Dog Law (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  When I got home, I plugged my camera into my laptop and sat with Deeks in my lap as I watched the shadowy image of a man walk into the frame, grow larger, then bend and drop out of the frame. It looked like he had something over his head or his face, but the image was too dim for me to tell what. “It’s too dark,” I told Deeks. Too dark to shoot video through my tinted windows. It had been a mistake to let an amateur like me set up the security cameras, I told myself. Pennywise and pound foolish. I watched the video again and again, but I couldn’t make out anything that would help me identify the vandal.

  The next day, I took a drill, some screws, and some concrete anchors to work with me, and I mounted one of my cameras high on the wall in front of my car. When I came back to my car at the end of the day, I had one flat tire—a hole through the sidewall again—and a missing video camera.

  “This is taking a toll,” I told Brooke that evening over wine and salad. “I’m going to have to give up and park somewhere else.”

  “If this vandal is following you, it won’t work.”

  “At least it might slow him down. This is costing me a fortune, and I can hardly think about my work.”

  “Maybe that’s the point. Maybe you’re getting somewhere on the Natalie Stevens case, and somebody doesn’t like it.”

  “Why the Natalie Stevens case?”

  “Isn’t that the only one you have?”

  Unfortunately, it was. “I may be at the point when I can cast suspicion on Natalie’s missing father, but I really have no idea what happened that night.”

  “Have you talked to her about implicating her father?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not looking forward to it?”

  “Not really, no.”

  I moved my car to the parking lot outside the mall in Shockoe Bottom that had once been the old train station. It gave me a half-mile walk uphill to get to my office, but the vandalism stopped. I drafted more discovery motions and hand-delivered copies to the clerk’s office and the D.A.’s office. I got a copy of the D.A.’s witness list—most of their witnesses seemed to work for the police or the medical examiner’s office—and I sent them my witness list. I called around and traveled around to talk to all the potential witnesses, but I didn’t learn anything that seemed particularly helpful.

  Deeks and I spent Christmas in Charlottesville with my mother and my brother and his family. My father, long estranged from the family after leaving my mother for his veterinary assistant, showed up for lunch, bringing presents. Nobody told me he was coming, and his expression was cautious when he spoke to me—or even looked at me.

  “Look,” I said finally. “I’m not the scary bitch you seem to think I am.”

  “Said the scary bitch in her most belligerent voice,” my brother said.

  “You’re not helping,” I said.

  “Sorry.” Though he didn’t look it.

  Daddy had gotten me a dog training collar with a remote, so somebody had told him about Deeks. I hadn’t gotten him anything.

  “I would have,” I said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “I think everybody was afraid you wouldn’t come if they told you.”

  “This is my family. Even you.”

  He held out his arms, looking tentative. When I stepped into them, he hugged me hard enough squeeze the breath out of me.

  Natalie spent Christmas in jail. When I saw her the day before, I gave her a George R.R. Martin paperback, since during one of our conversations she’d said she liked fantasy. When I saw her the day after Christmas, she said she’d finished it.

  “Isn’t about 600 pages?”

  “More like 800, but it’s not like I have a lot else to do. Are there five books in the series? Can you get me the next one?”

  I nodded. “Sure. Has Chloe been to see you?”

  “No. She’s not even pretending anymore.”

  “Your uncle?”

  “Twice.”

  “What do you hear from your father?”

  She pursed her lips and exhaled through puffed cheeks. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing since all this started. Uncle David says it’s been more than a week since he’s been able to get hold of him.”

  “Your father’s disappeared?”

  She shrugged. “Daddy loves me and can’t bear what’s happening to me, and he’ll get back just as soon as he possibly can.”

  “That’s what your uncle tells you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Except that now he’s dropped out of touch with everyone.”

  Tears welled in her eyes and spilled over. “I need him.”

  It didn’t make what I had to say next any easier. “The night someone rented a room at the Best Western in your name, someone else rented a room in your father’s.”

  “What?”

  “Your father, or someone using his name, rented the room right next to the room rented in your name.”

  She shook her head, clearly bewildered.

  “Airline records show your father didn’t leave for Hong Kong until the next morning.” I told her everything I knew.

  “You’re wrong. Daddy wouldn’t have killed someone and then left me to go to prison for it.”

  “I’m not saying he did.”

  “What are you saying, then?”

  “Maybe he’s staying away to provide us a red herring.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I said, “Your father rents a room. A man next door is shot. Your father leaves the country. He may be staying away to give us the chance to save you by throwing suspicion on him.”

  “I wouldn’t want to do that. If it worked, he could never come home.”

  “He can’t be convicted in a trial against you. We just use him to raise reasonable doubt. It may be that he’s got an alibi or something he can use to clear himself when he needs it. If he used it now, though, we couldn’t implicate him in order to save you.”

  “You don’t know he has an alibi.”

  “I can’t know that. I can’t get hold of him.”

  Chapter 19

  The trial started on a Tuesday morning in the second week of January. The front rows of the courtroom’s gallery were filled with prospective jurors. Ralph Waldo was at the prosecutor’s table, but he was not alone. Aubrey Biggs, the curly headed district attorney himself, sat beside him, which meant that Waldo was second chair.

  The bailiff called the court into session with an “Oyez, oyez.” Everyone stood up, and the judge came in and sat down. He waited until the jury pool was seated and the rustling and foot-shuffling had abated.

  “Greetings,” he said in his resonant voice. “I am Circuit Judge Eric Cheatham. At the table to your right is Commonwealth’s Attorney Aubrey Biggs, who will be representing the government in this case, and beside him is his associate Ralph Waldo.” Aubrey stood, and then Ralph stood beside him, at six-foot-one or two, a head taller than Aubrey. When the judge introduced me and then my client, we each stood to smile and nod at the potential jurors. At such times I try to negotiate the line between looking genial and likeable and looking simple-minded, but it’s a fine line.

  “The charge in this case is one of murder in the first degree,” the judge said. “Twelve of your number will sit in judgment. In choosing those twelve, we will be asking you a number of questions…”

  The potential jurors had filled out questionnaires the day before, and I had been up late entering the information into a database. As the judge called each juror’s name, I tapped the name on my iPad, and a juror summary sheet popped up with basic information like name, address, age, marital status, and occupation. I could get more information by scrolling down: organizational memberships, religious affiliation, whether they had ever been in court or ever been a victim of a crime. The questionnaire itself went on for fifteen pages, though my summary was considerably condensed. Color-coding helped. Mildred Lees, for example, was a member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and her summary was outlined in red. Natalie had been driving th
e streets of Richmond in an impaired state the fateful Sunday night. Though I would do my best to keep that out of evidence, I was also going to do my best to keep Mildred Lees off the jury, just in case.

  The judge was saying, “Kyla Sander, I see that you are a student at J. Sargeant Reynolds. Is that correct?” J. Sargeant Reynolds was the community college.

  “Yes, your honor.” According to my summary sheet, Kyla was twenty-three and unmarried.

  “Do classes start this week or next? You know that jury service is not mandatory for you.”

  “This semester my classes are all online and at night. I can do this.”

  “I see. You don’t list any occupation other than student.”

  “No, ma’am. I mean, no sir. No, your honor.” There was a titter, and Kyla’s face turned red. “I live with my parents.”

  The judge moved on to another potential juror. He spent just over two hours questioning them. One prospect had spent six months working as a secretary for a lawyer that did criminal defense work. I rather expected the judge to excuse her for cause on his own initiative, but he did not. She was likely to have formed strong opinions about criminal defendants, either idealistic—the defendant is innocent until proven guilty—or cynical, as in “all defendants are guilty scuz-buckets.” She might be a good juror from the defense perspective, or she might be a very bad one.

  Another prospective juror had once witnessed the police put a man on the ground outside a bar and cuff him. Another had had his house burglarized. One woman had once been held up at knife-point. One had a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. One, when asked if she had ever been arrested for a crime whether or not that arrest had resulted in a conviction, asked the judge if the arrest counted if her record had been expunged. The judge didn’t excuse any of them for an inability to decide the case impartially. I was beginning to think that this judge wasn’t going to excuse any prospective juror for cause, at least not unless one of the attorneys asked for it in a sidebar conference, when he hit on a juror whose brother-in-law worked as a patrolman for the police department in Norfolk, Virginia.

  “Is it your opinion, Mr. Bridges, that police can generally be relied upon to tell the truth?”

  “When testifying under oath? Sure.”

  “If a defendant in a criminal case were to take the witness stand, would you generally expect that defendant to be truthful?”

  “If it helped her case.”

  “But not otherwise?”

  “You can’t expect her to say something that’s going to put her in jail. She’s not like a police officer who has no stake in the outcome.”

  Judge Cheatham’s gaze flicked to me. “Thank you, Mr. Bridges. You’re excused from further service in this case.”

  Jonathan Bridges looked surprised, then angry, but he got up and left the courtroom. Not long after that the judge asked Aubrey Biggs if he had any questions for these fine people.

  “Thank you, your honor.” Biggs got up and took a breath as he smoothed the jacket of his suit against his sides, a habit of his I’d seen before. “Mr. Hill. You were the one who saw the police handcuffing someone outside a barroom. Is that right?”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  Biggs smiled. “You don’t have to call me your honor. I’m Mr. Biggs.” I wondered how a man who was five-four could say that with a straight face, but I guessed he’d had long practice.

  “Mr. Biggs,” the man said.

  “What was your reaction to what you saw? Did the police act appropriately, do you think?”

  Charles Hill jerked his head. “It was something. They put that man right down on the ground.”

  “Did it seem to you to be an unnecessary use of force?”

  “Well, the man was talking loud and moving around some. I guess so.”

  “You guess it was necessary or unnecessary?”

  “Necessary, I guess.”

  “Did the incident affect your attitude toward the police?”

  “It sure makes me careful. I don’t want them to grab me and put me down like that.”

  Biggs went on to another prospect. I was studying the jurors. Michael Burling, age 26, was wearing a pinstripe suit, which made him stand out, though not as much as the copy of the Wall Street Journal he had folded on his knee. It made me think he didn’t want to sit on the jury—he worked in the loan department of Wells Fargo and doubtless had better things to do—and was giving me a reason to bump him with one of my peremptory challenges. He was young, though, and kept studying Natalie Stevens and me with apparent interest. Natalie, for her part, looked young and fresh-faced in her dark slacks and her white shirt with its open collar. She’d be able to hold his interest, I thought, and despite his age he had the possibility of exercising a leadership role in the jury room.

  By the time it was my turn to ask questions, I already had a good idea about who I wanted on the jury and who I didn’t. I asked a few questions to clarify a point or two, asked a few questions along the lines of “You’re aware that the defendant doesn’t have to prove anything in this trial, aren’t you?” I asked the MADD Ms. Lees if she would hold it against Natalie if she didn’t testify, and she said she wouldn’t, which meant I couldn’t get her struck from the panel for cause.

  When I had asked all the questions that I thought would do me any good, the judge called us up to the bench. “Counselors,” he said. “Are you satisfied with this panel?”

  Biggs said, “I would like to excuse Mr. Hill for cause. He’s admitted to a changed attitude toward police.”

  “He did agree the use of force was proper,” I said. “I’m careful around police myself.”

  “Yes,” Judge Cheatham said. “If he believed the police had behaved wrongly, I think I’d be more skeptical about his ability to hear the case with an open mind. I’m going to make you use one of your peremptory challenges, Mr. Biggs. Any other challenges for cause?”

  I shook my head. “No, your honor.”

  “Mr. Biggs?”

  “No, your honor.”

  “Very well. We’ve got a panel of twenty-five, more than we usually have, which means you each have a good number of strikes. Mr. Biggs?”

  “Charles Hill.” Charles Hill was gone.

  “Mildred Lees,” I said.

  “Kyla Sander.” It was my college student, the closest I had to one of Natalie’s peers.

  “Why Kyla Sander?” I said.

  “I’m exercising a peremptory challenge,” Biggs said. “I don’t have to give a reason.”

  “The defendant in this case is a young woman, and so is Kyla Sanders,” I said. “That’s why Mr. Biggs wants her off the jury. J.E.B. v. Alabama.”

  “Mr. Biggs.”

  Mr. Biggs’ shoulders had come forward, and he’d gotten a bit red in the face. “I can’t strike her for her sex, but I can strike her for her age. She’s a young college student, and she’s likely to identify too closely with the defendant to be objective.”

  “I’ll allow it. Ms. Starling?”

  I said another name, and Judge Cheatham marked it on his list. Mr. Biggs said, “Ashley Nichols.”

  “Another woman, your honor,” I said.

  Biggs rolled his eyes in my direction. “Your honor, are we going to have to go through this every time? Ms. Starling herself exercised her first strike on a woman.”

  “If you think that’s why I struck her, you should have challenged it.”

  “Confine your remarks to the court, Ms. Starling. Mr. Biggs?”

  Biggs’s lips were pressed together and his nostrils were flaring. He looked to me like he was hyperventilating. “She has tattoos on both forearms,” he said. “It may be a prejudice on my part, but I just don’t see her as a law-and-order type.”

  The judge nodded.

  “John Shields,” I said, giving up on Ashley Nichols.

  When we had twelve jurors left, the judge sent us back to our tables. He thanked the thirteen panelists Aubrey Biggs and I had challenged, and he sent them back to
the jury pool.

  The trial proper began right after lunch with opening statements. Paul Soldano, who was in town this week, was sitting with Brooke Marshall on the back row.

  To give him his due, Aubrey Biggs was good. He told the story beginning at 6:36 p.m. on Sunday, December 6, with Natalie checking into the Best Western motel. “The defendant has a home here in Richmond, but she lives there with her father and stepmother. That Sunday she did not go home. Early in the evening, she checked into a motel on the south side of town. At some point between eleven p.m. and two a.m., a man was shot to death in that motel room. He fell and bled extensively into the carpet, but his body didn’t stay there. By two a.m. he was lying on a street several blocks away in an area zoned residential and commercial. His head had been crushed and most of his face peeled off by a spinning car tire.” A woman in the jury flinched—Melanie Scarborough, age thirty-four. Biggs followed up on it. “You don’t want to see those pictures—I didn’t want to see them myself—but it is our duty to look at them, to see exactly what was done in an effort to block identification of the body. So far those efforts have been successful. We still don’t know who the murder victim is…”

  I was waiting for him to start arguing his case, talking about what evidence should weigh heavily in the jurors’ minds and what should not, but, as required in an opening statement, he stuck pretty well to the facts he expected to prove. What I wanted was an opportunity to object, to break the flow of his story, but he didn’t give me the opportunity.

  “A man living in the neighborhood saw a young woman matching the defendant’s description bending over the body on the street outside his home. He saw her drive away, and he got the license number. The car was registered in the name of Mark Edward Stevens, Natalie’s father. The next morning police went to the residence of Mark Edward Stevens. They saw the car, which had a broken headlight and blood on its bumper. DNA testing tells us it was the blood of the man that Natalie Stevens had left lying in the road.”