by James Renner
“Why would I do that?”
Trimble chuckled.
“What’s funny?” asked David.
“Nothing.”
“No, really. I want to know. What’s funny?”
“This,” he said, waving at the walls, in the general direction of the courtroom.
David smiled. “Yeah.”
“I can never be tried again, you know,” he said.
“That’s the way it works.”
“Double jeopardy.”
“Double jeopardy,” David agreed.
“I could even tell you how I did it,” said Trimble. “And ain’t nothing you could do about it.”
“That’s true.”
“Does that bother you?”
“No.”
“It does.”
“You don’t scare me, Riley. You know that, right?”
Trimble looked cross for a moment. Then he smiled and wagged his finger at the writer. “You. You’re scared. I can tell.”
“Why would anyone be scared of you, Riley? You just proved to everyone that you’re just a white-trash air-conditioner installer who never hurt anyone.”
“I don’t care about them,” he said, stepping closer to David. “Just you. You know what I done. You’re smart enough to be scared.”
“Which part am I supposed to be scared of, Riley? The part where you couldn’t man up and face the music so you let your scoutmaster take the rap for Sarah? The part where you couldn’t get a hard-on for grown women so you gave up and went after easier prey? The part where you were too scared to touch the dead bodies so you had to roll them out of the trunk?”
Trimble stepped to David and grabbed the writer by the throat, pushing him back against the mirror. He leaned in toward David’s ear. “How about the part where I stuck a screwdriver up Sarah’s pussy and carved out her insides? How about the part where I taught Ronil how to kidnap his holes and not get caught? How about the part where I pierced Jennifer’s tits with copper wire and plugged her into the wall? How about now? Are you a little afraid now, you sarcastic little shit?” He shoved David backward, hard enough that David saw stars dance in his periphery for a few minutes.
“No,” David said. “But if I were you, I’d be afraid of what happens next.”
“What do you mean? I’m free, you dumb fuck.”
David tapped the microphone bud on his lapel.
“Is that on?” Trimble asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “It was when I came in. But the cameraman could have turned it off.”
Trimble looked at the bathroom door, as if expecting a team of police detectives to come tumbling through it to take him back to prison, double jeopardy be damned.
“You’re lying,” he said.
“I’d never lie to you, Riley.”
“You’re trying to trick me.” Trimble’s hands were shaking.
“Now who’s afraid?”
“Fuck you,” said Trimble, and he walked out. David followed.
Pohlman’s eyes said it all. That and the fact that he and the cameraman were sharing one pair of headphones.
Behind them, the jury foreperson was giving an exclusive interview with Action News. “I just didn’t believe the reporter, that Neff guy,” she said. “I never trust reporters. Especially him. He looked like a snotty kid. If he was their best witness, then they never really had a case.”
Trimble leapt at Pohlman’s camera, tackling it to the floor as if it were a person who had wronged him. “Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” he shouted, tearing at the compartment that contained the videotape.
Everything in the corridor came to a sudden halt. No one spoke. All eyes were on the exonerated killer as he assaulted the camera.
Then the cameraman from Channel Five snapped to it and grabbed Trimble by the back of his shirt. “The fuck off my gear!” he said.
Instead of surrendering the camera, Trimble tossed it at the nearest wall, where it collided with the brick inches from a woman’s head. It fell to the floor, intact. He looked at David. “You motherfucker!” he yelled and launched himself at the writer.
David didn’t think. He just balled a fist and planted it straight out as Trimble ran forward. It connected with the man’s nose with a loud smack.
From the crowd of people, two police officers rushed out and grabbed David’s arms.
“He came after me,” said David.
“Just stop,” said one of the officers.
He suddenly realized how this must look to everyone except the team from Channel Five: an angry journalist punching the man he had wrongly accused.
“No,” shouted David. “He admitted it.”
“Can’t you leave him alone?” yelled a stout woman David recognized as some distant relative of Trimble’s.
“He’s telling the truth,” said Pohlman. “Jerry got it on tape. Why do you think he just kicked the shit out of our camera?”
“I’m innocent!” said Trimble.
Trimble jumped at David again, but this time the police officers were ready. They tackled him to the ground and pinned his arms behind his back.
“You tricked me!” shouted Trimble, trying to wrestle away.
“Cut it out, Trimble, or we’ll use the Taser,” said the older policeman.
“Arrest him, already,” someone shouted. News cameras repositioned to catch B-roll of the struggle.
“For what?” asked the older policeman. “He was acquitted.”
“That’s bullshit,” shouted a teenage boy in front of the pack.
“It’s the law,” the policeman responded.
“Christ,” said a deep voice from the back. Except it came out as kind of a “Kee-riced.” The audience parted to let Judge Siegel through. His face was ashen and he was in jeans and a polo, having discarded his robe. He put his hands on his hips and took a moment to think, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He looked at David and Pohlman and said, “You just killed my legacy.” He shook his head, then addressed the crowd of lookee-loos. “I cannot order this man arrested. However, this outburst demonstrates to me that Trimble is a man who could likely be a danger to himself and others should he remain free at this time. The safest place for you right now is a psychiatric ward. At least for a while. As it happens, the nearest psychiatric-care facility is next door at the county jail. Officers, please escort Mr. Trimble to lockup.”
“No!” shouted Trimble. “I ain’t no nut! Fuck you, Judge! I ain’t no nut.”
“Get him away from me,” said Siegel. The officers yanked Trimble toward the elevators.
As he passed, Trimble glared at David, marking him. “I hate you,” he said, simply. “I hate you forever!”
* * *
The Serial Killer’s Protégé had only sold 2,452 copies when Trimble confessed to murder on the day of his acquittal, in December of 2007. It was, after all, a local book. But later that night, Pohlman aired an exclusive on the local ABC affiliate and a series of events quickly propelled David into a new and strange life.
Pohlman’s piece was rebroadcast on the national newscast the following evening. The Morning Show picked it up. A week later, Primetime did a story. A month later, Dateline NBC scooped everyone with the revelation of a long-lost witness in the Donna Doyle case who positively identified Trimble as the man he had seen with Donna before she disappeared. The Ohio legislature, smelling free publicity and recognizing the turning tide, began to consider an end to the state’s death penalty. One grandstanding state representative proclaimed, “Brune’s wrongful execution should serve as a constant reminder that we can never be entirely sure of a criminal’s guilt. That does not mean justice does not work, but rather, like each of us, that it is imperfect and fallible. Therefore we cannot in good conscience continue to mete out that ultimate punishment. Let God be the final judge.” An argument started—mostly by Fox News pundits—for the end of double jeopardy laws, but, to David’s great relief, that was quickly quashed by more intelligent voices. Paul fielded paperback offers from seve
ral New York publishers. Vanity Fair published a new introduction that David wrote for the paperback edition. Sam Mendes’s production company snatched up the movie rights.
Three months after the verdict, the book had sold a hundred thousand copies. Six months later, it was half a million. By then Elizabeth was dead.
It was impossible for him not to become distracted, he told himself later. He should have noticed Elizabeth’s gloomy moods returned as her belly grew. Initially he chalked it up to stress—the baby was going to change every part of their life, wasn’t it? He should have been stressed, too. But he was medicated. And yet, he felt that everything would be okay now. And it wasn’t just the money or the Rivertin talking. He didn’t think so, anyway. And he tried to explain this to Elizabeth. And she would smile and nod.
He thought the house would cheer her up. He hired movers. He hired a decorator. She pretended to be happy.
Looking back, he would come to realize how often she had made excuses to go out, “to the store,” “to the bank,” “to the library.” Where had she really been? And why?
David distracted himself with things like the big goddamn desk from the estate of the Edmund Fitzgerald’s captain and the yellow Bug he’d always wanted as a teenager. He spent a great deal of time reading things like What to Expect When You’re Expecting and Fathers of Boys. He almost didn’t notice she never picked up these books herself.
When she broke down crying in the middle of the baby shower, he told his family it was because hers was not there. But had he believed that? Not really. Do you want to know his secret fear, the thought that troubled his mind while he waited for sleep at night? His real fear was that she had caught his darkness like a cold, that Brune or whatever it was had transferred to her, that the demon in the box had even, somehow, impregnated her.
“Are you okay?” he had asked the night before she went into labor. But by then it was way too late.
“Yes,” she had said, forcing a smile. “I’m …
* * *
… just fine!” exclaimed the young male nurse. “Ten fingers and ten toes.”
David was relieved at the mere sight of his boy. The books he’d read had warned him that the baby might look strange at first, slimy, its head shaped into a cone from the pressure of the birth canal. But Tanner just looked like a baby. He’d been swaddled in blue cloth and lay with his eyes closed in the warm bin atop the cart that would take him to the nursery. His little face, wrinkled like an old man, almost looked contented. Soon they were finally alone. A family.
“David, I don’t think I can do this,” said Elizabeth.
“Can’t do what?”
“I don’t feel a connection, any connection,” she said. “I don’t feel anything.”
He held her hand in one of his and brushed her hair with the other. “Shhh. You just went through a lot. All this takes a while.”
She shook her head. She mumbled something.
“What?”
“I told you I wasn’t going to be good with family stuff,” she said.
“You’ll be fine. You’re going to be a great mother.”
She looked at Tanner strangely. David could not read her thoughts. “What if I wasn’t supposed to become a mother? You know? What if I was supposed to end up like Elaine? What if I was meant to be murdered? That guy that interrupted the whole thing … what if he changed my destiny or fate or whatever? What if I was never supposed to grow up and have this kid?”
“But he did interrupt it,” said David. “So it must have been what was meant to happen.”
He could tell she didn’t believe him. “What if he grows up to be bad?” she asked.
“That could never happen,” he told her.
Later, in the hall, the nurse spoke to him in an accusatory tone. “I’m concerned about your wife,” he said.
“She’s fine,” said David.
“I think she has postpartum depression. She doesn’t like being with the baby.”
“That happens, right?”
“To a degree.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Talk to her,” he said. “See if you can get her to spend some time with our counselors up on the fourth floor.”
“The psych ward?”
“There’s a special section for postpartum patients.”
“No,” he said. “She’d never go for that. And she’d think I was attacking her.”
“Mr. Neff, your wife needs help. Let us help her.”
He nodded. “I’ll talk to her.”
“I swear to God, I will kill myself if you make me go up there,” she said. “This isn’t postpartum depression. I’m just sad.”
“Listen to what you’re saying,” he said.
“I’m fine. Please. Just give me some time.”
Her cell phone rang. She looked at the display. “It’s work,” she said. “Let me take this. It’ll just be a minute. Can you go get me a salad from the cafeteria and a Coke?”
He was gone less than ten minutes. When he returned to the room, the nurse was standing there with Tanner in his hands looking panicked.
“Where’s Elizabeth?” David asked. The bed was empty. She had cut off her wristbands. They lay on the table next to a pair of snips.
The baby went back to the nursery. The police were called. He searched for her in the hospital for the better part of an hour. David’s yellow Bug, the car they had driven to the emergency room when she had gone into labor, was still in the parking garage. When the police drove by their home, they discovered that Elizabeth’s car was missing.
At 8:16 that evening, while he sat on her hospital bed feeding Tanner, two officers stepped into the room and he could read their faces well enough to know that it was over.
The sorrow he should have suffered was muted. The officers who had delivered the news, however, did not know that David was medicated for PTSD. They noted in their report that he appeared unemotional, disaffected. Years later Tom Sackett would read this report and begin to wonder if Elizabeth’s death really had been a suicide.
* * *
The courtroom had not changed. Only this time he was standing where Riley Trimble had once stood.
“How do you plead?” asked Siegel.
“Not guilty, Your Honor,” said David.
An assistant prosecuting attorney named Jacqueline Day stepped forward. She was two years out of law school and hungry for her first big case. “Your Honor, the defendant has unlimited resources, the know-how to alter his identity, and the means to hide forever. The state believes he is a serious flight risk.”
“C’mon!” said Synenberger. “My client is a famous author who cannot disappear and go unnoticed. His assets are not liquid. He has a son he must take care of. He will not run.”
“He is a cold-blooded killer who has managed to fool everyone close to him for four years,” she snapped.
“My client remains innocent of the charges put before him.”
Siegel held up his hands. He looked over to David and couldn’t help but smile. “Every time you step into my courtroom, you test the boundaries of this bench,” he said.
“I did not kill my wife.”
Siegel looked away. “You will surrender your passport,” he said. “I’m setting bail at one million dollars.”
“Your Honor, with all due respect, a million dollars is nothing to this man. He’ll be out of jail by the end of the week,” said Day.
“Court dismissed.”
* * *
Synenberger was right. David’s manager, Bashien, had diversified his money into bonds, stocks, and real estate. He recommended mortgaging the house. Still, cutting the county a check for a million dollars would take a few days. Maybe a week. David thought that might be too long. Too long without Tanner.
He was returned to his sixteen-by-five-foot concrete room with its plywood ledge, painted gunmetal-gray, that doubled as a chair and a bed. The night before his arraignment had been a kind of torture he had never before experie
nced, a total lack of control, separated from his son, unsure where Tanner was or how he was doing. He kept picturing Tanner in the home of some foster parent who seemed pleasant enough during the day but became something else at night, something akin to Riley Trimble. And when he wasn’t thinking of Tanner, he was thinking of Elizabeth. Strangled. Picturing her accident had been hard enough, but now his imagination created images of her murder in his mind. A faceless man wringing the life out of her, her eyes wide with terror, the agony of suffocation. She had suffered. She had been murdered, and for four years, no one had cared. That anyone thought he could have done such a thing was too much to take in. His heart was too full of grief and shame to make room for self-pity.
In the morning, he had been allowed a phone call. He had called his father, who told him Tanner had made it to him the night before, after spending three hours talking to Family Services. Tanner had stayed up half the night but was sleeping finally, so David’s father didn’t wake him. “I don’t have to ask you if you did any of this,” his father had said.
“Thanks, Pop.”
After the arraignment, he ate lunch—corned-beef hash and beans—and returned to his cell. He lay on the blanket they had provided him and began to count the imperfections in the plastered ceiling.
He thought about Elizabeth. Murdered? There were, he realized, only two explanations for this: she had been killed by this man who called himself Arbogast or by the Man from Primrose Lane himself.
With these thoughts overwhelming his mind, exhaustion found him and stole him away into a fitful and troubled sleep.
* * *
He awoke to the sound of his cell door opening.
“Neff,” said the guard. “Somebody bailed you out. Let’s go.”
Bashien had worked faster than expected.
David followed the guard through a large chain-link fence and into a room where he changed back into his clothes.
Dressed, he was led to a window where he signed for his things—wallet, keys, watch—and was told his car had already been towed back to his house. “Your ride is waiting in the lobby,” said the woman inside the window, pointing an acrylic nail toward a set of double doors. She buzzed him through.
The man waiting for him on the other side of those doors was not Bashien but a young man, about twenty-five years old, with shiny blond hair gelled back against his head in a very Gordon Gekko way. He wore a dark tailored suit, his spectacular cuff links catching the reflection of the fluorescents set into the ceiling.