“Well, don’t worry about me,” he told her. “I’ve got football practice after school, so I’ll be late getting home, too.”
She smiled across the kitchen table at him. “Gonna get off the bench more this year?”
He gave her a thumb’s up and said, “Way to boost the kid’s self-esteem, Mom.”
She laughed, and at that moment, he kind of liked her again. They didn’t have as much of the ol’ give-and-take as they used to when he was younger. He had decided she was too oblivious to get most of his humor and she probably figured he was just a smart-ass kid, but every now and then they still laughed together.
Maybe when he was older, things would be better between them.
She left for the county seat, and he headed for school shortly after that.
Rowdy and Steve were waiting for him in the parking lot. They greeted each other with colorful obscenities, the way teenage boys usually did at the sprawling school. It had been built forty years earlier, but many people in town still called it “the new high school.”
“How’s your mom think the trial’s gonna go today? “ Steve asked.
“She won’t really say,” Jack replied with a shake of his head. “She acts like she’s confident Navarre will lose, but I think she’s worried that he’ll win.”
“Things’ll really hit the fan around here if he does,” Rowdy said. “I mean, how can you break into a guy’s house and then sue him for shootin’ you?
Jack shrugged. “People have been doing that for a long time. And sometimes they win, too. I read about some cases like that on the Internet.”
“You should be a lawyer,” Rowdy suggested. “You like all that legal stuff.”
“Lawyers are weasels. That’s what Delgado says.” Jack and Delgado were still going to the firing range for target practice at least once every couple of weeks.
“How come everybody just calls him Delgado?” Steve asked.
“I dunno. I’ve never heard him say what the J. P. stands for.”
“Justice of the Peace,” Rowdy said. “Anyway, you need to be a lawyer, Jack, so you can defend me when I get arrested.”
Jack looked over at his friend. “What’re you gonna get arrested for?”
“Well, right off the top of my head, I don’t know.” Rowdy grinned. “But a screw-up like me’s bound to get in trouble sometime, right? Probably wind up in jail more than once.” He started to sing. “‘Nobody knows … the trouble I’ve seen….‘”
“That’s enough,” the vice-principal said as they went inside the building. He was standing there watching the students stream past him, and he didn’t seem any happier about it being the first day of school than they did.
As usual, the first day was busy and confusing, even for seniors. Jack had plenty on his mind.
But that didn’t stop his thoughts from straying to the county seat now and then.
He couldn’t help but wonder how the trial was going.
CHAPTER 17
Nine people sat at the defense table: Joe Gutierrez and his client, Pete McNamara; Dave Rutherford, representing the city of Home; Everett Hobson, the district attorney of Hawkes County, and one of his assistants, Janet Garcia; Rosario Encinal, from the Solicitor General’s office in Washington, representing the federal government; and three attorneys representing the manufacturer of the gun Pete McNamara had used to shoot Jorge Corona and Emilio Navarre. It made for a crowded table. In fact, the bailiffs had had to bring in a smaller table and put it at the end of the one normally used by the defense, just to have room for everybody.
Despite that, the defense team seemed outnumbered by the three people who sat at the plaintiff’s table: Navarre, his lawyer Clayton Cochrum, and one of Cochrum’s associates, a stunningly beautiful blond woman.
That was the way it seemed to Alex, anyway, as she sat on one of the benches reserved for spectators. Since she was on the witness list, she would have to leave the courtroom before the trial got underway, but she had slipped in here in hopes of catching Pete McNamara’s eye and giving him an encouraging smile. She had known him for years, even before he’d been Jack’s Little League coach.
Pete had his head down and didn’t seem to be paying much attention to anything around him. His shoulders slumped like he was already defeated. Alex wasn’t really surprised to see that. Pete had taken Inez’s death hard. The few times she had talked to him over the summer, his eyes had been so haunted that he seemed barely there.
Dave Rutherford seemed to feel her looking at the defense table, though, and turned his head to look back at her. She gave him a brief, strained smile, then stood up and came over to the railing that divided the tables from the spectators’ benches.
“You’re not supposed to be in here, Alex,” he told her in a low voice. “You need to be out in the hall with the other witnesses.”
“I know. I just wanted to see Pete. Tell him I said hello, would you?”
“Sure.” Rutherford glanced at the crowd that had filled up the benches. “There are lots of people here from Home.”
“Of course, there are. We stand by our own.”
“I hope they behave themselves. Judge Carson is pretty intolerant of disturbances. If people get loud, it could hurt our chances.”
“I’ll spread the word.”
Rutherford nodded. “Thanks, Alex.”
She stood up and gripped his hand for a second, then spoke to several people in the audience she knew, asking them to pass along Rutherford’s suggestion that everybody be quiet and polite.
One of Pete McNamara’s friends from the VFW nodded solemnly and said, “We’ll try, Chief, but it’s mighty hard keepin’ our feelin’s in when we see poor ol’ Pete sittin’ up there on the wrong side of this trial. It oughta be the other way around.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Alex told the man.
She stepped into the hall outside the courtroom. Chairs for the witnesses lined one wall. A rope line had been set up to keep the press away from them, and a couple of bailiffs stood guard on it to keep the reporters at bay. Alex was grateful for that. The last thing she wanted right now was some news vulture clamoring in her face. Judge Phillip Carson had barred camera crews from inside the courthouse, but there were still plenty of reporters clogging the corridors.
Alex took a seat. She wished she could be inside the courtroom to hear the opening statements and everything else that was going on. Waiting was hard for her, and there was no telling how long it would be before she was called to testify. It might be today, Rutherford had told her, but more than likely it would be tomorrow or the next day. It all depended on how long jury selection took and how Clayton Cochrum presented Navarre’s case. It was possible that Cochrum wouldn’t put any witnesses on the stand except his own client, but Alex and her officers might be called as hostile witnesses, Rutherford had warned her.
She looked along the line of chairs. J. P. Delgado and Clint Barrigan were here, as were the EMTs who had responded to the call from the McNamara home. Was Cochrum going to try to get their testimony on record before the defense had a chance to do so?
Alex didn’t know. All she could do was wait, and wish the events that had spawned this travesty of justice had never taken place.
Dave Rutherford surprised her during the lunch break by telling her that jury selection was complete and that opening statements would take place as soon as court was back in session.
“Then testimony will get underway, I suppose,” Rutherford said with a worried frown. “I can’t help but think that Cochrum has some sort of trick waiting for us, though.”
“You’re probably right,” Alex said. “A weasel like him is bound to have something up his sleeve.”
Just looking at the smug, self-assured lawyer made her skin crawl. Navarre was just a thug who had never had any morals and never would. Cochrum, on the other hand, somewhere along the way had sold out whatever humanity he had in exchange for money. Although no one had been able to prove it, Alex was sure Cochrum wa
s actually working for the Rey del Sol drug cartel or their enforcement arm, a gang that had originated in American prisons and now had members scattered throughout the border states and beyond. Some were illegals from Mexico, but many were native-born Hispanic Americans who had been lured into joining by easy money or misguided sentiments. Like all law enforcement personnel in this part of the country, Alex received frequent warnings about cartel activities.
About three o’clock that afternoon, Clint Barrigan, as the first officer to respond to the shooting call, was summoned into the courtroom to testify. That meant Cochrum was going the hostile witness route. That was the only course open to him, really, other than having his client testify and then resting his case.
When Clint came back out into the hall a half hour later, his rugged face was grim. He looked at Alex and gave a little shake of his head, but that was all. They had all been cautioned by Dave Rutherford about discussing the case.
Delgado was next, and then one by one, the EMTs. It looked like Cochrum was saving her for last, Alex thought. But the time was close to five o’clock now, so it appeared her testimony wouldn’t take place until the next morning. The case was already a lot farther along by now than she had realistically expected it to be.
Sure enough, a few minutes after the last of the ambulance guys emerged from the courtroom, the doors opened and the spectators and reporters began to stream out. An excited hubbub filled the corridor. When the lawyers appeared, the commotion got even worse. The attorneys for the defense drew a crowd, but Clayton Cochrum drew an even bigger one and obviously reveled in it. Alex didn’t see Navarre; she supposed Cochrum’s bimbo assistant had probably slipped him out of the courthouse some other way.
Cochrum spewed a lot of high-toned crap about being certain that justice would prevail for his client, and the reporters ate it up. Alex found a harried-looking Dave Rutherford and asked, “What’s going on in there?
Rutherford shook his head. “I don’t really know. Cochrum doesn’t seem to really care about the testimony. He just uses it as an excuse to work in some speeches about the evils of guns and what racist rednecks we all are. Somebody from our side always objects, of course, and the judge sustains the objections, but that doesn’t matter. Cochrum’s already hammered that into the heads of the jury. Carson ought to shut him down as soon as he starts up with that claptrap, but he won’t.”
“Why not?”
Rutherford grimaced. “Carson used to be a federal judge. He retired from that and ran for election as a state judge. But he got his marching orders from Washington for a long time, and you know what that means.”
Unfortunately, Alex did. Not much had come out of Washington in the past decade that most folks in this part of the country agreed with.
“Anyway, I think you’ll be first up in the morning,” Rutherford went on. “Are you ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Alex said.
But she had to wonder what was waiting for her. She had an uneasy feeling that it might be something none of them expected.
CHAPTER 18
Alex tried to put the trial and everything about the Navarre case out of her mind when she got home that evening. It was the first day of Jack’s final year in high school, and she wanted to hear all about that instead. She didn’t even want to think about what was going on in the county seat.
That was all he wanted to talk about, though. He brushed aside her questions about school and asked her about the trial. Alex told him what she could—Dave Rutherford had cautioned all the witnesses about talking too much about the trial, even with family members—and Jack seemed frustrated that she couldn’t tell him even more.
“Really, I don’t know anything else,” she assured him. “I haven’t even been inside the courtroom except for a few minutes this morning before the trial even started.”
“There’s a lot of talk at school about how mad everybody’s gonna be if Mr. McNamara loses,” Jack said.
“Everybody needs to just settle down and let the law run its course. Getting mad isn’t going to help anything.”
“Yeah, well… what if the course the law takes is the wrong one?”
Alex didn’t have an answer for that. The part of her that believed in the legal system wanted to think that whatever finding the courts reached had to be the correct and proper one.
The part of her that had watched objectively what had happened over the past ten or twelve years since the liberals had taken over Washington completely knew that wasn’t necessarily the case.
She didn’t feel any better about things when she arrived at the courthouse the next morning, but at least she didn’t have to sit around for very long, stewing and waiting. She had only been sitting in the corridor about five minutes when a bailiff opened the courtroom doors and said, “Ms. Bonner?”
“Chief Bonner,” Alex said as she stood up. She didn’t want to get pissy about it, but that was her title after all.
The bailiff didn’t seem offended. He smiled and said, “Please come in, Chief. You’ve been called to the stand.”
Alex had testified in plenty of court cases before. She knew the drill. She went to the witness stand and was sworn in, then sat down to await the questioning. Cochrum was still sitting at the plaintiff’s table, whispering to the blonde.
Judge Carson said, “Mr. Cochrum? Are you ready?” The judge was in late middle-age, a slight, gray-haired man with a heavily lined face.
Cochrum got to his feet. “Yes, sir, Your Honor,” he said as he came toward the witness stand. Alex thought the lawyer’s suit probably cost as much as she made in a month. He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses in the courtroom, of course, but other than that he looked like the same smug, smarmy weasel he did when he was preening for the cameras.
He stopped in front of Alex and said, “Good morning, Chief Bonner. How are you this morning?”
“I’ve been better,” Alex said, not bothering to keep the curt annoyance out of her voice.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Just for the record, you are the chief of police in the city of Home, Texas, is that correct?”
“Yes,” Alex said.
“And also for the record, you understand that I have called you to testify for the plaintiff as a hostile witness.”
“Yes.” She was definitely hostile, and she didn’t care who knew it.
“Now, I believe that on the night of June eighth of this year, you were at your residence when you received a call from the night dispatcher at the police department?”
“That’s right.”
“In your own words and to the best of your recollection, please tell us what was said during that call and what you did afterward.”
This was simple, straightforward testimony, and Alex went through it as quickly as she could. She expected Cochrum to try to slant things with his questions, but surprisingly, he didn’t. He was just as matter of fact as she was.
Somehow, that worried her even more. Cochrum was setting them up for something, she thought, and he wouldn’t be doing that unless he was confident that he had a pretty powerful secret weapon on his side.
“Now, this weapon you say was lying on the floor near Mr. Navarre,” Cochrum said. “Did you ever see it in his hand?”
“No, I didn’t,” Alex said. “But a subsequent test showed that his fingerprints were on it.”
“Had it been fired?”
“There was no way I could be sure of that, one way or the other.”
“But you’re an experienced police officer, Chief,” Cochrum said. “In your professional opinion, did it appear to have been fired recently? Did it smell like it had been fired?”
“The whole room still smelled like guns had been fired there,” Alex said. “I didn’t bother smelling Mr. Navarre’s gun in particular because I knew the crime scene technicians from the sheriff’s department would test it and make the determination of whether or not it had been fired.”
“And did they make those tests?”
“T
hey did.”
“What was the determination?”
Alex didn’t want to say it, but she didn’t have any choice. “The tests showed that Mr. Navarre’s weapon had not been fired on the night in question.”
Cochrum smiled. “And since that’s the only time we’re concerned with here, that proves my client could not have shot anyone that night.”
“That’s not a question, but if it was, I’d have to answer no, that doesn’t prove any such thing.”
Alex spoke quickly, so she could get it in before Cochrum had a chance to shut her up. She was rewarded by a momentary flash of anger in his eyes. So he was human enough to get mad, anyway.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It proves that your client didn’t shoot anybody that night. But the fact that his fingerprints were on the weapon prove that he could have. He had the potential to—”
“You’ve answered the question, Chief Bonner.”
“You asked me what I meant by it. I was just telling you.”
That brought some laughter from the spectators. Judge Carson glared at them, but didn’t issue a warning.
“All right, Chief, I have no further questions.” Cochrum swung around and went back to the table.
The judge looked at the defense table. Everett Hobson stood up and said, “No questions at this time, Your Honor, but the defense reserves the right to call Chief Bonner as a witness on our behalf.”
“Noted,” Judge Carson said. “You may step down, Ms. Bonner.”
She didn’t correct him on the title. She just got out of there.
It hadn’t been too bad, Alex mused as she took her seat in the hall again. The little skirmish with Cochrum hadn’t amounted to much, and she thought she had held her own against him. She didn’t really understand his strategy, but she remained convinced that he was going to pull something underhanded before the trial was over.
She had been sitting there for only a few minutes when an uproar suddenly erupted inside the courtroom. It was loud enough for Alex to hear it clearly, including the shocked cries and the banging of the judge’s gavel as he hammered for order. A minute later, the doors opened and several reporters burst out. The print reporters were clawing cell phones from their pockets to call their papers. The broadcast reporters were practically sprinting for their camera crews.
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