by Adam Mitzner
As the car begins to pull away from the shouting reporters, Stuart says, “I think that went okay.”
From the look in his eye, it’s clear to me that he doesn’t understand what’s actually occurring in the courtroom. Perhaps that’s because he hasn’t heard the testimony firsthand, but I actually think it’s because Stuart can’t shake his fantasy that we’re destined to live happily ever after.
“Stuart, you need to prepare yourself for the fact that I’m going to be found guilty. You’re going to be the one who has to explain it to Jacob. The minute after the jury’s verdict, they’re going to revoke my bail and take me away in handcuffs.”
I’m trying to scare him straight. But I can tell that my words don’t have the slightest effect.
“I know you’re worried. But I know—not just think, but know, and know from the bottom of my heart—that it’s going to be okay. The people on the jury, they understand how much we love each other, and that we have a little boy who depends on us . . . on both of us. They know that nothing they do is going to bring Lauren back to life, but if they convict you, they destroy three other lives.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” I say, even though I have little hope that God is going to listen to Stuart’s plea.
When we arrive home, Livie tells us that Jacob has already eaten and taken a bath. “He’s in his bedroom. He’ll be excited you’re both home.”
Livie’s comment about dinner reminds me that I’ll need to figure out my own meal tonight. Since the trial has begun, I’ve survived on whatever takeout LeMarcus had served me.
I look over at Stuart. As if he can read my mind, he says, “I’ll either whip something up for dinner or order in. You should go see Jacob.”
I don’t have to be asked twice. I literally run up the stairs to my son’s bedroom.
Jacob is wearing a Batman costume as his pajamas. It’s complete with a cape, but thankfully not the cowl.
“How’s my best little man today?”
“Good.”
“How was school?”
“Good.”
“Anything you want to tell me?”
“No. Anything you want to tell me?”
“That I love you.”
“Oh. I thought you meant about school. I love you too, Mommy.” He scrunches up his little face. “Mommy, do you know why Batman became Batman?”
I do, of course. I suspect that my son’s posing this question tonight is not coincidental. I wonder what has brought this to the fore.
“No, why?”
“When he was a little boy, his mommy and daddy were killed. And he decided that he would become a superhero so that he could save other kids’ parents.”
I’m doing my best to hold back tears. The last thing I want is for Jacob to see me cry. He must already know, or at the very least sense, that he’s in danger of losing me. I could ask him directly what’s brought all this on, but like waking a sleepwalker, I fear that may give rise to consequences I’m not prepared to accept.
“It’s wonderful that, when something so sad happened to him, he was able to dedicate himself to helping other people.”
“Yeah,” Jacob confirms. “I think if something ever happened to you or Daddy, that’s what I’d do too.”
I want with all my heart to tell him that he’s not going to have to be a superhero. That nothing is going to happen to me.
But of course I can’t say that. For all I know, I’ll be out of his life forever by this time next week.
55.
ELLA BRODEN
I’m exhausted at the end of the day. A week of trial is as grueling as any physical endeavor I’ve ever undertaken. Hiking up Half Dome in Yosemite or running a marathon are cake by comparison.
“Do you want to go out to dinner?” Gabriel asks once we’re in a cab on the way back to my apartment.
“No. Bad optics if we’re photographed in the middle of the trial. Let’s order something in and open a bottle of wine.”
Once we arrive at my place, I go straight to the wine rack. Gabriel heads to the computer to place our dinner order. Forty minutes later, the Chianti I opened is half-gone, and the food from UpThai has just arrived.
“I can’t get Stuart Goodwin’s testimony out of my head,” I say as we begin eating.
Gabriel is still sequestered from hearing witness testimony. As a result, he relies on my evening summaries to assess how the trial is progressing. In the cab on the way home, I told him that Stuart provided the expected alibi for his wife. I didn’t yet, however, share with him my darker thoughts about his testimony.
“What about it?” he asks.
“I’m not sure if it’s about his testimony as much as about him, to be honest. But something doesn’t sit right with me. He went on and on about how much he loves Dana, even after he learned of the affair. It came off . . . I don’t know, kind of obsessive.”
“Maybe he was just compensating too much for the jury.”
“I thought about that too. But I’ve seen men like him on the witness stand. It’s just a hunch, but he wasn’t putting us on. He really feels that way about her. The kind of love that he thinks is all-consuming, but it’s really suffocating. And it made me start to think. What would he do if he did see the text messages that his beloved Dana had been sending to her boss?”
“What are you saying?”
“That maybe we’re prosecuting the wrong Goodwin.”
Gabriel looks at me as if the thought’s not been too far from his mind either. I wonder if he had suspicions about Stuart Goodwin before today. I know he’s on record as doubting Dana’s guilt, but he hasn’t said a word to suggest I might be prosecuting an innocent person since the day of her arrest. That’s more likely because he wants to be supportive rather than due to any change of heart, however.
“We never gave him a serious look,” Gabriel says. “As soon as we learned of the affair, we made the arrest.”
That made perfect sense. The last thing the cops want to do is send the message that they may not have gotten the right person. Actually, that’s the second-to-last thing they want. Even worse is finding evidence to point to someone else without conclusively making the case.
“A lot of the case fits against him too,” I say. “If he knew about the affair, he has motive. If he thought his wife was going to leave him for Lauren, maybe he decided to eliminate that option. And Stuart testified that she didn’t passcode-protect her phone. I have a hard time believing that he never took the opportunity to see what was causing his wife to work all those late hours.”
Gabriel nods in agreement. “So where does that leave it, then?”
It has never been my job to prove someone other than Dana Goodwin killed Lauren Wright. Which is why I know many prosecutors who would have let the conversation end there, secure with the thought that convicting the person on trial was the only task at hand. But I’ve never been that kind of prosecutor. There are things more important than winning. We need to be right.
I smile at Gabriel to let him know that I haven’t gone totally over to the dark side. He smiles back, telling me that my message has been received and he concurs.
“I’m sure the husband has never been arrested,” Gabriel says. “So we’re not going to have his fingerprints in the system or his DNA on file. Which leaves us with surveillance footage.”
He’s saying that even if Stuart left evidence linking him to the crime scene, we wouldn’t be able to prove it because his fingerprints and DNA aren’t in the database. Normally you’d get a court order to compel him to give samples, but doing that now would destroy the case against Dana, so that’s a nonstarter. Which leaves our only other option: hoping that he turns up on surveillance footage so we can put him at the scene of the crime.
Gabriel and his team reviewed thousands of frames of video to see if Dana had made the trip from Astoria to Central Park the night of the murder. Footage from the bank and the bodega around the corner from their home, hoping to catch her walking to wha
tever mode of transportation she might have taken; from the N-train and Lexington-line subway platforms, in case she had decided to come to Manhattan via public transportation; from the cameras at the tollbooths at the bridges and tunnels, in case she traveled by taxi. Her image never appeared. And they knew she hadn’t driven the family car into the city because they’d run the license plates, which hadn’t shown up at any of the Manhattan entry points that night.
It took more than a hundred man-hours to comb through the various tapes the first time through. Back then, Gabriel had the manpower to put five uniforms on it. There’s no way anyone is going to authorize overtime again. Not to pursue what’s little more than the fact that Stuart Goodwin gave me the heebie-jeebies.
“I’ll help,” I say. “And we should also track Stuart’s phone.”
Gabriel nods at my suggestion. Richard Trofino’s cell phone was on at the time of the murder, and the pings indicated it was in the general vicinity of the duck pond. That wasn’t much evidence, because his phone would have pinged the same way if it was sitting on his night table, given the proximity of their apartment to the same cell tower. But if Stuart’s phone pinged in the vicinity, we could show he was there on the night of the murder.
Of course, it’s a safe bet that Stuart knows this too. If he was smart enough to turn off Dana’s cell phone, I’m certain he knew enough to turn off his own phone. Or he would have left it on in Astoria so that it looked like he stayed at home.
That’s when another thought hits me. “Dana’s phone must have been turned off at the office, right? Otherwise, it would have pinged after six and shown us where she went after work. But it didn’t. How could Stuart have done that? There’s no evidence he was anywhere near Dana’s office on the day of the murder.”
Gabriel smiles at my concern, as if to tell me that this is not something to worry about. “When I was a kid, I was into model making,” he says, a seeming non sequitur, but one which I’m sure will reveal its purpose soon. “I don’t think anyone does that anymore, but I could spend hours. I was really good at following directions and piecing things together. Shocker that I became a detective, right? But my point is that, when I finished, I’d always have some leftover pieces. My model would look exactly like the picture on the box, and the directions didn’t say that there were extra pieces, in case you lost one or something, but there they would be, just sitting there, mocking me. Once, I even took a model back apart. I literally broke it after I’d finished it, because it was glued together. But I just had to know if I’d missed something. I hadn’t; there were just some pieces that didn’t fit. They weren’t even duplicates. They were . . . extras. Maybe pieces from a different model even, that had somehow found their way into my box.”
“And that’s relevant to the murder why?” I say.
“Sometimes all the evidence doesn’t fit either, Ella. Maybe Dana’s phone lost its charge. That’s not something Dana would remember, right? She’d just take her phone home and plug it in. But when she got home, maybe Stuart took it off her nightstand and made sure it was turned off. In that case, the evidence fits without Stuart needing to be some criminal mastermind thinking through every angle. He’s just a guy who got lucky. Or more likely, he saw the opportunity and took advantage of it.”
56.
DANA GOODWIN
“My guess is that it’s to explore a plea,” LeMarcus says from the back of a cab on our way downtown to meet Ella Broden.
It’s at least the third time he’s expressed this view since Ella called about a half hour ago and requested that we meet with her right away. I don’t know why Ella suggested this meeting, but I’m reasonably sure it’s not to offer me a plea. The case is going too well for her to cut me a break now. Something else must be going on.
“Yeah, maybe,” I say.
There’s no reason to rack my brain with possibilities, however. I’ll find out within the hour why she’s asked us to come see her on a Sunday morning.
It’s odd returning to the DA’s office. I knew it would be, of course, but I’m surprised at the power of the emotions that confront me. I feel shame in reentering the only office in which I’ve ever worked. Shame and heartache.
On the weekend, a skeletal security force works downstairs. Still, I know them all. Coming in on a Sunday was more the rule than the exception during my career. But none of them makes eye contact with me.
I’m surprised when Leon, who is manning security today, tells us to go to the sixth floor. I had assumed that Ella took either my office—previously her office—or Lauren’s, both of which are on the seventh floor.
“You okay?” LeMarcus asks as we take the elevator up.
“Just great,” I tell him.
Ella is waiting in the corridor as the doors open. You have to do that to escort your visitors past the first set of locked doors.
The ground rules we established are that everything said today is off the record. Nonetheless, LeMarcus told me that I’m not to say anything unless he gives the okay.
We follow Ella down the hallway, not passing another person. The office lights are all off. It’s so quiet that I assume we’re the only people on the floor.
The room Ella directs us into has a temporary feel to it. There’s nothing on the walls, no photographs or mementos on the desk. In fact, it looks almost vacant. Whenever I was preparing for trial, my office resembled a crime scene, like it had been ransacked to the nth degree.
Gabriel Velasquez is sitting on a sofa. Beside him is the young woman who is second-seating Ella at trial. I still have never heard her voice. The notepad in her lap tells me that she won’t say anything today either. Her purpose is to transcribe what I say, which gives the lie to the idea that anything in a murder trial can ever truly be off the record.
There’s a small, round conference table in the corner of the office. Nothing is on it. I imagine that this is the first time Ella has ever used it. She motions for us to assemble the adjacent chairs. She hasn’t offered us water or coffee—a sign that she expects this to be a short visit.
Gabriel joins us at the table, but the other woman stays put on the sofa. There are only chairs enough for the four of us.
“Let me get right to why I wanted to meet,” Ella says, speaking directly to LeMarcus as if I’m not even there. “We have reason to suspect that Dana’s husband was involved in Lauren Wright’s murder. We’re not certain whether he acted alone or in concert with his wife, but we’re willing to give Ms. Goodwin the opportunity to explain the situation to us.”
“What evidence do you have?” LeMarcus asks.
“I’m not going to share that. But this is an opportunity for your client to tell us what she knows.”
In a conspiracy, every member is equally liable. So long as there’s an agreement beforehand, coupled with a single act in furtherance of that conspiracy, even if that act itself is perfectly legal, everyone involved is equally culpable. Getaway driver, shooter, even someone who just makes a phone call—or sends a text—luring the victim to the location of the crime, are all, in the eyes of the law, guilty to the same degree. The reason for this, among other things, is that it relieves the prosecution from having to prove each member’s particular role, which would be next to impossible. All that is required is to show that each participant acted with intent to engage in the conspiracy and committed just one overt act in furtherance thereof, even if that act is perfectly legal.
“Can we have a moment?” LeMarcus asks.
“Of course,” Ella says. “We’ll give you the room.”
“That’s okay. You can stay put. We’ll confer in the hallway.”
LeMarcus rises and motions for me to follow him. When we’re in the corridor alone, my lawyer peers down at me. The consternation in his face makes me feel a bit like a child about to be on the receiving end of a parental lecture.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
It’s odd that LeMarcus, who would normally be skeptical if a prosecutor told him that the sun was
going to rise tomorrow, has accepted without question Ella Broden’s theory that my husband murdered Lauren Wright. Stranger still that he’s leaped to the conclusion that I’ve long known the truth.
However, in this instance, LeMarcus is right. On both counts. So his question is an apt one.
I could remind him that his very first instruction to me was not to share with him anything he hadn’t expressly asked me, and he never asked me if I knew who killed Lauren. That wasn’t the real reason, of course. Not even close. “It’s complicated,” I say.
“It seems pretty damned simple to me. One of you is going to jail for the rest of your life. Do you want it to be him, or you?”
How many times did I attempt to scare witnesses in exactly this way? A hundred? Five hundred? Probably even more. I’d tell them that if they didn’t cooperate with law enforcement, they were going to go to jail for a very long time, but they held the key to their own freedom, if only they would tell the truth. When that didn’t work, I emphasized that if their own well-being mattered so little to them, they should at least consider the welfare of their children.
LeMarcus’s expression makes clear that he’ll tolerate his client lying to his face, but not throwing her life away. It’s almost as if he takes personally my refusal to turn on Stuart. I remember feeling that way with witnesses too.
“I can suggest that you wear a wire,” he says. “All you need to do is tell Stuart about their theory and see what he says.” He must see reluctance in my eyes, because then he adds, “Dana, if you don’t help them, they can’t help you. You know that. And it’s my professional opinion that you’re going to be convicted. Your only way out is to help them to prove that Stuart is guilty.”