“Yes, Your Honor,” Raines said. And in a quieter voice, “Thank you.”
“Okay,” Boggs said, “let’s move along to our next case.”
Jessie stepped away from the counsel table. House arrest with an ankle bracelet? For an accused murderer? It wasn’t the result she’d expected, and she had a feeling it would only be the first of many surprises. Boggs had been right about one thing: It was the Commonwealth’s burden to prove that Brooke Raines had not killed Corbin Keeley in self-defense, and Jessie would need to prove that at trial, to a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt. She needed to be prepared.
14
While Jessie was arguing in preliminary arraignment court, Leary was skipping work to investigate a three-year-old case. Since Jessie’s involvement with the Corbin Keeley case, he couldn’t get the similar case from his own past out of his mind. Back then, he’d found Lydia Wax’s story about stabbing Terence Resta in self-defense suspicious, but he’d been unable to find any evidence to disprove it. Now, he found himself compelled to try again.
Bullshit. You just miss being a homicide detective, and this is your excuse to play cop again.
His thoughts scattered as he stepped out of his car at the curb in front of Terence Resta’s brother’s house and saw the man come out of his front door. Chance Resta wasn’t a particularly big man, but he was solid. His torso was compact and hard. Leathery-looking hands hung at his sides from arms that were thick and ropy with muscle. Red-rimmed eyes glared out from beneath a sloping forehead. In a bare-knuckled fistfight with the man, Leary believed he might win, but not without significant injury.
“Get the fuck off my land!”
The front lawn of Resta’s small house had frosted over in the November chill, and the man’s work boots crashed violently down on the stiff grass. Resta looked older than Leary remembered. His face seemed more lined, more weathered, and his lurching gait seemed more labored. The stark changes didn’t surprise Leary. He’d seen what the weight of grief could do to an otherwise healthy person.
He lifted his hands, palms out, placating. “I’m just here to talk, Mr. Resta.”
“Yeah, you’re good at that, aren’t you? About the only thing you are good at, you and your fucking partner both.” He spat on the grass, then looked around. “He here, too? Fucking cops.”
“My partner is dead,” Leary said. “And I’m not a cop anymore.”
That seemed to catch Resta’s attention. His bulky chest stopped heaving as his breathing slowed to a normal rate. “Sorry about your partner.”
Leary nodded. “Thanks.”
“Why aren’t you a cop anymore? They finally fire your ass for being a shit detective?”
Leary felt his anger swell. He forced the emotion down. Resta had hit a nerve, but letting him see that wouldn’t get Leary any closer to getting what he wanted.
What the hell do I want?
“I resigned. I wanted to pursue other interests.”
Resta let out a derisive snort. “I bet you did. You certainly weren’t interested in pursuing justice for Terry.”
“That’s not true. I worked your brother’s case hard. My partner and I both. There wasn’t any evidence that contradicted Lydia Wax’s self-defense claim.”
Resta shook his head, a look of disgust on his face. “You didn’t find it. Doesn’t mean there wasn’t any.”
“I agree,” Leary said, and the words seemed to startle Resta. “That’s why I’m here. I want to try again.”
“Little late for that.”
“Can we talk inside?” Leary said. “It’s cold.”
“You think I’m letting you in my house? I fucking hate you, Detective Asshole Mark Leary. I spent the last three years hating you and the whole worthless Philadelphia Police Department.”
Leary tried to peer past him, into the house, but Resta’s bulky frame blocked him. Then he remembered something. “You still restoring bikes?”
The man’s expression softened slightly. “You remember that, huh?”
“Back when we were investigating your brother’s case, we stopped by here a few times. You were working on a Harley Davidson, I think.”
Resta nodded. “FXRT 1340 Sport Glide.”
“Right. I remember. You said it was your hobby, restoring old bikes. Relaxed you.” Leary didn’t add that the man looked like he could use some serious relaxation right now. “That bike was from the eighties, I think.”
“1987.” Leary thought he glimpsed conflicting emotions behind Resta’s bloodshot eyes. “I love Harleys. I’m working on a 1961 Sprint now. Beautiful—you should see her.” A hint of a smile touched his face.
“I’d like to.”
The smile dropped. “It’s an expression. You think I want to hang out in my garage with the detective who fucked up my brother’s case? Get out of here.”
Leary sighed. “Look, I know you don’t think much of me, but I’m actually a pretty good detective. And your brother’s case has been on my mind. I think I got it wrong and I want to fix that. It’s not too late, Chance. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
Resta seemed to think about it. Then, silently, he turned and led the way toward a detached garage to the left of his house. He rolled the door up, revealing a small but tidy workspace. A partially disassembled motorcycle was propped near the center of the garage.
“Nice,” Leary said, looking at the bike.
“Still needs a lot of work, but she’ll be a beauty when I’m done.” He looked from the bike to Leary, and the warmth left his face. He leaned his bulk against a worktable and crossed his arms over his chest. “What do you want to know?”
“Has anything changed since we last spoke? Have you found or heard anything that might shed light on Terry’s death?”
“Not really. I mean, me and the guys still talk about it. Put a few drinks in us, and the subject is bound to come up, you know? We were a close group, especially back when we still had the business.”
The business, Leary recalled, had been an auto repair body shop in the Fairmount neighborhood of Philly. It was a family business the Resta brothers had inherited from their parents. The brothers had hired their childhood buddies as employees—not the best business decision, and probably not the only bad one the brothers had made.
“What do you mean, ‘when you still had a business?’ The shop went under?”
“Nah, I sold I it after Terry died. There was an interested buyer, and I didn’t see the point of keeping it going without Terry.”
“Who was the buyer?”
“Some company. They’d already bought up a bunch of the neighboring businesses, and they wanted ours, too. For the land, to develop it.”
Leary knew they were straying from the subject of Terry Resta’s relationship with Lydia Wax, but some instinct told him this information might be relevant. “What was the name of the company?”
Resta’s eyes narrowed. “Just some letters. CBG, I think. No—CBL. Why are you asking about it? I thought you wanted to talk about the bitch who killed my brother.”
“You said you sold the business after Terry died. Would you have sold it if he was still alive?”
“No way. Terry would never have sold. He was big on carrying on the family business.”
“Do you still have the paperwork from the sale? I’d like to take a look.”
Resta stared at him, and Leary could see the distrust and confusion in the man’s eyes. In the end, Resta shrugged. “Sure, why not? Wait here, I’ll get the contract. You think … you think Terry being killed and this company buying the business have some kind of connection?”
Leary let out a long breath. “Right now, I’m not sure what to think.”
But something told him he might be on the right path.
15
“I still don’t get why this is necessary,” Carrie Keeley said. Jessie stood with the girl and her mother in the corridor outside the courtroom in the Criminal Justice Center.
Jessie had a cup of coffee in
her hand, but she barely tasted it. The ramp-up to Brooke Raines’s trial had entered the pretrial conference and hearing stage. It required her full attention, and she was exhausted. Carrie Keeley and Nina Long seemed determined to attend every hearing—and to understand them, too. The need to educate the women added an extra burden to Jessie’s workload, but that wasn’t what was tiring her. Lately, she’d been finding it difficult to sleep.
At first she’d blamed her sleeplessness on adrenaline. She told herself that with a major trial fast approaching, it was natural to be wired. But that didn’t explain why she saw Nina’s battered face every time she closed her eyes. It didn’t explain why her gut churned when she considered the strategies she would need to use to discredit Brooke Raines’s story and hide Corbin Keeley’s history from the jurors. She’d prosecuted plenty of complicated cases—very few criminals were purely bad, and very few victims were purely innocent—but she’d never found herself in a position like her current one. Last night, her tossing and turning had been so bad, Leary had staggered out of the bedroom and moved to the couch just to get some peace.
Jessie drained the last few drops of her coffee and took a breath, focusing on the girl. “The fact that your father beat your mother shouldn’t be relevant here, but the defense is going to try to use it to support Brooke Raines’s self-defense claim. There are rules of evidence I’m going to use to try to keep those facts away from the jury.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Nina wince. She felt like wincing herself.
They were at the courthouse today because Jessie had filed a motion in limine. A motion in limine was a pretrial motion—the Latin actually translated to “at the threshold”—a common method for raising evidentiary issues before the beginning of a trial. Jessie’s motion was to exclude evidence of Corbin Keeley’s alleged abuse of Nina, and specifically to prevent Aidan Hughes from calling Nina, Carrie, or anyone else to the stand to testify about it. By raising her objection now, before a jury was empaneled, she hoped to cut off any opportunity for Hughes to use Keeley’s history of violence to sway the jury.
“I thought a wife can refuse to testify about her husband,” Carrie said.
The teenager had obviously been doing her best to research the complicated legal issues. “That’s called the spousal privilege. One spouse can’t be forced to testify against the other in a criminal matter. But it doesn’t apply here. There must be a valid marriage at the time the privilege is claimed, and your parents were divorced.” Jessie didn’t add that even if they’d still been married at the time of Keeley’s death, a widow couldn’t claim the privilege, either, since death was considered a legal end to the marriage. “That’s why we need to exclude the evidence on other grounds.”
“I understand.” Carrie didn’t look fully convinced of the rationality of the law, but she nodded anyway.
“Well,” Jessie said with a breath, “it’s time.”
She threw away her coffee cup and they entered the courtroom. Aidan Hughes was sitting at the defense table. He rose as soon as he saw her, with a big, warm smile on his face. “Good morning, Jessie.”
“Hi, Aidan.”
He nodded to Carrie and Nina with the same friendly smile. Neither woman looked at him. They hurried to their seats in the gallery. To Jessie, Hughes said, “You wrote a killer brief. Going up against you is never easy, I’ll give you that.”
“Thanks.”
In a lower voice, he said, “I’m still surprised you’re doing this at all. I mean, prosecuting a victim whose supposed crime was fighting for her life? Doesn’t seem like your style.”
Was he baiting her, or was his question sincere? Had he picked up on her conflicted feelings and decided to try to turn them to his advantage? “My style is to bring out the truth, and make sure that people who commit murder are held accountable.”
“My client didn’t commit murder. She did what she had to do to survive—”
“What’s she doing now?” Jessie had noticed the chair next to Hughes’s was empty. The defendant’s presence at this hearing was not mandatory, and apparently Brooke Raines had not found the subject interesting enough to justify leaving her apartment. “Did your client have a more important commitment?”
“Brooke’s under an incredible amount of stress.”
“She should be.”
Hughes’s smile fell away. “You’re not going to win this one.”
Their banter was cut short by the entrance of Judge Willard Armstrong. Armstrong was one of the younger judges in the Philly criminal court system, a forty-something-year-old who’d worked as both a federal prosecutor and a defense attorney. The experience of both perspectives seemed to have rubbed off on him. He had a reputation as a fair and thoughtful jurist.
“Okay,” Armstrong said. “Let’s hash this out. I reviewed both of your briefs. Ms. Black, you’re first.”
“Yes, Your Honor. The Commonwealth believes this is a fairly straightforward issue. We anticipate that the defense will attempt to call the victim’s ex-wife, Nina Long, to the stand to testify regarding certain alleged prior acts of domestic violence by the victim. We request a ruling of inadmissibility now, in order to prevent the introduction of such evidence. As the Court knows, under Pennsylvania rules of evidence, evidence of a person’s character or trait is not admissible to prove that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character or trait. That’s well-established law.”
“Mr. Hughes?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Hughes said. “It’s also well-established law that evidence of a victim’s prior conduct—violent conduct in particular—is admissible in a self-defense context to show that the defendant’s fear and apprehension were reasonable.”
Jessie had anticipated this argument and was prepared for it. “That rule is only applicable if the defendant had actual knowledge of the prior conduct. And Brooke Raines did not have actual knowledge of Mr. Keeley’s alleged abuse of his former spouse.”
Judge Armstrong arched an eyebrow. “Do you dispute that, Mr. Hughes?”
“I don’t believe the rule is that clear-cut, Your Honor. Ms. Raines had seen the news reports about Keeley’s abuse of his ex-wife. She saw the photograph—”
“Those news reports were speculative. Nina Long denied that her husband inflicted the injuries.”
“It’s a gray area,” Hughes said. “She knew there was a likelihood that Corbin Keeley had abused his ex-wife.”
“Your Honor, it is not a gray area,” Jessie said.
“It is,” Hughes said, “and in a case like this one—a case in which at least two women were brutally beaten and assaulted—the court should weigh all of the factors and in the spirit of fairness and justice—”
Jessie heard a sharp intake of breath behind her, but did not dare to glance back at Nina and Carrie. Judge Armstrong raised a hand. “Save the theatrics for the jury, Mr. Hughes. I’m sympathetic to your client’s position, but I need to interpret the law. I’m granting the Commonwealth’s motion.”
“Understood, Your Honor,” Hughes said. “In the alternative, the defense requests the opportunity to admit the testimony of Nina Long under Rule 406 instead.”
Jessie shook her head. Rule 406, the so-called habit rule, provided that evidence of a person’s habit could be admitted to prove that on a particular occasion, the person acted in accordance with the habit. Hughes was trying to use the rule to slip around the prohibitions on the use of character evidence.
“Mr. Hughes is intentionally blurring the distinction between character evidence and evidence of habit,” she said. “Habit requires much greater specificity—for example, that a person habitually arrives at their job at a certain time. That rule isn’t applicable here, Your Honor.”
“It is if we can establish that Mr. Keeley had a habit of hitting women.”
She heard another gasp from the front row of the gallery, but she couldn’t worry about Carrie’s and Nina’s feelings right now.
“That’s not the type of habit the
rule was intended to address,” she said, “and Mr. Hughes knows it.”
“Once again, I must agree with Ms. Black,” Judge Armstrong said. “My ruling stands. Evidence of Mr. Keeley’s alleged prior bad conduct will not be admitted at trial.” Jessie let out a quiet breath of relief, but before she could thank the judge, he continued talking. “But please note, Ms. Black, that this ruling goes both ways. The Commonwealth will not be permitted to use the testimony of either Mr. Keeley’s ex-wife, or his daughter, to introduce evidence of the victim’s good character. I won’t have you painting a saintly picture of this victim for the jury. Am I understood?”
“But Your Honor.” Jessie quickly gathered her thoughts. The general rule in a criminal trial was that the prosecution was permitted to offer evidence of a victim’s good character if the defendant first introduced evidence of the victim’s bad character. Jessie knew that Hughes would introduce evidence of Keeley’s bad character. There was no way he could present his client’s self-defense claim if he didn’t elicit testimony showing that Keeley had abused Raines. Jessie’s plan had been to rebut that testimony by calling Carrie to testify about how gentle, loving, and good her father had been, or, as Armstrong had phrased it, painting a saintly picture. For a second, she saw herself through the judge’s eyes and her stomach felt queasy.
“That’s my ruling,” Armstrong said. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t present evidence of Corbin Keeley’s good character unless you’re willing to open the door to the defense to explore his prior bad acts as well.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Hughes said. His smile returned, and he looked relieved as he gathered his files. He might have lost the motion he’d come to argue, but he’d won a victory nonetheless. Brooke Raines would have a chance to describe Keeley’s monstrous side, and Nina and Carrie would have no choice but to watch in silence.
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