By Reason of Insanity

by Randy Singer

  Sierra would attend summer school under an assumed name while living in D.C. with Rosemarie. Quinn would return to Virginia Beach a few times each month, meet with Catherine, and drive the four hours to D.C. to spend the day with Sierra. One of the hardest things had been convincing Sierra to go the entire summer without visiting her mom in jail. But Annie had insisted, refusing to even cry until after Sierra had left.

  Quinn, Rosemarie, and Sierra talked for a few minutes while they watched the Norfolk-Portsmouth ferry land at the wooden dock. Quinn had his left arm on the back of the bench behind Sierra, psychologically protecting his niece for the last time in a couple of weeks. He'd had no idea it would be this hard to let her go.

  "We'd better get going," he eventually said. "This isn't getting any easier."

  The three stood and Sierra gave him a long hug, squeezing so tight he thought he might have to pry her hands away.

  "I love you, Uncle Quinn," she said.

  Quinn felt tears coming but managed to choke them back.

  "I love you, too," he said. "But this is the best thing for the next few months." Quinn gave her a kiss on top of her head, and Sierra ended the embrace.

  Quinn watched with a knot in his stomach as Sierra and Rosemarie walked away. Just before they disappeared into the Waterside complex, Sierra turned and waved, her sad eyes telling Quinn that this hurt her as much as it did him.

  After they left, Quinn sat back down and soaked up the loneliness, his heart aching as if a family member had died. It is the right thing to do, he reminded himself. He had to prepare for two major trials. Hofstetter was after him and maybe after Sierra. And Sierra needed a strong female figure in her life.

  But none of that chased away the loneliness. Sierra had only been gone a few minutes, and he missed her desperately already. She had only been with him a week, but it was hard to imagine life without her.

  The ringing of Quinn's cell phone eventually broke the stupor.

  It was Marc Boland.

  "The media outlets have found out about Catherine's rape," Marc told Quinn. "Kenny Towns will hit every talk show possible, today and tomorrow, denying that the rape ever occurred. The armchair psychiatrists in the media will say the prosecutors now have a motive for the Avenger's killings."

  "Then why didn't she just go after Kenny?" Quinn asked. It was the question that had bothered him about this scenario from the beginning. If Catherine really was the Avenger, even Catherine in a different personality, did it make any sense that she wouldn't avenge the one violent act that had hurt her the most? "Why go through this elaborate Avenger of Blood scenario?"

  "Maybe she was saving Towns for last," Marc replied. "Who knows? I'm not saying they're right; I'm just telling you what they're going to say. Which leads to my next question: did you make any headway getting Catherine to change her plea?"

  "She's thinking about it."

  "If she pleads insanity, the rape will actually work in our favor as a reason for her fractured personality," Marc said, as if Quinn needed to be reminded. "You ready to take half the interviews?"

  "Not really," Quinn said. "I'm leaving first thing tomorrow to head back to Vegas."

  "Good," Marc said, ignoring Quinn's actual answer. "Why don't you take the cable stations and radio? I'll take the broadcast TV stations."

  Quinn sighed as he took out a legal pad and pen. "Give me the phone numbers."

  76

  Catherine ate lunch quickly and went to her cell to read. The other inmates in her pod congregated at the metal tables, finishing their lunches or playing cards or arguing about anything and everything. Tasha and another woman had pulled a mattress from somebody's cell into the open area and now alternated between sit-ups on the mattress and push-ups with their feet elevated on the benches of the metal tables. All the while, the TV blabbered on as the trustee in charge of the television surfed the channels.

  When Catherine heard shouting and catcalls from the pod, she looked out to see most of the inmates glued to the TV. The level of noise had dropped by several decibels.

  "Get out here, O'Rourke!" Tasha shouted.

  Catherine put down her book and shuffled warily out of the cell. The last thing she needed to see was another "update" about her case. . . .

  She stopped in her tracks just outside her cell door. On the screen, big as life, was the face that had haunted her nightmares for years. Kenny Towns was eight years older now but looked exactly the same. Shorter haircut. A more professional bearing. But the same arrogant smirk.

  She hated this man.

  "He's hot," said one of the inmates. Others joined the commentary, making lewd comments about what they'd like to do with Kenny.

  "Shut up!" yelled Tasha.

  Kenny's lawyer sat next to him as Kenny answered questions from a former prosecutor now making a living as a CNBC host.

  "Sure, we had sex," Kenny was saying. "But it was always consensual."

  Catherine felt the pressure building inside her head and chest. She wanted to turn away, but somehow she couldn't.

  "On more than one occasion?" asked the host.

  "Yes, more than one occasion." Kenny smirked in a way that said the conquering hero had been intimate with his conquest too many times to count. "We were college students. We had an ongoing relationship."

  The catcalls started again, so loud this time that Catherine couldn't hear the next question. But she heard Kenny say that a few other fraternity brothers had called recently to tell him they had been sexually involved with Catherine as well. One of them said that Catherine had threatened to drag Kenny into her murder case.

  Cat felt her face flush as the taunting in the cell merged with the roaring in her head. She looked around at the inmates--smiling, mocking her, making all manner of suggestive noises.

  "I've got a family," Kenny was saying. "A wife and kids. The last thing I wanted was to be dragged into something like this--a desperate woman's lawyers accusing me of things I didn't do."

  "Shut up!" Cat yelled, more to the television than the inmates. "Shut. Up."

  "Chill, woman," one of the inmates said.

  "I wish he'd accuse me of a few of those things!" said another, and everybody laughed.

  "I mean it," Cat said. She turned on the trustee as her anger exploded. "Turn this off!" she demanded.

  The woman shrugged. "We already voted. Democracy at work."

  Cat stormed toward the woman. "Shut it off!" she yelled. She turned toward a table of inmates right behind her. She grabbed an inmate's plastic tray and flung the half-eaten lunch at the elevated TV screen. She missed, so she grabbed another one and this time hit the mark. She cleared another table with one sweep of her arm, sending trays of food flying to the floor.

  The bars of the pod seemed to pulse and billow, keeping time to the anger-laced adrenaline flowing through Cat's body. She was vaguely aware of the inmates staring at her, the doors near the guard post clanging open, Tasha coming toward her to calm her down.

  Cat whirled toward the trustee again, stopping just inches away. "Turn it off now!" she demanded. She grabbed the remote and spun back toward the television just as the guards reached her. One knocked her to the floor, facedown. A second put a knee in her back. They cuffed her hands and dragged her to her feet, escorting her out of the pod toward solitary confinement.

  As Cat left, she could still hear the TV in the background, the grating voice of Kenny Towns protesting his innocence. "I feel sorry for Catherine O'Rourke," he was saying. "I hope she gets the psychological help she needs. I just wish she had left me out of this."

  Cat walked without resistance toward the isolation unit. She had never felt so powerless in her life. The man who had raped her, a man who was never brought to justice, who had never even apologized, was now playing the victim! Her insides roiled in rage. She wanted to rip his heart out, the same thing he had done to her.

  * * *

  Three days later, when Catherine O'Rourke left solitary confinement, she made a series of c
ollect calls to Quinn Newberg. The first two times she called, he didn't answer. She reached him on her third try.

  "I'm ready to change my plea," Cat said.

  77

  Two months later--

  Wednesday, August 20

  The whole world hates the insanity plea.

  Quinn was reminded of this basic truth as he pulled into the courthouse parking lot and prepared to face the protesters and media. Reverend Harold Pryor and his spiteful band of followers stood at their posts in front of the courthouse steps, carrying signs with a blowup of Catherine's face and a simple message: Baby Killer. Yesterday they had shouted in Quinn's face and pronounced damnation on him as he climbed the steps. Quinn had lost his cool and asked the reverend if he didn't have some abortion clinics he could go bomb. Today Quinn was determined to keep his mouth shut.

  The lawyers had finished jury selection the prior afternoon, and Quinn would give the opening statement for the defense this morning. He didn't feel close to ready. In the last two months, Quinn's normally hectic pace had increased until life seemed a blur of frenzied activity, an adrenaline-laced roller coaster ride under the white-hot glare of media cameras. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a good night's sleep. He spent every minute preparing witnesses for two major trials, "commuting" from Las Vegas to Virginia Beach, visiting both Annie and Catherine in jail, and sneaking up to Washington, D.C., every few weeks to see Sierra.

  He had spent an inordinate amount of time talking with Catherine. It was all a necessary part of trial preparation, he kept telling himself. Yet after hours of talking through the metal vents in the bulletproof glass of the attorney interview booths, Quinn still hadn't solved the mystery of Catherine O'Rourke and her multiple personalities, if indeed she had them.

  Since the day of Catherine's outburst during Kenny Towns's television interview, she had been nothing but a class act, answering every one of Quinn's questions with quiet grace and seemingly endless patience. She had endured numerous sessions with Dr. Mancini and two separate sessions with the commonwealth's forensic psychiatrist, a precise Asian-American man named Dr. Edward Chow.

  Quinn climbed out of his car and pulled his suit coat from a hanger in the back. He pulled it over his limp right arm first, struggling to slip into the jacket without lifting that arm up and away from his body, a movement that still sent stabbing pain through the unrepaired rotator cuff. After he wriggled into the suit coat, he grabbed his briefcase and headed across the black asphalt parking lot, the heat already radiating from the surface even though it was only 8:30 in the morning.

  Quinn picked up the pace as the reverend and a few others jogged over to him and started walking beside him, shouting in his face as he approached the courthouse.

  "Not today," Quinn grumbled.

  "The blood of the kidnapped babies is on your hands!" shouted the reverend.

  "Your client is a baby killer!" echoed a younger woman.

  "Baby killer! Baby killer!" The protesters and cameramen formed a moving mob around Quinn as he reached the courthouse steps. Red camera lights blinked while shutters clicked and whirred. Quinn kept his gaze straight ahead, tuning out the protesters as he entered the doors of the courthouse.

  The door closed, and the welcome sound of relative silence flooded the hallways. The protesters seemed very far away.

  "Good morning, Mr. Newberg," said one of the guards at the metal detector.

  "Good morning, Deputy Aaronson."

  Quinn plunked his loose change and keys inside a small plastic container to pass through the screener. "Quiet day, huh?" Aaronson asked.

  Quinn smiled. "If this is your idea of a quiet day, I'd hate to see a riot."

  This brought a big grin from the deputy. "If you win this case, you might just get your chance."

  * * *

  Quinn walked into the courtroom, placed his briefcase at the defense counsel table, said a few words to Marc Boland, and slipped through a side door into a small, gray hallway with no outside windows. Just off the hallway were two even smaller rooms hidden behind heavy metal doors with a single narrow slit about a third of the way up. On a typical court day, male inmates would be herded into one room and females into the other. For the past three days, Catherine had been the only occupant of the female cell. Her friends and sister had brought her a fresh change of clothes each day, and the deputy allowed her to put them on before entering the courtroom.

  "Good morning," Cat said after the door to the courtroom closed behind Quinn. "Did you get any sleep last night?"

  Quinn stood outside the cell, leaning against the wall. He cherished these few moments before court even though he couldn't see his client's face.

  "Sleep is overrated."

  "I know what you mean," Cat said.

  Today, even more so than the last few days, Quinn could sense the tension in Cat's voice. Today the trial began in earnest.

  "Did your friends find some clothes that fit?" Quinn asked, trying to lighten the mood. On Monday, Cat had discovered how much weight she had lost during her months of confinement; her dress had practically swallowed her slender body.

  She started to say something, but the words apparently caught in her throat. Whenever she spoke about things that really mattered to her, Cat's voice had a deeper tone and a softness that Quinn had grown to recognize, a softness that he intended to showcase for the jury when Cat took the stand. "My friends went out and bought me three new outfits," Cat said. "It made me cry."

  "That's the good thing about murder trials," Quinn said dryly. "You find out who your true friends are."

  "And who they aren't."

  Quinn checked his watch. In a few minutes, the bailiff would call court into session. Quinn needed to take one last look at his notes.

  "Things are going to get a little heated today. Boyd Gates is a first-class jerk, and there's no telling what he'll do to get a reaction from you. If you lose your cool even one time, the trial is over. Our whole case is premised on the theory that the Catherine O'Rourke on display in the courtroom did not and would not commit these crimes. A different personality altogether is responsible. Having that alter ego suddenly appear at trial would look staged and manipulative."

  "I know that, Quinn," Cat said. "And I promise not to bull-charge the prosecutor or the judge."

  "That would be nice."

  "No promises on Jamarcus Webb, though."

  "Maybe I can hold you back if you go after him."

  "Maybe," said Cat. "But then again, you've never seen me mad."

  78

  "My name is Boyd Gates, and I have the privilege of representing the Commonwealth of Virginia."

  The prosecutor stood ramrod straight in front of the jury box, holding a legal pad in his right hand, his left hanging at his side. He wore a conservative blue suit and red tie. His bald pate seemed to attract and reflect every ray of artificial light in the courtroom, except for those drawn to the ultra-shiny black wingtip shoes, buffed and polished as if Gates's former navy commander might stop by the courtroom for a quick inspection.

  "'This is insane. What kind of warped person would commit a crime like this? She must be crazy to think she could get away with it. She must be sick.'" Gates stopped and surveyed the jury. "These are common expressions we use when we hear about a horrendous crime like the one in question. But these sayings do not reflect the legal definition of insanity. If they did, no criminal audacious enough to commit a truly horrible crime would ever go to jail."

  The last statement was hyperbole, but Quinn knew better than to object. He tried to look disinterested, scribbling a few notes on his legal pad, chin in hand. "Don't look so mesmerized," he whispered to Catherine.

  "The test of insanity under Virginia law is twofold." Gates consulted his legal pad, though Quinn knew he had the test memorized. "The first part is this: was the defendant, Catherine O'Rourke, at the time of the murder of Paul Donaldson, suffering from a mental disorder that kept her from knowing the nature and quality of the ac
t she committed or, if she did know it, that prevented her from appreciating that the act was wrong? Or second, if she understood the nature of right and wrong, was she unable to control her actions, the so-called 'irresistible impulse' rule?"

  Gates stopped reading and looked back at the jurors. "That's a lot of lawyer talk, but it all boils down to this: the insanity plea cannot be used by a defendant to excuse coldblooded and premeditated murder. And one of the ways to determine whether the defendant knew her conduct was wrong is to ask yourself this question: did she try to cover up the crime afterward? In this case, the answer is a resounding yes.

  "The defense will rely upon a well-traveled psychiatrist named Dr. Rosemarie Mancini, the same psychiatrist who testified that Mr. Newberg's sister was insane when she killed her husband--"

  Quinn jumped to his feet. "Objection, Judge. That's improper argument, not an opening statement."

  Gates turned to face the judge, adopting a posture of indignity. "It's a fact I'll prove at trial, Your Honor. It's a preview of the evidence, and it happens to be true."

  "Of course it's true," responded Quinn. "But so what?"

  Rosencrance gave him a stern look. "You can make your so-what argument during closing statements, Mr. Newberg. I'm going to allow mention of your expert's opinions in other cases to be admitted for whatever relevance the jury chooses to grant them."

  "Thank you, Your Honor," Quinn said grudgingly. He took his seat.

  "As I was saying," Gates continued, "Dr. Mancini will suggest that this defendant has dissociative identity disorder, something that used to be called multiple personality disorder. Dr. Mancini will claim that, because of an alleged rape that occurred eight years ago, Ms. O'Rourke developed a second personality, one that has the ability to completely take over her body, one that the Catherine O'Rourke sitting here today didn't even know existed.