The Kill Clause tr-1

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “Yes,” Robert said.

  Tim felt a familiar pull-instinctive resistance in the face of Robert’s unequivocality.

  “We know it. Anyone who studies the record knows it. That’s good enough for me,” Mitchell said. “And those who don’t get it now will after the next execution. We’ll soon establish a pattern. We don’t need to turn over potentially damning evidence.”

  “You’re going to be in high demand, I’m sure, for talking-head appearances,” Dumone said to Rayner. “And, if you’d like, you can always steer conversation in the appropriate direction. Keep dialogue on track-without giving anything up. But we’re not exposing ourselves at this stage. We can revisit the issue later.”

  Ananberg leaned back in her chair, thin arms woven across her chest in an inadvertently prudish show of frustration. Rayner tilted his head, his expression one of concession.

  Rayner’s financial supremacy and facility with armchair social theory ostensibly put him in the driver’s seat, but it was ever clearer that Dumone was the on-the-ground chief. When Rayner talked, the others listened; when Dumone spoke, they shut up.

  “Can we get to voting?” Robert asked. “I didn’t exactly come down here to talk about missives and Oprah Fuckin’ Win-”

  Dumone fanned a flat hand, a gesture that was at once soothing and firm, and Robert cut off midsentence. Robert offered his brother a face-saving smirk as Rayner opened the safe and removed another binder from the stack. It hit the table with a slap.

  “Mick Dobbins.”

  “Mickey the Molester?” Robert said. He shot Ananberg a look. “Listen, sugarbritches, Mickey the Alleged Molester just don’t have the same ring.”

  Dumone held the binder before him in one hand like a psalm book, letting it fall open. “Groundskeeper at Venice Care for Kids. Indicted on eight counts of lewd acts with a child, one count of murder one. Before the incidents, he was beloved by kids and staff.” He passed the detective progress reports to Tim. “IQ seventy-six.”

  “Does that preclude capital punishment right off the bat?” Tim asked.

  Ananberg shook her head. “Two independent psychiatric evaluations failed to classify him as mentally retarded. I guess it doesn’t just come down to IQ, it has to do with level of functioning and other stuff.”

  The remainder of the papers were segmented and passed around the table.

  “Seven girls, ages four to five, claimed they were molested by him,” Dumone said.

  “How?” Tim asked.

  “Genital and anal touching. Some digital insertion. One girl claimed to have been sodomized with a pen.”

  “Intercourse?”

  “No.” Dumone shuffled through the pages, glancing at the lab results.

  “How’s this a capital case?” Ananberg asked.

  “Peggie Knoll was admitted to the hospital with high fever, shaking chills. Evidently it was a bladder infection-by the time they caught it, it had turned into a kidney infection. She died of”-he flipped open the hospital report-“overwhelming urosepsis.”

  “Did they do a rape kit?”

  “No. Knoll never claimed to have been molested. It wasn’t until after her death that the seven girls came forth, said they and Knoll were molested, put Knoll’s molest a few days prior to her hospitalization. The DA backtracked-paraded out a few expert witnesses who said if a molest-especially anal-vaginal-occurred in that time frame, it was a proximate cause of the bladder infection.”

  “How did Dobbins get off?” the Stork asked. He blushed deeply, hiding his face by sliding his glasses farther up his nose. “The trial, I mean.”

  “The jury found him guilty, but the judge was underwhelmed with the merits and threw the case out for insufficiency of evidence.”

  “They’re overturning juries now,” Robert said with disgust.

  “There was a decided lack of physical evidence,” Dumone said. “Nothing in Knoll’s medical records. The search of Dobbins’s apartment turned up nothing. The case detective noted a stack of pornography in a bathroom cabinet. Several issues of the magazine Barely Legal.”

  “I know it well,” Ananberg said. Six sets of eyes fastened on her. Mitchell looked distinctly annoyed; Tim alone wore a half smile.

  “Pornography don’t mean shit,” Robert said. “What else? What about the medical reports on the other girls?”

  The Stork raised his hand, his eyes, shiny through his glasses, focused on the sheet in front of him. “Medical examinations were inconclusive. No tearing, no scarring, no bruising, no bleeding, no trauma associated with penetration.”

  “But penetration was just digital,” Mitchell said. “That would cause less trauma.”

  “On a five-year-old girl, something would still be detectable,” Ananberg said.

  “How long after the alleged molestation were the girls examined?” Tim asked.

  The Stork flipped a sheet over. “Two weeks.”

  “Plenty of healing time.”

  “Especially if there were just superficial tears or light bruising,” Mitchell added.

  “No DNA, no nothing?” Ananberg asked. “Anywhere?”

  Rayner shook his head. “No.”

  “So the whole case hung on the girls’ testimony? Do you have the interrogation tapes?”

  Rayner pulled two tapes from his briefcase. “I got hold of them a few weeks ago.” He crossed the room and slid the first one into a VCR hidden in a dark wood cabinet. “The supervising DA and I were in Ivy together.” Off the others’ puzzled expressions, he added, “My eating club at Princeton.”

  The tape quality was poor; the recording jerked a bit, and the lighting washed out the interview room to whites and yellows. A young girl sat on a plastic chair, her heels resting at the seat’s edge, her knees drawn up to her chin.

  The interviewer-presumably a Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect social worker-sat on a low footstool, facing the girl. “…and so he touched you?”

  The girl hugged her legs, clasping her hands midway up her shins. “Yes.”

  “Okay, you’re doing a good job, Lisa. Did he touch you somewhere you didn’t want him to?”

  “No.”

  A frown appeared on the social worker’s face, a barely noticeable furrowing between her eyebrows. Her voice was soft and reassuring. “Are you sure you’re not scared to answer, sweetheart?”

  Lisa rested her chin on her knees. Her head bounced a few times before Tim realized she was chewing gum. “Not scared.”

  “Okay. Then I’ll ask you again…” Calm, drawn-out sentences. “Did he touch you somewhere on your lower body?”

  A tiny voice, almost inaudible. “Yes…”

  The social worker’s face softened with empathy. “Where? Can you show me on these dolls?” Two puppets appeared almost instantly from the social worker’s bag, complete with shiny polyester genitalia.

  Lisa studied them tentatively before reaching out to take them. She made the male puppet hold hands with the little girl puppet, then looked up at the social worker.

  “Okay…then what?”

  Lisa arranged the puppets in an embrace.

  “Okay…and after that?”

  Lisa chewed her gum thoughtfully for a moment, then put the male puppet’s hand on the little girl’s chest.

  “Very good, Lisa. Very good. And that’s how Peggie told you she was touched also?”

  Lisa nodded solemnly.

  Rayner looked troubled. He exchanged a glance with Ananberg, who shook her head, unimpressed. “Let’s watch the rest of the interviews first,” he said.

  Occasionally fast-forwarding, they made their way through the following six interviews, each of which featured similar questioning techniques by the same social worker.

  When the last girl finished tearfully recounting her molestation, Rayner stopped the tape. “It was a damn witch-hunt. No wonder the judge threw out the verdict.”

  “What are you talking about?” Robert said. “Every one of those girls said they were molested. They even acted it ou
t on the dolls.”

  “The social worker asked leading questions, Rob,” Dumone said. “It’s fine for us, trying to pull a confession, but kids are more impressionable. They parrot.”

  “How were the questions leading?”

  “For starters, there weren’t any general questions,” Ananberg said. “Like ‘What happened?’ The social worker was prompting, implanting all the information through closed, suggestive questions. So ‘Did he touch you below the belt?’ turns into ‘Where did he touch you below the belt?’ And she was conditioning the girls, rewarding them for the answers she wanted to hear-smiling, saying ‘Good,’ telling them it’s okay.”

  “And frowning when she didn’t like what she heard,” Rayner added. “If a girl gave the ‘wrong’ answer, she was subjected to repeated questioning-and the interviewer’s tacit disapproval-until she made something up.”

  Tim glanced through the files at the badly photocopied detective notes. “The girls were in the same circles. Parents knew each other. After the first accusation, there were meetings between the families, conferences at school. Cross-pollination. These recorded interviews happened later. The witnesses weren’t exactly working from a clean slate.”

  “And who knows how many other opportunities there were to have memories implanted and reinforced?” Ananberg added. “Other kids, media…” She spun her hand in a double loop, a gestured et cetera.

  “What about the dolls?” Mitchell said.

  “Same criticisms apply,” Rayner said. “On top of which, anatomically correct dolls are not recommended to be used with very young children.”

  “Only with the elderly,” Ananberg said.

  Robert fixed her with a piercing stare. “This isn’t a fucking joke.” He gestured to his brother. “Not to us.”

  “I don’t think she meant anything,” Dumone said.

  “No, he’s right.” Ananberg ran her hand through her dark brown hair. “I’m sorry. Just trying to defuse the tension in here. It’s a, uh, tough topic.”

  “If you can’t handle tough topics, maybe you’re in the wrong place.”

  “Robert. She apologized,” Tim said. “Let’s keep moving.”

  Ananberg returned to her usual briskly professional tone. “According to the Ceci and Bruck study published in 1995, questioning young children with anatomically correct dolls is less than reliable.”

  Mitchell glanced up from the court file. “Who cares about the dolls? According to this, the guy confessed.”

  “The confession was persuasively called into question by the defense,” Rayner said. He strode over to the VCR and switched tapes.

  The cold light of a police interrogation room. The camera caught some glare from the backside of a one-way mirror. Mick Dobbins sat hunched in a metal folding chair while two detectives worked him. Despite his solid frame and broad shoulders, his orientation was distinctly youthful. His arms hung loose and heavy between his spread knees, and his left sneaker was untied, his foot turned on its side. One of his overalls straps had come undone; it swayed at his side like a yoyo waiting to be snapped up.

  The detectives had the lights going hot, one of them always staying just out of Dobbins’s view, to his side, behind his back. Dobbins kept his head hung but tried to follow the detectives with his eyes, which peered nervously through the sweat-matted tangle of his bangs. His low-set ears protruded from his oddly rectangular head like opposing coffee-mug handles.

  “So you like girls?” the detective asked.

  “Yeah. Girls. Girls ’n’ boys.” When Dobbins spoke, his mild retardation was immediately apparent in his low register and plodding cadence.

  “You like girls a lot, don’t you? Don’t you?” The detective raised a foot, placed it squarely on the small patch of metal chair exposed between Dobbins’s legs. Dobbins lowered his head more, tucking his chin into the hollow of his shoulder. The detective leaned forward, his face inches from the top of Dobbins’s head. “I asked you a question. Tell me about them, tell me about the girls. You like them? You like girls?”

  “Y-y-yeah. I like girls.”

  “Do you like touching them?”

  Dobbins wiped his nose with the back of his hand, a rough, frustrated gesture. He muttered to himself. “Chocolate, vanilla, rocky road-”

  The detective snapped his fingers inches from Dobbins’s face. “Do you like touching them?”

  “I hug girls. Girls and boys.”

  “Do you like touching girls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah what?”

  “I like touching girls. I…”

  “You what?”

  Dobbins jerked at the sharpness of the detective’s tone. He squeezed his eyes shut. “Strawberry, mocha almond fu-”

  “You what, Mick? You what?”

  “I, uh, uh, I sometimes pet them when they’re upset.”

  “You pet them, and they get upset?”

  Dobbins scratched his head above one ear, then smelled his fingers. “Yeah.”

  “That what happened with Peggie Knoll? Is it?”

  Dobbins cowered from the voice. “I think so. Yeah.”

  After double-checking the file, Rayner paused the video. “That’s really the essential segment.”

  “That’s no confession,” Tim said.

  “Pretty weak,” Mitchell agreed. “I’ll grant you it wasn’t a confession, but I don’t think we need a confession here. I think the other evidence holds.”

  “What other evidence?” Ananberg asked. “Seven impressionable children regurgitating implanted memories? A girl who died of an infection that was never conclusively linked to a molestation that was never proven to have occurred?”

  “So let me get this straight,” Robert said. “We have seven little girls who testify individually that they’ve been molested by a retard groundskeeper, we have each of them acting out with puppets the sick shit the freak perpetrated on them, we have them each saying he molested their friend who’s now dead from a resulting infection, we have him on tape saying he likes to pet and hug little girls, and you don’t think this is an open-and-shut?”

  Tim pictured Harrison outside Kindell’s, arms crossed. It’s an open-and-shut.

  “No,” Tim said. “I don’t.”

  Robert directed his scowl down the table. “Stork?”

  The Stork’s rounded shoulders rose and fell. “I don’t really care.”

  “If you’re gonna sit in this room,” Tim said, “you’d better care.”

  “Fine,” the Stork said. “I think he probably did it.”

  “Franklin?” Rayner asked.

  Dumone shrugged. “We’re thin on physical evidence, especially with no indication of vaginal or rectal damage on any of the girls and nothing concrete linking the bladder infection and the molest.”

  “Dobbins has got no criminal history,” Ananberg said. “No felonies, no misdemeanors.”

  “That don’t mean shit,” Robert said. “A puke can start anytime.”

  “It just means he’s never been caught for anything before.” Mitchell exhaled hard through his nose, irritated. “Sounds like you’ve made up your minds already. Why don’t we take a nonbinding preliminary vote to see if we’re just wasting our time in continuing our assessment here?”

  Ananberg looked to Rayner with an arched eyebrow, and he nodded.

  The vote went down four to three, not guilty.

  The Stork looked typically indifferent, but Robert and Mitchell were having difficulty keeping their frustration out of their faces.

  “We’re here to pick up the slack when the courts screw up,” Mitchell said. “When we fail to act, there’s no other recourse.”

  “Acting is not always the right decision,” Tim said.

  Robert’s eyes remained locked on the photograph of his deceased sister. “Tell that to the seven little girls who were molested and the dead girl’s parents.”

  “The seven little girls who said they were molested,” Ananberg said.

  “Listen, bi
tch-”

  Dumone rocked forward in his chair. “Rob-”

  “You might think you have the answers in here, with your studies and your Freudian bullshit, but you haven’t so much as set high heel on the real streets, so don’t you fucking tell me you know shit about who’s done what.”

  “Robert!”

  “Until you spend some time with these pieces of shit, you don’t know how they tick.” Robert jerked his head toward the TV. “That fucker just smells guilty.”

  Dumone was standing now in a half crouch above his chair, hands on the table, arms elbow-locked, bearing his weight. “Believe it or not, your sense of smell isn’t the criterion for our voting. You can argue the merits, argue the cases, or you can hop a Greyhound back to Detroit and stop wasting our time.”

  The room froze-Rayner’s glass halfway to his mouth, Ananberg midturn in her chair.

  Dumone’s eyes burned with an uncharacteristic fury. “Do you understand me?”

  Mitchell’s face was drawn. “Listen, Franklin, I don’t think-”

  Dumone’s hand shot up, a crossing guard’s signal aimed in Mitchell’s direction, and Mitchell stopped cold.

  Robert’s expression softened, his head ducking slightly under the heat of Dumone’s glare. “Shit, I didn’t mean it.”

  “Well, don’t pull that crap in here. Do you understand me? Do you understand me?”

  “Yes.” Robert raised his head but could barely meet Dumone’s eyes. “Like I said, it was nothing. I was just pissed off.”

  “‘Pissed off’ has no place in our proceedings. Apologize to Ms. Ananberg.”

  “Look,” Ananberg said, “I don’t think that’s really necessary.”

  “I do.” Dumone kept his glare leveled at Robert.

  Robert finally turned to face Ananberg. The emotion had burned itself out of his face, leaving behind an eerie calm. “I apologize.”

  She laughed nervously, a single note. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Silence descended over the table.

  “Why don’t we take a little break before we tackle the next case?” Rayner said.

  Tim stood on the half circle of Rayner’s back patio, gazing out at the elaborate back gardens. A few motion-sensor lights had kicked on when he’d stepped from the house, shining golden cylinders into the night and illuminating flurries of winged insects.