Law of Attraction

by Allison Leotta

“On that night, the defendant knew or suspected that Laprea was involved with someone else. That night, August sixteenth, is the night the defendant killed her.

  “The defendant’s neighbor, a sixty-year-old janitor named Ernie Jones, was on his way to work around nine thirty p.m. Mr. Jones was in the hallway outside of the defendant’s apartment when Laprea came running out of the defendant’s home. Her clothing was in disarray, and her face and arms were already covered in bruises. Mr. Jones saw the defendant follow Laprea into the hallway; and he saw that the defendant was extremely angry. The defendant screamed at Laprea and accused her of cheating on him. Then he punched her in the face. Mr. Jones heard her cheekbone crack when the defendant’s fist slammed into it. The medical examiner will tell you that blow fractured her left cheekbone, although the fatal blow came later.”

  Despite the drama of what he was saying, Jack’s voice remained soft, his gestures restrained. The facts were dramatic enough. Any attempt to dramatize the story would just cheapen it. But as he spoke, he walked slowly back and forth in front of the jury box so he could make eye contact with each one of them, making each juror feel as if he were telling his story especially to them.

  “You’ll hear that although Mr. Jones is smaller and a good deal older than the defendant, he tried to intervene, to stop the violence in a fatherly way.” Here, Jack allowed a note of anger to creep into his voice. “In response, the defendant punched that sixty-year-old man in the face.”

  The spectators murmured a chorus of disapproval, and Anna saw several jurors shoot daggers at D’marco.

  “Laprea Johnson used that opportunity to try to flee from the defendant. She ran down the stairwell. As she ran away, she yelled that she was calling the police. She said that the defendant would never see his children again. Mr. Jones watched the defendant run down the stairs after her. It was the last time anyone would see Laprea Johnson.”

  Jack paused and took a sip of water. The pause was strategically placed here, allowing the jurors to fill in with their minds what happened after D’marco and Laprea were out of sight.

  Jack went on to describe the nine-year-old boy who found Laprea’s battered body the next day, in the wooded lot behind D’marco’s building. He talked about the search warrant, how Laprea’s purse was still at D’marco’s house, her bloodstains on his carpet. He described the medical examiner’s findings and the medical evidence, which showed she died of blunt force trauma to the head on the night Ernie Jones saw D’marco hitting her.

  “Now, you might wonder: What was the defendant’s reaction when confronted by the authorities? You’ll hear that he ran. He ran from the police officers searching his home a few days after the murder. He was so desperate to escape, he jumped across rooftops, three stories up, to get away from them. And he continued running, one week later, when Officer Green found him lurking behind Laprea Johnson’s house. That day, the defendant was so eager to flee, he tried to run Officer Green over with a car, and then he led the officer on a car chase through a residential neighborhood. Luckily, Officer Green caught him. And so the defendant sits before you today.”

  Jack listed the charges against D’marco, briefly explaining their elements. He didn’t mention D’marco’s escape and assault on Anna, which the judge had ruled was inadmissible here. That was a separate case, set to go to trial several weeks from now. Jack listed all of the witnesses the government was going to call, briefly stating their roles. When he mentioned Officer Brad Green, Jack described him as a good cop and a neutral eyewitness.

  Anna sank further in her seat. This was going to be a disaster.

  “After you’ve heard all the witnesses and seen all the evidence, you will come to one inescapable conclusion. D’marco Davis killed Laprea Johnson. I will ask you to hold him accountable for that. Thank you.”

  Several of the jurors nodded at Jack as he sat down. The courtroom was quiet; the jury was grim, feeling the weight of the case settle on their shoulders. A few women in the audience—Laprea’s friends and family—were softly crying and holding each other.

  It was a difficult silence for Nick to walk into. The crowd was feeling sadness at the lost life, and anger at the man who took the young mother from the world. Nick would have to counter those emotions. If anyone could do it, Anna thought, Nick could. As he stood in front of the jury, he exuded charisma, his boyish good looks and perfect smile making the female jurors take double, and a few triple, takes of him. Anna knew how they felt.

  Anna expected him to come out swinging. Most OPD lawyers started their openings by passionately asserting their client’s innocence. “Mr. Smith is innocent! He was innocent the day of the crime, he was innocent when the police arrested him, and he sits before you today, an innocent man!” Anna anticipated something similar from Nick. Especially since his client had claimed he was actually innocent when he’d broken into Anna’s house.

  Instead, Nick opened with a rather professorial lecture. “A bedrock principle of American law is the presumption of innocence,” he began. “Mr. Davis is presumed to be innocent. What the prosecutor just said, however confidently he says it, does not change that.”

  Instead of declaring his client’s innocence, Nick was imploring the jury to follow the legal principle that he was presumed to be innocent. It was a subtle but important distinction. He wasn’t vouching for his client.

  “As you listen to the evidence, keep an open mind. Don’t come to any conclusion before you’ve heard everything. Remember that the government has the burden of proving Mr. Davis’s guilt. That burden never shifts to Mr. Davis. The defense doesn’t have to do anything. We could just sit back and see what evidence the government has. It’s up to the government to meet its burden of proof: beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest burden in American law.”

  Nick didn’t make any charges of police misconduct or prosecutorial overreaching. He didn’t say there was an alibi, or that his client did it in self-defense. He didn’t suggest that someone else did it.

  What he did say was a mild and academic recitation of the law. It was a perfectly acceptable opening statement. But many criminal lawyers thought that the best defense was one that put forth their own theory of the case. Just arguing that the government hadn’t met its burden was risky. The jury didn’t just want to measure some technical evidentiary threshold; they wanted to know what had really happened. Nick wasn’t suggesting any alternative story to counter the government’s.

  Anna was surprised that Nick’s opening wasn’t more aggressive. Why didn’t he talk about the fact that Laprea was pregnant with another man’s child? He could really spin that for the defense: there’s this other man out there, intimately involved with the victim, and we don’t know who he is. Where’s the mystery man? Isn’t he a suspect? That alone could be his “reasonable doubt.” Anna knew the omission had to be a deliberate tactic on his part. She wondered what he had up his sleeve.

  When Nick sat down, Anna saw that a few of the jurors were openly glaring at D’marco. Nick’s plea for them to keep an open mind hadn’t worked.

  “This is a good time for our lunch break,” Judge Spiegel announced. She turned to the jurors. “Please return at one o’clock, when we’ll begin hearing from witnesses. Do not discuss the case with anyone in the meantime.”

  The courtroom stood in respectful silence as the jurors filed out, then burst into a subdued roar. A marshal led D’marco back to the holding cell. He cooperated, docile as the orthodontist he resembled. Anna walked toward the front of the courtroom against the wave of people filing out.

  Nick was leaving as she was coming up. They met at the front of the audience section. He stopped in front of her, searching her face, wondering if she was there to see him.

  “Hey,” he said softly.

  “Hi, Nick.” She stepped around him.

  Jack watched her interaction with Nick. A look of satisfaction flashed across Jack’s face as she bypassed the defense attorney, but it was gone by the time she crossed the short space to the
prosecution’s table. Jack’s expression reassembled itself into the mask of cool politeness he always wore around her now.

  “Hello, Anna.” Jack’s posture was formal, almost military. “How have you been?”

  “Hi, Jack,” she said, feeling nervous warmth to be talking to him. “I’ve been fine. That was a great opening.”

  “Thanks.” A small smile fought its way through the mask. He knew he’d given a great opening statement, and he was glad she had seen it.

  “But,” she said softly, turning so no one in the audience could hear, “I think you’d better see this.”

  She handed him the paper she’d been clutching throughout the speeches. He looked at her suspiciously, then skimmed the report. He was familiar with the format and quickly understood what it was saying. When he was done, he looked up at her, his green eyes narrowing with anger.

  “Fuck.”

  “That pretty much sums it up.”

  “Anna, I told you to cancel the paternity test.” His voice was quiet, but the anger was there. Anna’s stomach clenched.

  “The night we were at Ben’s Chili Bowl? The night before I was fired off the case? Jack, I was kicked out of my office the next morning and told to have nothing to do with the case. I couldn’t cancel any tests or do anything else. I thought you were going to cancel it.”

  He paused, staring at the paper. After he’d instructed Anna to put a stop to the testing, he’d checked it off his mental to-do list. Even when Anna had been fired from the case the next day, it hadn’t occurred to him.

  “You’re right,” Jack said at last. At this point, it didn’t matter why the testing had continued. It had. Now he had to deal with the results.

  33

  Jack burst into the witness room, where Rose Johnson, Ernie Jones, and a bunch of police officers sat in the chairs lining the walls. He scanned the room until his eyes landed on Officer Brad Green. Jack glared at Green for a moment, just long enough for the officer to see Jack’s fury and swallow nervously. Then Jack turned to the other people in the room.

  “Officer Fields,” Jack calmly addressed a young woman in an MPD uniform. “We have until one o’clock for lunch. Could you make sure Ms. Johnson and Mr. Jones find a good place to eat?”

  The officer nodded and stood up with Rose and Ernie. Rose smiled quizzically at Anna as the officer ushered her out into the hallway, where a gaggle of women waited to enfold her into their clucking, loving circle. As the door was closing, Anna saw Ernie standing uncertainly to one side, until Rose reached through her people and drew him into the group.

  Jack turned to the other police officers. “You’re released until twelve forty-five.” His eyes lasered back to Green. “Except you. And you, McGee. I need you here for this.”

  When the room was cleared, Jack turned to Green, who was sitting in his chair and straightening his clip-on tie, smoothing it over the paunch of his belly.

  “I just gave my opening statement,” Jack said slowly. It was the very softness of his voice that alerted Anna to how furious he was. “I told the jury you were a good cop, a neutral eyewitness, a man with no dog in this fight.” Jack paused. “Is that true?”

  “Of course,” Green said. Fear was plainly visible on his face. “What’s going on?”

  Jack tossed the report contemptuously on Green’s lap. The policeman reluctantly looked at the paper. He didn’t understand exactly what it was saying, but he understood that it was from the FBI’s DNA laboratory in Quantico and that it involved him, Laprea Johnson, and her unborn baby.

  “I—I think I need a lawyer.”

  “You’re damned right you need a lawyer!” Jack roared. “Nick Wagner is right outside! You can lawyer up right now, and in a month, I’ll see you in the case of the United States versus former officer Bradley Green!”

  “If I talk to you, you’ll charge me anyway.” Green seemed to shrink into his seat. A wave of crimson crept from his round cheeks to the roots of his close-cropped hair.

  “Maybe so, maybe not. But I guarantee that if you do not tell me the truth right now, you’re done.”

  “I didn’t know she was pregnant!” Green looked up at Jack. “Until I heard about the autopsy.”

  “It was your fucking baby!”

  “It could be anybody’s!”

  “Anybody with your DNA! You were sleeping with the goddamn victim!”

  Green’s hands went slack and the FBI paternity report fluttered to the ground. Jack turned to McGee. “Detective, take his gun,” he instructed.

  McGee nodded, stood up, and walked over to Green. Green looked up at him in shock but didn’t move.

  “Brad, I need your weapon,” McGee said apologetically.

  Green still didn’t react. McGee unbuttoned his suit jacket and deliberately put his hand on the gun holstered at his side.

  Green stood up suddenly and put his hand on his gun. He rested his palm on the grip as he looked at the three other people in the room. Anna recalled that Green had been a college football player. Now he looked like he wanted to tackle—or shoot—McGee. Anna heard the soft click as McGee unsnapped his holster. The two policemen stared at each other, their hands poised on their revolvers. Anna half expected McGee to say, “Go ahead, make my day.”

  Green pulled his gun out slowly and handed it, muzzle down, to McGee. McGee nodded, ejected the magazine, and made sure there was no round in the chamber. Then he tucked it into the back of his pants. Anna exhaled, and Jack started pacing the small room.

  “Let’s take a minute to decide what to do now.” Jack was talking more to himself than to anyone else. Anna heard the exhaustion that saturated his voice. She understood the effort it took to gear up for this trial: the lunches of Clif Bars eaten at his desk, the late nights working after he’d put Olivia to bed, the single-minded focus that allowed him to push through his own sleep deprivation. This morning, he’d been running on the energy of finally presenting this case to a jury. The paternity test results sliced through that energy to the core of his fatigue. He looked at his watch and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I need to disclose this to the judge and Wagner. I obviously can’t use Green as a witness anymore.”

  “Wait,” Anna spoke up for the first time. She understood that Jack’s mind was still on the trial, going down the path he’d been treading for almost a year. But there was one more thing she needed to know. “Officer Green, when was the last time you spoke to Laprea?”

  “Ever?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at his feet and answered in a whisper. “On the night she was killed.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me!” Jack balled his hands into fists and he strode over to the officer. “We’ve been investigating this case for months! We did a time line of every minute of the night she was killed. You sat there and didn’t say a thing!”

  Green backed up to the wall as Jack yelled in his face. They were inches apart.

  “I couldn’t tell you—I’d get fired. I’m sorry, Jack, but I didn’t think it mattered. You put the case together great without my information.”

  “You coward! That’s obstruction of justice!”

  “Jack, please.” Anna put her hand on Jack’s arm. He looked at her hand, then at his own balled fists. He nodded, unclenched his hands, and retreated to the other corner of the room. Anna turned to Green and gestured for him to have a seat. He sank into a chair and put his head in his palm. Anna sat next to him.

  “Officer Green,” she said softly. “Tell us what happened. I think you’d better tell us everything.”

  He took a deep breath and exhaled deeply, a sigh that almost sounded like relief.

  “It wasn’t as bad as it looks now. I was just trying to help her. After that Valentine’s Day assault, I’d check in on her and the family, I’d sometimes go have lunch where she works and talk to her. Davis was in jail pending trial, and she appreciated somebody coming by, you know?

  “One night she was leaving work about the same time I was heading home. So I o
ffered to give her a ride. One thing just led to another.”

  He looked both ashamed and a bit proud of his conquest.

  “How long did your relationship last?” Anna asked.

  “We only got together a few times. It never got serious. I mean, we talked about where it was going, but I wasn’t really ready for anything big. I guess we had that talk a week or so before the first trial.” He wrinkled his nose. “I hope that didn’t affect her testimony.”

  Of course that affected her testimony, Anna thought. But she contained her anger and concentrated on obtaining the information she needed.

  “Did you hear from her after that trial?”

  “No, I think she was back with Davis then. The next time I heard from her was the night she died.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was on duty, doing routine patrol, and she called my cell phone. From a pay phone. She was hysterical. Said D’marco hit her again, said she was ready to prosecute him ‘to the full extent of the law’ this time, and could I come over and arrest him. I told her: sorry. You know, because of her testimony last time. Lying and all. I told her it’d be hard to ever bring a case against him again based just on her word. No one would believe her. I wasn’t going out there to arrest him for a case that was just going to tank when she got back together with him again. I told her if she wanted to get him arrested, to call 911. Let them sort it out.”

  “Mm-hm,” Anna murmured for him to go on.

  “She called again about an hour later. I wouldn’t have answered if I’d known it was her, but it came up from a number I didn’t recognize. I guess it was Davis’s house. She was hysterical again. Still ranting about wanting me to come over and make an arrest. I wasn’t really listening this time. I told her there was a hot chase going on—all available units were on the lookout for two armed men who’d just held up the Circle B. I was driving through an alley, working the spotlight, trying to see if there was anyone hiding behind the Dumpsters. I just told her again I wasn’t arresting D’marco Davis. And she said something like ‘No, you’re not listening to me.’ She was right, I wasn’t listening.