by Louise Ure
I knew what she meant. I’d lived with the same feeling since June. “You aren’t afraid of using power. Just abusing it by accusing the wrong man.”
Some days I wanted to punish Cates or Blanken or this highway patrolman for anything they’d done—an inappropriate remark, a smirk, slamming a door, littering. They were my effigy for all the evil in the world, and they could do the penance whether guilty of the sin or not. I was taking out all my pent-up vengeance on them.
“I know this is difficult,” I said, “but I don’t understand about the identification. You spent almost two hours with him that night, first in the car, then in the desert, but you’re not sure what he looked like. Do you suppose that you’ve blanked it out? You know, like a protective mechanism when things get too scary?” The waitress brought the food, but Miranda ignored it.
“That cowboy hat covered a lot of his face. And as for ‘blanking it out,’ I asked Giordano the same thing,” she said. “We even talked about hypnosis. But he said that my testimony might not hold up in court now that I couldn’t identify anyone in the first lineup. And nobody really trusts a witness ID after hypnosis.” She bowed her head in resignation. “But I’m going to sit in that courtroom every day. I’m going to hear every detail. If it’s Cates, I don’t know how, but I’ll know for sure. Maybe his voice, maybe some detail. I’ll know, even if I can’t do anything about it.”
“If it’s him, we’ll get him. I promise you. And if it’s not, we’ll find out who did it. He won’t get away with it.” Although I directed my words to Miranda, I sent them on silent wings to Amy as well.
I was going to tell Jessica that I needed vacation time but didn’t want to tell her it was to attend Cates’s trial. Our role in his defense was at an end unless they wanted posttrial research, and we wouldn’t normally attend the entire trial. I couldn’t explain to her why I had to be there, but, like Miranda, I had to see it for myself. I had to decide for myself if he was really guilty of this murder. If he was, it would be another brick in the wall for me—another reason to believe he had attacked Amy as well.
“Go ahead, Calla,” Jessica said. “Take as much time as you want because you’re not coming back here. You’re fired.”
“For what?”
“I just had a visit from Detective Giordano from the Tucson PD. He says you pointed him toward Ray Cates for attacking another woman. He’s our client and still on trial!” Her voice held outrage and fear for the financial jeopardy I’d put her in.
I should have realized that Giordano would call her. In fact, I should have expected it weeks ago. He was probably checking on my story. Had I really been assigned as jury consultant in Raymond Cates’s defense? Was Jessica aware of any other association I had with Cates? Had I ever mentioned his name or his family before?
“You’ve been out of the office so much recently that I can’t count on you. And even when you’re here, your mind isn’t on work. I wouldn’t be surprised if Whitcomb, Merchant filed a lawsuit against you. Breach of confidentiality. Libel. Slander. You’ll be lucky if you keep the shirt on your back.”
She hung up before I could reply, but I don’t know what I would have said anyway. She was right. Now I could probably add legal fees to the pile of unpaid bills.
I had no job, but I certainly had somewhere to go: back to Raymond Cates’s trial.
Monday morning Judge Gutierrez had other court business to attend to, so by the time the bailiff called for order and the jury was seated, it was already ten thirty and the courtroom was packed. Reporters had been on hand early for the best seats. The Chavez family had come in from Bakersfield and taken the first row of seats behind Dee Dee Pollock. Cates senior sat behind McCullough.
Now that my association with the defense team was over, along with my job, I looked for a place in the gallery. Miranda Lang gestured me to an empty seat beside her in the back row.
Pollock tapped the stack of papers in front of her into alignment, then stood and approached the jury box. “Lydia Chavez was a beautiful young woman with a sweet baby boy and a whole, full life ahead of her. On the night of April first, this man, the defendant”—she flung an accusatory arm in Cates’s direction—“met her in a bar, bought her drinks, then took her to the desert and raped and killed her.”
She walked back to the prosecution table, lifted a glass, and took a small sip of water, then turned back to the jury.
“He put the gun inside her vagina and pulled the trigger.” A stunned silence, then nervous throat clearing. “He … put … the … gun … inside … her … and … he … pulled … the … trigger,” she said again, as if each word carried the weight of the world on its small rounded shoulders.
Her reiteration worked. No one was taking notes. They didn’t need to. That phrase was carved into their memory. She’d said it out loud, and it became real.
“How do we know this? There was no one there in that empty desert except Lydia and her killer, so no one saw him do it. That’s not unusual in a murder case. Most murderers don’t wait until there’s a crowd around. And he had the presence of mind to get rid of the gun, so there’s no comparison we can make to a specific weapon.”
Merchant bristled in his seat, trying to decide whether to object to the “presence of mind” comment, then thought better of it and folded his hands on the table.
“But he wasn’t as smart as he thought,” Pollock said. “He left behind evidence. And people noticed. And that’s what’s going to get him in the end.
“Over the course of the next few days you’ll hear evidence that three people in the bar that night saw this man”—she pointed again—“with Lydia Chavez. They’ll also tell you that they left the bar within moments of each other.” She started counting on her fingers, starting with an index finger for the witnesses she’d just mentioned.
“Then there are the tire tracks at the murder scene. You’ll hear that the tread marks are not only consistent with his tires but that the tracks are spaced exactly as far apart as the wheels on his car.” Now she had two fingers raised.
“You’ll also learn that the defendant owned a gun—an unusual gun—just like the one that killed Lydia Chavez.” Three fingers.
“And you’ll learn that similar orange-colored cat hair was found on his clothing and on the body of Lydia Chavez.” Four fingers.
Her fingers curled down, and she wrapped her thumb around them, forming a fist. “And most importantly, you’ll learn that we have proof that the defendant’s car was at the murder scene within an hour of the time Lydia Chavez lost her life. How do we know that? Because an alert sheriff’s deputy gave it a ticket for parking outside the marked visitors’ parking area at Gates Pass.”
I remembered McCullough’s comment in my first meeting with him. “That parking ticket is why they focused on Ray so quickly when the body was discovered.”
“You put all that evidence together, and it’s no longer circumstantial,” Pollock continued. “It’s not a coincidence. It’s not a mistake.” She thumped her fist on the railing around the jury box, sending three jurors backwards in their chairs in surprise. “It means he’s guilty of the sexual assault and murder of Lydia Chavez.” She glared at Cates, spun on her heel, and strode to the prosecution table, her head held high.
I nodded my congratulations. Exactly the right tone of outrage and horror, and a simple description of the evidence she wanted the jurors to follow.
Gideon Merchant, hampered by thirty pounds of excess weight, struggled to rise. He looked more grandfatherly today, a tweed jacket over gray slacks. He didn’t approach the jury box but placed his hand on Cates’s shoulder and rocked in place.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, your task here today will not be as difficult as my esteemed colleague from the county attorney’s office suggests. Your decision will be easy. You’ll decide that Raymond Cates is not guilty because he did not commit this crime.”
He unbuttoned his coat, stuck both hands in his pants pockets, and walked toward the jury b
ox.
“You will meet Hector Salsipuedes, an honorable and hardworking man, who will tell you that Raymond Cates couldn’t have killed Lydia Chavez, because he was sharing a beer with him eighty miles away near Patagonia when she was killed.
“And you will hear from Ms. Vicki Tenning, a friend of Ms. Chavez’s, who can confirm that the man Ms. Chavez was drinking with was not Raymond Cates.
“You will come to understand that all the State’s evidence—their supposed witness IDs and parking tickets and bullets and cat hair and tire treads—are all coincidences or plain and simple mistakes. Nothing more.
“We don’t pretend to know who was in the bar with Ms. Chavez that night. You’ll hear in the next few days that she left word with a friend that she was meeting a potential new boss there. Who knows? She was young and attractive. Maybe it was just a potential new boyfriend. But listen well, and when you’ve heard all the evidence, you’ll know that it wasn’t Ray Cates.”
He paced back to the defense table and put both hands on Cates’s shoulders again. “This is a terrible crime, but it was committed by someone else. The prosecution’s evidence is just coincidence, and the witnesses are mistaken. Listen carefully to what both sides have to say, and I know you’ll come back with a verdict of not guilty. Not guilty because he didn’t do it.”
If I were awarding points, I would have called it a draw after round one. But heavyweight bouts usually last longer than one round. And I didn’t know whom to bet on.
28
When court opened on Tuesday morning, I was already seated next to Miranda in the third row of the gallery. I was torn between needing to be in the courtroom—to bear witness to this—and needing to be out looking for a job. It took my breath away to realize how close I was to bankruptcy, and money worries clouded my every thought. What would that mean for Amy? Would I have to put her in a state facility?
I tried a mental exercise that had sometimes worked for me in the past. I closed my eyes and visualized coins and dollar bills tumbling farther and farther away, as if tossed by a strong wind coming from behind me. I let them drift off. Then I let the sounds of the courtroom grow louder and brighter in my ears until the money had disappeared. Gutierrez rapped his gavel twice, and I opened my eyes.
The prosecution began its case with Sheriff’s Deputy Paul Thompson, who had investigated the crime scene.
Thompson had been called to the scene at one fifty-five a.m., when two tourists out for a midnight stroll had found the bloody, mangled body of a woman hidden behind a knee-high shelf of rock at Gates Pass. He described the position of the body, faceup with naked legs spread wide, her bound arms tucked to her chest as if she was cold. After the evidence techs had gathered hair, blood, and fiber samples, they turned the body over and unearthed the bullet lodged in the wet sand beneath her.
As part of the early investigation, Thompson said, he put in calls to the Tucson PD and the sheriff’s office to follow up on any vehicles that had been seen in the area that evening, and he put a rush on the identification of tire marks left at the scene.
Merchant only had a few questions for him on redirect.
“Deputy Thompson, you were at both the crime scene and the Cates family home outside of Patagonia, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And did you wear the same clothes—slacks, shoes—in both locations?” Thompson nodded, but his mouth turned down.
“You’ll have to do more than nod, Deputy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you drove the same car?” Again a nod, then a “Yes.”
“No more questions.” Merchant was just planting a seed. He was saving his real ammunition for the testimony that more directly pointed at Cates rather than at the crime.
Pollock’s next witness was Sheriff’s Deputy Ernie Niles, who had written the parking ticket for Cates’s car that night. He told the court how he had found the black Cadillac at ten forty-five on the night of April first, more than twenty feet outside the marked parking area at Gates Pass, where cars were not allowed. He had written a ticket and was prepared to have the car towed if it was still there when he made his next pass.
“What was the license number of the car you ticketed?” Pollock asked.
“Arizona plate, 376 NVT.”
“Did you find out who owned that car?”
“Yes, it’s registered to Raymond Cates at a Patagonia address. That’s why we went looking for Mr. Cates the morning after the body was found.”
“Please put an X on this diagram, showing us the position of the car at ten forty-five.” Niles rose from the witness box and wrote an X in orange Magic Marker a hairsbreadth away from the stick figure of a body that Pollock had drawn on the chart.
“How far away from the body would you say that is, Deputy Niles?”
“About forty yards. Both the vehicle and the body were outside the parking area on the east side of the pass.”
The black-and-white diagram sprang to life in my head. Could the officer have been that close to Lydia and her killer but not seen them? Was she still alive? Did the killer have his hand plastered to her mouth to keep her from screaming? Or was she already dead while he hunkered down behind a rocky shelf or a mesquite, holding his breath until the officer turned away?
Merchant rose and approached the deputy. “I only have a couple of questions for this witness.” A couple of questions? This was the heart of the prosecution’s case. If he didn’t discredit Niles, I thought the jury would vote to convict, just like the people in our mock trial.
“Were there any other cars in the lot when you ticketed the Cadillac?”
“Yes, sir. Two sedans and a truck.”
“And did you investigate those drivers as well?”
“No, sir, they weren’t ticketed. They were parked legally.”
“Nothing more for this witness,” Merchant said with a dismissive flip of his wrist. If he wanted to make it look like the parking ticket wasn’t important, it wasn’t working. The jurors began to frown when they looked Cates’s way now.
The revenge seeker in me smiled, thinking that we now had evidence that put Cates at the scene of a crime. That’s more than I had been able to do with Amy’s attack. It was a lucky break for Cates that he no longer used vanity plates like the RAM ’EM designation on his pickup truck seven years ago. If Officer Niles had ticketed a black Escalade with a license plate as unique and memorable as RAM ’EM, the jury would be asking to take a vote right now.
At the end of the afternoon’s testimony I gave Miranda a hug, picked up my purse, and moved to the aisle. When I turned to the back of the courtroom, I caught the profile of a tall, thin highway patrolman leaving the room. His size and coloring were the same as the patrolman who had pulled me over on the way to Phoenix. What was he doing here? Nothing in this case involved the Highway Patrol. I pushed past two aisle-standers and was rewarded with “Well, of all the nerve” over my shoulder. I didn’t slow down. When I reached the courtroom door, I looked both left and right. Lydia’s mother stood with a group that must be friends or family. Three journalists laughed at a joke only they would understand. And there, entering the elevator, a tall man in a patrolman’s uniform put his sunglasses on as the door closed. I’d lost him.
Wednesday brought the testimony that Miranda and I dreaded most. My stomach was sour with coffee, and I hadn’t been able to eat anything. When I greeted Miranda at the door to the courtroom, her palms were as sweaty as mine.
The Pima County coroner was a wiry, light-skinned Hispanic man with wavy hair that was graying at the temples. He seemed completely at ease in the witness chair, and spoke concisely but with barely veiled emotion about the damage that had been done to Lydia Chavez. He described the ligatures around her wrists, the laceration on her chest, the broken jaw, and the path of the bullet as it carved new canyons of pain inside her. When he amplified his testimony with graphic full-color photographs of the victim, the jurors recoiled, trying to keep the gruesome damage at arm’s
length.
“Can you confirm that Lydia Chavez was alive when the gun was put inside her and fired?” Pollock asked.
“Yes.”
Miranda stood up to excuse herself and tripped over three pairs of feet to get to the aisle and head outside. I wanted to follow and help her, but knew I had to stay to hear every word. I leaned forward and focused all my attention on the coroner’s litany of horror.
“When do you estimate the time of death to be?”
“Ms. Chavez died between nine thirty and eleven thirty that night.”
In my mind each of the prosecutor’s questions became a new chapter in Amy’s attack as well, each reply a caption to the illustration of my sister’s damage. I saw her face in each photo. I measured her pain with each piece of evidence.
Something in this testimony pulled at me, something I was supposed to hear. What was it that caught and held at the back of my mind?
Merchant and McCullough had decided not to cross-examine the coroner, and he rose to leave the stand. While his testimony brought the rape and murder to lurid life for the jury, there was no evidence from him that tied directly to Raymond Cates. No semen, no fingerprints, so no reason to do battle when, as Merchant had suggested in his opening argument, “This is a terrible crime, but it was committed by someone else.”
Pollock introduced her ballistics expert, David Queen, who testified about the unusual caliber of the bullet used to kill Lydia Chavez. He was jowly without being fat, and his plummy English accent made him sound as if he had two more degrees than anyone else in the courtroom. Marjorie Ballast had warned us that he would be a formidable presenter. “Every word out of his mouth sounds like it ought to be carved into a building somewhere,” she had said.
Queen had a blown-up photo of a bullet on an easel next to the witness chair. “The bullet exited through the victim’s back and lodged in the sand beneath her. Since it didn’t hit any bone inside her or any rocks in the soil, it was still in one piece and we could take an accurate measurement of the caliber of cartridge used.”