Capitol Murder

by William Bernhardt

  “Just the same-”

  Herndon adjusted the direction of his finger. “Okay, you’ve had your say. Now it’s Mr. Kincaid’s turn.”

  “Your honor, the only reason I’m asking the court to permit this testimony is that it is vital to uncovering the truth.”

  “It always is,” he said wearily.

  “Moreover, it is critical to understanding what happened to Veronica Cooper.”

  “Oh honestly,” Padolino said, “as if we didn’t already know what-”

  “Counselor,” Herndon admonished, “it is not your turn. Back to the Peppermint Stick Forest.”

  Padolino clammed up.

  Ben continued. “Of course we’ll give the prosecutors access to her, the same as we’ve had, as much as her doctors will permit.”

  “What about this other person? The one the police chief called ‘the Sire’?”

  “Real name Barry Dodds, real estate agent by day. Vamp by night.” Ben shook his head. “He’s not talking-for obvious reasons. Judge, this girl is all we’ve got.”

  “And the minor problem of her not being on the witness list?”

  “I could show you mounds of case law in which new witnesses were allowed to be added when they were discovered after the trial began-but I don’t have to, because you already know all about them. Mr. Padolino was allowed to use a previously unlisted witness, and whether he actually called her or not, her testimony was devastating to my client on cross-examination. All I’m asking for is the same leniency you gave the prosecution.”

  “But my witness was a young woman of unquestioned integrity,” Padolino insisted. “His witness is-is-well, for God’s sake. She’s a vampire!”

  “Not exactly,” Ben corrected.

  “Okay, she just runs with the wolves, whatever. The point is, the fundamental credibility required of any witness, and especially from an eleventh-hour surprise witness, is utterly lacking.”

  Herndon batted his finger against his lips. A long time passed in silence while the attorneys waited in excruciating suspense.

  “You both make good points,” Herndon said, at long last. “And I suspect I could rule either way and not be wrong. The only difference is, if I say no to Mr. Kincaid, he’s going to lose, and Appeal Item Number One would be my ruling against his new witness. Why should I let that happen? That’s not good for me or the prosecutor’s office. Furthermore-” He paused, looking deeply into Ben’s eyes. “-I’ve been watching the defense work for several weeks now. And I tend to think that if Mr. Kincaid says this witness is critical to learning the truth about what really happened-then she probably is. I’m going to allow it.”

  “But-”

  Herndon turned his finger. “Don’t bother. The prosecution’s objection is noted. But the jury is going to hear what this woman has to say.”

  Given all that she had been through, Beatrice looked better than Ben expected, but there was no denying her fragility, the brittle-glass quality of her demeanor. She had been brought to the stand in a wheelchair, and her doctors had insisted that she should testify for no longer than one hour without taking a break of equal length, and that she should be on the stand for no more than four hours a day. Her skin was pale-almost to the point of being translucent-but Ben knew she had suffered severe blood loss and probably had not seen the sun for a very long time.

  “It was all fun at first,” Beatrice explained. Her voice was quiet and delicate; even with her microphone turned up to its maximum volume, the spectators in the rear of the gallery had to strain to hear what she was saying. “We were just four DC working girls out partying, trying to have a good time. Originally, we frequented the usual twentysomething haunts-the Rhino Bar and Pumphouse, that sort of place. But as we soon learned, we all had a dark side-probably what brought us together in the first place. We were all into Goth, so we started going to those clubs. We thought the whole occult thing was kind of sexy. So it was inevitable that we would end up at Stigmata. The owner’s head toady, Sid Bartmann, took a shine to us and invited us to their upstairs apartment one night-and that was when our lives began to fall apart.”

  “Was that when you first began taking drugs?”

  “Yes. Bartmann had a lab not far from the club where he cooked the stuff up. The drugs only increased the intensity of the fun, at first. And the sex… well, you got used to it, after a while. If you were high enough, that could be fun, too. Some of the men up there learned about our… interests, and they took us to a meeting of Circle Thirteen. That was where the Sire spotted us. His minions invited us into the Inner Circle, allowed us to take part in their secret ceremonies. All very thrilling. Exciting. Sexy. Like I said, fun, fun, fun. Until Colleen got killed.”

  Beatrice described how the Sire had taken them, while they were all high, and involved them in the Inner Circle’s sacrificial rites. Colleen had been chosen to be the first because she was so immersed in the vampiric mythos. It had long been a fantasy of hers to participate in a gothic vampire sexcapade.

  “Her hands were bound behind her back,” Beatrice explained, her voice halting. “She was tied to a chair. And we just stood there watching, thinking how cool this was, getting more than a little turned on. We’d been warned that the ceremony required some small bloodletting, but hey, we were vampires, right? They assured us the drugs would prevent Colleen from feeling any pain, only erotic pleasure, and the injury would be small and temporary and invisible.

  “But something went wrong. That was when we realized the Sire wasn’t a wannabe. He truly believed he was a vampire. ‘Vampyr,’ he liked to say. And he craved blood. Craved it with such intensity that he lost all control. That’s what happened with Colleen. I don’t know how to explain it with any word other than-bloodlust. Once he stuck his teeth into Colleen and started drinking from her, he couldn’t stop himself. He started on her neck but eventually moved to her jugular. Blood spewed everywhere. Colleen’s eyes bulged. She screamed, but somehow that only seemed to titillate him, to urge him on.”

  “Did you try to stop it?” Ben asked.

  “God, yes. All three of us ran to help her, but the other members of the Inner Circle held us back. They told us not to worry-they’d seen it happen before.” She paused. “I don’t think even they realized just how out of control the Sire was. And by the time they did-it was too late.” Tears poured from her eyes. “Colleen was dead.”

  Ben gave her a moment to collect herself, then forged ahead. “What happened next?”

  “We didn’t know what to do. Amber wanted to go to the police, but the Sire said we were just as likely to go to jail as he was. We were accomplices; they’d get us on felony murder charges, he said. Plus-we needed that drug. If you haven’t been dependent on a drug, you can’t know what it’s like. Veronica talked about us all quitting our jobs and getting out of town-but we didn’t have the money to last a week on our own, and we knew it wouldn’t be a day before we came crawling back to Sid or the Sire to get our fix. We were hooked. We couldn’t live without it. We’d do anything for it.” Her head fell. “Even sell out our friend. Even cover up her murder.”

  “So you… just went back to the party-hard swinging vampire life?”

  “At first. Then Veronica came up with an idea-a way to make some serious getaway money-enough to buy a huge supply of the drug, enough to last us for years, enough to blow town and start our lives over again somewhere outside the influence of the Sire. Somewhere far away from those hypnotic eyes.”

  “Do you know what her plan was?”

  “More or less. She was going to film Senator Glancy having sex with her-then blackmail him for money.”

  Several members of the jury stirred. For the first time, the story presented by the Glancys had received some independent verification.

  “And did you think that plan was… realistic?”

  “Definitely. Veronica had a way about her. It wasn’t just that she was gorgeous. She knew how to make herself irresistible, how to make men know she was interested, availabl
e, or better yet, how to make them think she wanted them. And it wasn’t all a show, either. She liked having sex and as with most things in life-practice makes perfect. She was good at it. Veronica was kind of like a drug herself. Men became addicted to her.”

  “Did you follow the progress of her… plan?”

  “For a while. Till the morning one of the Sire’s Inner Circle goons showed up unannounced at the apartment Amber and I shared after she left the escort service. With a gun.”

  “Why was he there?”

  She pressed a hand against her chest, trying to regain her strength. “The video had been released-the video Veronica made to blackmail Senator Glancy-and suddenly the eyes of the world were on her. The Sire was afraid she’d expose everything. He’d decided it would be best to ‘bring us all in.’ He’d gone to the Capitol to collect Veronica himself and sent this goon after us. Well, we knew what that meant. We’d heard about the young girls who went to the Inner Circle and disappeared. We’d seen the Sire and some of the other hard-core bloodsuckers going into that secret, always locked, back room, licking their chops. I knew if we cooperated, no one would ever hear from us again. So I made like I was coming on to him, snuggled up close, fiddled with his fly. And while I distracted him, Amber snuck up behind him and clubbed him on the side of the head with a baseball bat.”

  Ben nodded. Hell of a dramatic story. But was the jury buying it? “What did you do then?”

  “What else? We ran. Tried to disappear, become invisible. We knew the Sire had connections everywhere-including with the police, so that was not a realistic option. We had to lie low, deep down under the radar. But how far can you get without using ATMs, credit cards, contacting friends? And just to make everything harder, remember-we were going cold turkey, trying to function without the drug for the first time in months. We were a mess. Couldn’t think straight, couldn’t plan more than a minute ahead at a time. Stuffing ourselves with sugary foods and booze, trying to make the pain go away. Eventually Amber couldn’t stand it anymore. She went back to Stigmata for a fix. Of course, once Randy had her back in his clutches again, he never let her go. Until she ended up getting shot. Through his police connections, the Sire had learned that Amber’s father was in town and tracked him down. When her father refused to talk, the Sire killed him, stuffed his body in the trunk of his car, and stole his wallet. They looked enough alike that he could pass using Daily’s photo ID, as long as no one looked too closely. He eventually caught up to Amber in the hospital and killed her. I got to hear him brag about it.” Her head fell. She pressed her fingers against her forehead, as if trying to extinguish the pain, the grief. “Because he caught me, too.”

  “But he didn’t kill you?”

  “No. He’d had to kill Amber, since he couldn’t get her out of the hospital without being seen, but there was no reason to be so harsh with me. He pumped me full of drugs that kept me half stoned and tried to brainwash me, torturing me, making me participate in sick ceremonies, slapping me around and then making me beg for more. He broke my nose. But I never gave in to it. I pretended that I did-but I didn’t. The problem was-he knew.”

  “So why didn’t he kill you?”

  “He wanted me to suffer, just as he said he had suffered after we ‘deserted’ him. He wanted to put me through hell. So he put me in that room with the others in the back of that church of his, tied me down to the bed-and he sucked my blood. While I was still awake and alive.”

  Sickened expressions crossed the faces in the jury box. The outpouring of pity was so strong Ben could feel it. If only some of that sympathy would spill over to his client…

  “Not all at once, mind you. He’d take a pint here, a pint there. When he wasn’t around, his assistants would take our blood in the more conventional way. Me and the others-we were his living blood bank. He’d wait till I’d had time to produce more blood, then suck me down again.”

  “A fact the police can confirm,” Ben inserted, and he noticed Padolino didn’t object. Because he knew it was true.

  “But every day,” Beatrice said, “every single day he reminded me that eventually he was going to kill me. He’d… play with me. Hurt me. Torment me in any way imaginable, both mental and… physical. He never let me move, stretch, go outside. He would spoon-feed me the most disgusting gruel you could imagine. He didn’t even let me go to the bathroom-just gave me a chamberpot and told me to do the best I could. I couldn’t shower. I got bedsores. My muscles atrophied. I still can’t move my left arm. Every day the pain got worse, but he didn’t care. He wanted me to live in hell, the sadistic bastard. And I did. I did.” Tears again streamed down her cheeks. “And the worst of it was-I knew I had no chance of escape. None. The only thing I had to look forward to was death. A slow painful death caused by that disgusting psycho sucking out all my blood.”

  Ben paused a moment. Her testimony had been painful, not only for her to give, but for everyone to listen to. But he had a little more ground to cover before they took a break.

  “Beatrice… who killed Veronica Cooper?”

  “The Sire. He told me he was going to do it, then laughed about it after she was dead. Laughed because he’d not only silenced her-he’d made a quarter of a million dollars.” She paused, wiped the water from her face, then continued. “He went to the Senate the morning after the video broke-the same morning he sent his flunkie after me and Amber. He bribed some old security guard to put a false name on the ‘expected dignitaries’ list so he could get in and out without leaving a trace. He found Veronica, overpowered her, bit her, took her money-and gave her that anticoagulant to make sure she bled to death.”

  “Let the record reflect,” Ben said quietly, “that a police search of the so-called Temple of the Vampire, detailed in the report admitted as Exhibit D-235, reveals that a quarter of a million dollars in cash was found in a satchel in the man known as the Sire’s bedroom. A comparison of serial numbers has established that this money came from the Glancys’ Grand Cayman bank account. And the satchel was splattered with blood that matches that of Veronica Cooper. They also found a bottle of the anticoagulant known as warfarin.”

  “We never meant for this to happen,” Beatrice said, her voice cracking, tears streaming through the fingers spread across her face. “All we wanted was a little fun, something to relieve our stress at the end of the workday. And now-now-” She began to choke, her words mingling with her sobbing. “Now all my friends are dead. All of them. And I don’t feel as if I can go on living another day. The doctors watch over me, trying to save me, and I keep thinking-why? Why bother? Why not just let it end and let me finally-finally-find some peace?”

  Silence blanketed the courtroom like a shroud. Judge Herndon called for the prearranged break. But no one was listening. Everyone’s eyes were on the poor broken girl in the witness stand, not yet even twenty-two, who only a few months ago had a life so vibrant, so promising, that almost anyone might’ve envied it. And who now was so miserable that she secretly wished her doctors would let her die.

  After the break, Padolino attempted to cross-examine Beatrice, but there was little he could do, and he was smart enough not to push her over the brink, an act that would’ve made the jury despise him. He emphasized how ill she had been, how often she had been on drugs, and naturally suggested that anything she said, anything she thought she remembered, was suspect. The prosecutor repeatedly hammered the fact that she had not seen the Sire commit the murder and was in reality only making surmises about what had happened based upon what this career liar had told her. And he reminded the jury that despite the horrific tragedy these girls had suffered, all the hard-and-fast evidence still pointed to Senator Glancy.

  After the drama of Beatrice’s testimony, closing arguments were almost anticlimactic-but still of critical importance. Perhaps more than in any previous case in his career, Ben realized that everything could hinge on them, as the jury tried to weigh the credibility of Beatrice’s astonishing testimony, whether it could possibly be true, wh
ether it was enough to overcome all the evidence that pointed to Todd Glancy as the killer.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Padolino began, “when all is said and done, it comes down to this. Which is more likely: that Veronica Cooper was killed by a man who knew her, worked with her, had an illicit affair with her, was being blackmailed by her, had scheduled a meeting with her, left a meeting just before the time of her death, and controlled the hideaway in which she was found? Or that she was killed by some hitherto unknown person with no knowledge of or access to the Senate, who the defense wants you to believe was a-” He rolled his eyes. “-a vampire, covering up the evil deeds of his equally diabolical coven. Which one sounds like the truth, the world as we know it, and which one sounds like a preposterous fantasy cooked up by a desperate defense? In the final analysis, I don’t think it’s all that hard a question to answer.”

  Padolino proceeded along those lines for nearly an hour, reviewing all the evidence that had been presented during the case and never missing an opportunity to remind the jury of the unsavory secrets that had been revealed about the defendant. “Using a typically disreputable defense tactic, they have attempted to save the defendant by trashing his victim-but it didn’t work, did it? They say the victim had an active sex life-the implication being that this makes it okay for Senator Glancy to have sex with one of his young employees, perhaps even to murder her. A detective was called to provide more slander. Even the senator’s wife was called to talk trash about poor dead Veronica Cooper-but in each case, what we learned about Senator Glancy was far more illuminating. That he has had not one but many affairs. That he favors aberrant, sickening sexual practices-practices which in many respects resemble the wounds found on the victim. Worst of all, that he has engaged in sexual promiscuity with a minor-a seventeen-year-old girl-and subjected her to the same ugly perversions as the others. That he cut her on the neck, just as Veronica Cooper was cut-fatally. Good God-” Padolino’s voice swelled. “You saw that video. What isn’t this man capable of doing?”