AND CARLO BEGAN THE FINAL VOLUME OF the trial transcript, it was past eight o'clock, and dusk was gathering outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the conference room. Lights glimmered from the city, from the distant hills of Sausalito, and from the cars which crept like illuminated soldier ants across the shadowy bridge which linked them. They had been here since dawn; Terri's eyes felt scratchy, and the cheese had begun to congeal on the two remaining slices of pizza in the open box between them.

  "In 1987," Terri explained to Carlo, "the sentencing phase of a death penalty case worked pretty much the way it does now. The prosecutor presents the so-called aggravating factors, like the callousness or brutality of the crime itself, which support a sentence of death. Then the defense offers the 'mitigating factors' which cut against it—like character or mental state of the defendant, or his miserable personal history, or that he acted under the influence of someone else, or maybe drugs or alcohol. In theory, the jury finds for death only if the factors in its favor outweigh those against. Whether to impose death then lies with the judge."

  Terri began flipping through the transcript. "According to Mauriani," she continued, "Payton and Rennell were forced to wear prison clothes at the sentencing phase. The idea was to remind the jurors that Payton and Rennell were different from the rest of humanity. Psychologically, it might make them a little easier to kill." Finding the first page she had marked with a paper clip, Terri passed the transcript to Carlo. "But here's where you'll find the one truly special touch. It'll help you appreciate how ruthless Mauriani could be."

  * * *

  On the witness stand, Thuy Sen's twelve-year-old sister, Kim, looked even smaller than she was, and her thin legs in a schoolgirl's red knee socks dangled without touching the floor. Dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, the brothers watched her; Payton closely, Rennell without expression. Anna Velez, Mauriani noted, dabbed away tears of sympathy; from her mother's testimony, the jury already knew that Kim still could barely eat or sleep. But Mauriani wanted the more clinical jurors, like Henry Feldt, to see this child for themselves.

  "When you think of Thuy Sen," Mauriani softly asked her, "what do you remember?"

  Kim seemed to choke on the words. When at last they emerged, it was in a light, whispery voice which her perfect diction only made more affecting. "That I didn't wait for her, like I should have." She swallowed, staring at the floor. "Because of me my sister's dead . . ."

  Abruptly, the child covered her face. The only other sign that she was crying was the uncontrollable trembling of frail shoulders.

  Chou Sen stood, face twisted in anguish.

  Struck by regret, Mauriani nodded to her. But as she came forward for her surviving daughter, leading her from the courtroom, Mauriani saw the grim set of Henry Feldt's face.

  * * *

  "Jesus," Carlo murmured.

  "Yeah." Terri discarded the last, half-eaten slice of pizza. "Kim Sen's twenty-seven now. But wherever she is, it's a fair bet she's wearing out some psychologist."

  "How did James respond?"

  "Start reading where I put the second clip," Terri answered, "and prepare to be amazed."

  * * *

  James paused to dab at his nose. "From your verdict," he told the jury, "you've cleared the legal hurdle called reasonable doubt. But that does not mean there is no doubt—with no witnesses to the death, there must be at least some lingering doubt." Theatrically, James flung his arms open wide. "In the presence of doubt, why condemn these men to death?

  "They will die in prison, ladies and gentlemen, a threat to no one. You do not need to accelerate their demise."

  In disbelief, Mauriani glanced at Henry Feldt. Frowning, Feldt had turned from James to his clients, studying them with the same lack of sympathy they had shown throughout the trial for Thuy Sen.

  * * *

  At the close of James's argument, Mauriani stood at once. "Your Honor, I ask the Court to meet in chambers with prosecution and defense counsel."

  The keenness of Rotelli's glance confirmed his instant comprehension. "Very well," he said and motioned his courtroom deputy to open the door to his chambers.

  They gathered inside, Mauriani and James seated in front of Angelo Rotelli's walnut desk, the court reporter set up to the side, surrounded by the trappings of a trial judge—tomes on evidence, treatises on trial practice, bound jury instructions, and green leather chairs suitable to the inner sanctum of a men's club.

  Rotelli steepled his hands. "Mr. Mauriani?"

  "The defense has concluded its argument for mitigation," the prosecutor began. "By my calculation, in eleven minutes. Mr. James has called no witnesses, or attempted to introduce any mitigating factors—for example, regarding the defendants' background." Pausing, Mauriani added pointedly, "On behalf of either client.

  "In light of this, I believe it's appropriate for the
Court to inquire as to the nature of counsel's preparations for the sentencing phase, and the options he considered on behalf of Rennell and Payton Price—as individuals. Including his investigation with respect to their personal histories."

  James drew himself up. "Your Honor," he said in a defensive tone, "I can assure you that defense counsel has been nothing less than diligent. Mr. Mauriani is seeking privileged information—an unwarranted peek beneath the veil of my strategy. At whatever prejudice to both of my clients."

  Turning to Mauriani, the judge raised his eyebrows. James's implication was clear—that any material he had uncovered was so damning it would grease the skids toward execution. That it was also, Mauriani suspected, a cover for James's sloth could not be helped. Mauriani had done what he could—raised the issue, and forced James to put his excuses on the record. With luck, Angelo Rotelli had helped him bury a potential claim that the brothers had ineffective assistance of counsel—at least during the sentencing phase.

  "Thank you, Your Honor," Mauriani said solemnly.

  * * *

  Rising in rebuttal, Mauriani walked toward the jury box. "Defense counsel," he began with quiet scorn, "has argued that there is 'lingering doubt.' What about this case would leave you any doubt—about who killed Thuy Sen, or about the agony of this child's last moments of life, asphyxiated by an act no child should ever know about?"

  For the first time, Henry Feldt nodded. "There is only one question," Mauriani told him. "What penalty does justice to Thuy Sen and her family?

  "That penalty is death."

  With this, Mauriani sat, a minute after he had risen.

  * * *

  Alone, Terri reviewed the last few pages; Carlo had skipped out for a quick cup of coffee with a new woman in his life, a medical student, almost as busy as he.

  The judge, Terri found, had given the jury clear instructions on the option of life without parole. But in Terri's experience, few jurors believed that this alternative was real, and these jurors had probably despised the brothers as deeply as they sorrowed for the Sens.