by Sydney Bauer
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, cutting her off before pacing determinedly back towards the window.
‘You think I’m being ridiculous?’ She shook her head, the gesture making her long blonde locks sway behind her shoulders. ‘I am not the one who walked halfway across town in the dark and the rain to knock on my opponent’s Goddamned door. Does your girlfriend know you are here, David? Does she know you are standing dripping wet in my apartment begging me to tell you what I know?’
There was silence as David turned to meet her eye once again, the illumination from the city now bouncing off the harbour and filling the apartment with light.
‘You’re playing with fire, Amanda,’ he said. She went to open her mouth to argue, but he held up a hand in protest. ‘Let me finish,’ he said. ‘Jeffrey Logan is a sociopath. He is a manipulative megalomaniac who is – whether you want to believe it or not – trying to control your case.’ And then he saw it, the slightest twitch in her left eye.
‘He wants to see his children incarcerated – in fact, that has been his plan all along – and he will do anything, including using you as his conduit, to get his way.’
‘The boy shot his mother, David,’ she replied with exasperation, but David knew at least some of the fight had gone out of her.
‘Did he?’ asked David, moving back towards her. ‘Then why doesn’t he have a dislocated shoulder where that cannon of a rifle would have rested when he blew his mother in two?’ He was saying too much, but something told him he could reach her, if only he could . . .
‘No.’ She began taking a step backwards.
‘J.T. may have had his finger against that trigger, Amanda, but someone else was pushing him – someone older, stronger.’
‘But the forensic evidence . . .’ she began.
‘. . . is covering up the truth,’ he finished. ‘Someone else was behind him, using him as a shield. The man is a psychopath, Amanda. He has a desperate need to control people, to take them, consume them, suck them dry and spit them out.’
‘Stop it,’ she said, retreating once again. ‘You shouldn’t be telling me this, David.’
But David was determined. ‘He controls people, Amanda – he slinks in with his fancy credentials and movie star looks and before you know it you are doing exactly what he wants you to do. But you are smarter than that, Amanda. Your father – he was a working-class Joe who fought his way through the system to become one of the most respected legal minds in this country – what do you think he would say about you bending to some celebrity asshole simply because he swears he can hand you your guilty verdict on a silver platter?’
‘You’re right, my father is a great man but he would expect me to do everything I can to win this case,’ she said. But David knew he had hit a nerve. ‘And more to the point, I don’t need Logan to do it,’ she bit.
‘Then why are you allowing him to dictate how you play it? Would you have been choosing housewives over childless men on that Goddamned jury if Logan hadn’t offered to bat for your team?’
Her lips parted and her eyes blinked as she took a breath and met his eye once again. ‘This isn’t fair,’ she said. ‘What in the hell do you expect me to do? The man has a right to give testimony. Do you honestly think I should be gagging the children’s father when . . .’
‘If his motive is to pervert the course of justice then that is exactly what you should be doing.’
But she was shaking her head. ‘Maybe he does want to do what is best for his kids. To get them long-term help for . . .’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Amanda, the man is a multi-millionaire psychotherapist. If he wanted to help them he would do everything to ensure their release so that he could admit them to one of the best private clinics in the country. If those kids get sent away, they will be locked into the system – sent to second-rate psych hospitals where the therapists are juggling a hundred and fifty patients a day.’
‘Yeah, well maybe they should have thought of that before they plotted the murder of their mother.’
‘There were two people holding the gun that night, Amanda – and all the younger of the two was trying to do was work out a way to save his mother.’
They stood there, mere feet from each other, the silence deafening as David took the final steps towards her.
‘You know this is wrong,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘It is not worth it, Amanda – the exposure, the kudos, the promotion to Roger Katz’s job. You are bigger than this,’ he said as he instinctively placed his hand on her chin and lifted it so that she might meet his eye. ‘If you are going to win this, then win it on your own terms – and not with that bastard as back-up.’
And then, just as a beam of pale green light shifted across her face turning her blue eyes turquoise, she did the last thing David expected – she stretched her neck and rose onto the balls of her feet and reached up to kiss him softly upon the lips.
And in that moment, his entire body filled with a confusing mixture of fear and anger and frustration and regret, he found himself lingering that second too long, before taking a step backwards and heading towards the door.
59
Jeffrey Logan aka Jason Nagol aka James Golan took a long slow breath, allowing the refreshing Sunday morning salt air to fill his lungs as he opened the living room doors and stepped onto his ocean front deck to look out towards the ice blue North Atlantic beyond.
He was home.
Of course, many would argue that Vegas was his home, but he had never thought of that filthy desert pit as anything close to being home – more like the prison he was forced to grow up in, until he took destiny into his own hands and cut the ties that bound him.
He felt a need to see it then – the one that had provided the key to his freedom. And so he moved back inside and closed the doors before walking to the far corner of the open plan living area. Lifting the plush, cream thick-pile rug from the floor, he found the groove in the Baltic pine floorboard and used his car key to get under it. He lifted it the necessary six inches and reached inside to grab the rope that would hoist up the trapdoor and allow him to access the basement.
Seconds later, the cool dank air cosseted him in a welcome wave of familiarity. He was there, alone, in his blessed concrete haven, standing in front of his ‘children’, his family – his collection of over a thousand firearms, handguns, long arms and explosive weapons that he had begun ‘adopting’ at the age of twelve. And he sought ‘her’ out, the original XM21 – the real Yankee Doodle, ‘Born in the USA’ sniper rifle he had called upon all those years ago. The one that he had used to put a bullet in the tyre of the ’82 family Buick from a good 200 yards away, the one that hit the front driver’s side tyre just as the semitrailer was approaching from the other direction, the one that had saved his life! He found it, took it from the wall and caressed its 559 mm barrel and the original M14 wooden stock briefly before making sure that he shared his time evenly with the others, old and new, heavy and light.
Of course, his wasn’t your typical gun enthusiast’s collection. Many of the world’s most celebrated collectors spent decades and millions amassing historically significant weapons that included everything from the first blunderbusses and muskets to the original muzzle-loading hand-cannons and Tommy guns. But the difference between Logan and those sorts of lily-livered wannabes was that Logan had actually used, or intended to use, every single piece in his collection for the purpose for which they had been made.
Not that all of his pieces were modern – indeed, he had an original Luger, a Colt .45 and a .38 super automatic aka Bonnie and Clyde. But most of his ‘children’ were of the high-tech variety – hunting and military weapons including pistols, shotguns, semi-automatics, assault rifles, machine guns, sniper weapons and a much-loved Mark V Deluxe which (sadly) had had to take leave from the rest of his family – at least for a while.
Jeffrey Logan moved towards the far wall so that he could assess his beloved clan as a whole, the nostalgia washing over him as h
is mind drifted to memories of each and every piece in his precious arsenal – from the early handguns that had whet his appetite by killing the cats and flattening the dogs and, once, even putting a poor homeless man or two out of his misery, to the German-made Heckler & Koch PSG-1 sniper rifle, which had ultimately secured his inheritance.
And when he eventually allowed their beauty to overcome him, when he finally gave into his urges and allowed himself to ‘let go’, he felt an overwhelming rush – of exhilaration, of excitement, of pure and utter bliss. It was a raw sexual uprising that began in his thighs and exploded in his groin and overtook his entire body, climaxing in the fantasy that he might soon be able to call on one of his children again.
While logic told him all was very much on track, and commonsense argued it would be much safer if he did not require the services of his much beloved arsenal, part of him wished that he could have his cake by beating Cavanaugh in the courtroom, and then call on his ‘children’ so that he could ultimately eat it too.
60
Monday 13 August
The first day of trial
‘I have a confession to make,’ said Amanda Carmichael. Immediately David felt the sting of irony in her words. The weekend had flown by – David having told Sara everything about his altercation with the standing ADA except for that unexpected kiss. He knew he had to tell her – he knew he eventually would – but not now as they faced the imminent birth of their child, and the task of defending a case that would, in many ways, affect both of their lives forever.
The courtroom was packed – the natural light from the high eastern windows casting alternate shadows across the silent masses below. Jeffrey Logan had decided to make his loyalties known from the get-go, taking a seat behind the prosecution’s table. And while the jury had not yet registered the significance of his choice of position, the media certainly had – with most of them, including Marc Rigotti and a half-smiling Caroline Croft, unable to take their eyes off him – setting up camp across the aisle from his kids.
A fresh-faced Judge Kessler had spent the first twenty minutes welcoming the jury, admonishing the gallery (who once again, she warned, would be banned from her courtroom for just the slightest hint of impropriety), and reminding the press, who sat shoulder to shoulder in the cramped media benches to David’s left, of their obligation to report these proceedings fairly.
J.T. sat by David’s side, next to him was Arthur and then Sara, who was holding Chelsea Logan’s hand tightly behind the modesty curtain, erected around the defence table so that the shackled defendants’ hands would not be visible, and thus act as a trigger for bias to the jury. David had argued repeatedly to Judge Kessler prior to this morning’s proceedings that their two defendants be uncuffed for the duration of the trial, but Kessler, perhaps keen to establish her authority early, had denied his request saying that she may reconsider if the children proved they could behave appropriately in court.
‘They’re being treated like two-year-olds while being tried as adults,’ a frustrated Sara had said to David as they left Kessler’s chambers in defeat.
‘So much for our supposed impartial system of justice,’ he had replied.
Now, as Amanda Carmichael made her way towards the jury, her perfectly fitting dark grey suit shining slightly as she moved across the sunlit room, David wondered what in the hell Amanda Carmichael was planning to divulge as part of her much anticipated opening statement. The guilt of his actions – or rather inaction – was cutting freshly into his consciousness, the magnitude of the weeks ahead sending a shiver of nervousness running slickly down his spine.
‘Now, I know what you are thinking,’ Carmichael said, moving slowly towards the sixteen. ‘A confession may seem like an odd way for the leader of the prosecution to begin her case, but I truly believe that my job here is to behave with the utmost of integrity, that my duty is to expose the truth and so, in order that you trust me, I need to – if you like – come clean.’
Slight smile, short pause.
‘Sometimes I feel for the defendant.’
Another pause as Amanda nodded at her own admission.
‘It’s true. Sometimes,’ she started pacing again, ‘I am not unhappy when I lose.’
David glanced at Sara, both of them knowing that at the very least this was a lie.
‘Sometimes I can even understand why someone takes the course of action that they do. And while I do my job to the utmost of my ability, while I prosecute cases with the full understanding that I represent the victim who cannot speak for themselves, sometimes I have to admit that the world is a better place without the murderers and rapists and abusers who are removed from those they have mistreated for so long.’ She nodded as she advanced on the sixteen once again.
‘When I first met J.T. and Chelsea Logan,’ she said, gesturing at the defence table behind her, the eyes of the jury members glancing towards the two wide-eyed children before returning, mesmerised, to the beautiful ADA before them, ‘. . . when I became more familiar with their case, I have to admit, I felt that something was amiss. I asked myself, why would two intelligent, good-looking, privileged, outwardly sensible, well-mannered young people plot and execute the murder of their mother?
‘I could not see it – and almost wanted to find a reason that would explain their heinous actions and, I guess, restore my faith in the virtue of our young.
‘The revelation that their mother, Stephanie Tyler, was an incessant emotional abuser – a woman who made these children’s life a living hell day in and day out – somehow eased my concerns by answering my question about motive. And while I certainly did not condone their actions, the facts, at least to some degree, assisted me in understanding them.’
‘She’s good,’ said Arthur, leaning across J.T. to whisper privately in David’s ear. ‘The woman is taking away the foundation for any argument we make in regards to self-defence.’
‘I’m pretty sure she knows that I don’t want to go with self-defence, Arthur.’
‘True, but maybe she thinks you may have realised that in the end we won’t have any choice.’
David knew this was Arthur’s way of telling him that they had run out of time – that they still had no concrete evidence against Jeffrey Logan and, whether they liked it or not, their main priority was arguing a case which would result in the lowest possible sentences for their two young defendants. But this would mean David standing up in court and describing his old friend Stephanie as the dictator mother from hell – a strategy that he and his two clients would never agree to, no matter how dire the circumstances.
‘You see,’ Amanda continued, ‘just as I allowed myself to see things from the defendants’ perspective, just as I accepted that perhaps these two young people saw their mother’s murder as the only way out, new evidence shattered my attempt to comprehend their actions by revealing the multiple motives behind Stephanie Tyler’s death.’ Amanda shook her head, before advancing on the jury two steps further to stand directly in front of their dock.
‘Fact,’ she said, lifting up her pointer finger in accentuation. ‘Chelsea Logan used her own computer to increase her mother’s life insurance by a sum of millions mere weeks before her shooting.
‘Fact,’ now her middle finger was up. ‘J.T. Logan was studying how to operate the murder weapon – a dangerous game rifle powerful enough to kill an elephant – at least four days prior to her death.
‘Fact,’ she went on, lengthening her third finger. ‘On the morning of Stephanie Tyler’s murder, Chelsea Logan impersonated her mother in a phone call to her mother’s lawyers, instructing them to cut her father, Doctor Jeffrey Logan, from Stephanie’s Tyler’s will.
‘And fact,’ she said raising her smallest finger. ‘When Doctor Logan, in a desperate attempt to protect his children, confessed to killing his wife, neither J.T. nor Chelsea offered up a single word in protest.’
Amanda Carmichael placed her two hands lightly on the railing before her, looking sincerely at each and ever
y one of her captivated audience of sixteen.
‘The thing is, ladies and gentleman, there is no way these children didn’t kill their mother. The forensic evidence is irrefutable, the medical examiner’s report watertight. So you see, in many ways my job here is easy, for I have the facts to back me up.’ She took a breath.
‘But you,’ Amanda continued, lifting her hands from the railing before bringing them back down as if in punctuation, ‘you have the tough call of doing what is necessary. You have the difficult job of facing the two defendants – two young people who admittedly appear more like children than the adults their crime states them to be – and doing what is right.
‘For you see, ladies and gentleman, sadly the great seventeenth-century philosopher, Baltasar Gracian, was right when he said things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Sadly, some hide behind the appearance of innocence and take advantage of those of us who would love to absolve them of their guilt.
‘But each and every time you look into J.T. Logan’s eyes, each and every time you glance upon Chelsea Logan’s face, I want you to see not just Stephanie Tyler who was almost disintegrated by a bullet that propelled her body halfway across a room, but also the defendants’ father, Doctor Jeffrey Logan who, despite his tireless efforts to protect his children, has been betrayed by the two people who he loves most.’
In that moment David knew that despite his desperate pleas, there was no way the ambitious Amanda Carmichael was going to let an opportunity such as this pass her by. For as she pivoted to return to her seat, the entire jury turned towards their beloved Doctor Jeff, and their devotion, their loyalty, their unbridled commitment to this man they so obviously adored was unmistakable.