Act of God (13 page)

“I’m sorry,” Dana replied, horrified by the request. “I don’t do interviews.”

“Are you sure?” the reporter asked, clearly dumbfounded. “Don’t you realize you’re going to be famous? The whole country is
going to want to know everything about you. Why, you’re the new Marcia Clark.”

“No, I’m not,” came the curt response.

“Frankly, my dear, I’m giving you the chance to tell your
own story, before someone else comes along and reaps the benefits of telling it for you.”

‘“I don’t do interviews,” Dana repeated with outward calm, even as the hand holding the receiver began to shake. “Please don’t
call again.”

“Who was that on the phone?” Molly asked. “Your face is all red.”

“No one important, sweetie,” Dana declared, reclaiming her seat at the dinner table. “Just someone trying to sell me something
I didn’t want to buy.” She picked up a bowl of potatoes and spooned a big helping onto her plate as though calls from tabloid
newspapers were a regular happening in their cozy Magnolia home.

“I think you’d better assume that was just the beginning,” Sam observed later, when they were getting ready for bed, and out
of Molly’s earshot, and Dana had relayed the gist of the telephone conversation.

“They’re like vultures, aren’t they?” she said with a shudder.

Sam eyed her thoughtfully. “I guess this is going to be a pretty big case for you, isn’t it?” he asked.

“The biggest,” she replied in a breathless mixture of regret, exultation, and fear.

“Well then,” he said, “before you get buried in it, let’s find a way to store up some good times to tide us over. I have a
few ideas. I’ll talk them over with Molly.”

Dana looked at him—her comfort, her sounding board, her rock. If she sometimes took him too much for granted, she knew it
was his sense of purpose, of balance, and of proportion that enabled her to be who she was and do what she did, and that meant
more to her than she could ever express in words.

“I’ve lost count of the times I’ve said it before,” she told
him with genuine affection, “but I honestly don’t know what I’d do without you.”

He grinned. “That’s okay, babe,” he said in his best Humphrey Bogart impersonation. “Just play your cards right, and you won’t
ever find out.”

Sam McAuliffe was a happy man. At forty-seven, he had the profession of his choice, the wife of his dreams, and a stepdaughter
he couldn’t have adored more had she been his own flesh and blood.

He may not have understood Dana completely, her drive, her intensity, her need to fight the good fight at every turn, but
it didn’t matter. He loved her unconditionally. She was everything he had hoped to find in a woman, fantasized about finding,
through the long, lonely years of singlehood. There were so many times when he had thought he would never meet someone like
her, never marry, never know the joy of having a family of his own. Then one day, there she was. He knew he would always be
grateful to her, for wanting him, for letting him into her life, for allowing him to become a part of something so special.

If there was one small flaw in the otherwise perfect tapestry of their marriage, it was that he and Dana had so far been unable
to give Molly the baby brother or sister that would have made their lives complete. They had often spoken of it, of how wonderful
it would be if they could have a child together. It would be the ultimate expression of what they felt for each other. He
knew Dana had never really had that with Molly’s father.

But in six years, it hadn’t happened. The closest they had come was one false alarm shortly before Dana made partner at Cotter
Boland. Sam knew that time was not on his side, and he so wanted a child while he was still young enough to raise one. After
the false alarm, he took himself to a doctor, unbeknownst to his wife because it was embarrassing, to see if maybe he had
a problem. However, the tests showed that he was just fine, and he was told not to worry, but to relax.

“Things have a way of surprising you when you’re least expecting it,” the specialist said.

Yet four years later, it was still just the three of them, and Sam was beginning to wonder if it simply wasn’t meant to be,
and if it was time to put the dream away, and appreciate what he already had.

Truth be told, he had enough to fill his plate. It was in holding hearth and home together that he truly excelled, filling
in the holes of Dana’s absences when she was overwhelmed by work. The Latham case was going to be the greatest test of his
abilities, and he fell asleep thinking up ways he could protect his family from the media invasion that was bound to come.

“You must be out of your mind,’ Judith Purcell declared, the moment she heard. “You can’t take this case.”

“I already did,” Dana told her.

“But how can you defend him?”

“I’m a defense attorney. That’s what I do.”

“Oh, come on,” Judith persisted. “You know what I mean.”

Dana fixed a level gaze on her friend. “Sometimes, we have to make hard choices,” she said in a soft voice. “We may not always
make the right ones, but we do the best we can. And then we live with the consequences.”

O
f all the single, separate moments in time that, for whatever reason, one was destined to remember for the rest of one’s life,
Corey Latham believed he knew the worst.

Certainly, there was the humiliation of being taken, in shackles, from his home, in broad daylight, for all his neighbors
to see. Of course, there was the degradation of being marched into the county jail where he was stripped and searched, fingerprinted
and photographed. Nor would he soon forget the frustration of being grilled for hour upon hour, until he felt that his brain
was turning to oatmeal. But all that turned out to be merely a prelude to the sheer terror of being escorted to the eleventh
floor of the King County Jail, thrust inside a cell that was little bigger than a closet, and hearing the heavy steel door
slam and lock behind him.

That was the moment. When he knew, no matter what he said or did, he could not get out. He had lost the right to freedom of
choice.

It was ten times worse than the
Jackson
, and that was bad enough. Even after three tours on the submarine, he was not
even close to being comfortable with the claustrophobia or the dread of impending disaster. But he had chosen the Navy, and
there were compensations aboard ship: the ability to move about, cramped though the quarters were; the camaraderie of his
fellow officers; the knowledge that he was serving his country and fulfilling a vital mission.

This was something else entirely. This was black panic that could take hold of him at any moment of the day or night. This
was knowing that he was caught, like a rabbit in a trap, in a situation he could not control, with an outcome he could not
predict. This was hearing his heart pounding in his chest so loud he feared it would explode inside him, like a bomb—and the
irony did not escape him. This was hour after hour, day after day, of nothing but his own thoughts, his own terror.

Ironically, it was pretending he was back on the
Jackson
that got him through. Pretending that this was just another tour, and that, as before, if he took it one day at a time, it
would soon be over. In his mind’s eye, his tiny cell became the missile stacks where he sometimes slept just to get out from
under the prying eyes of his engineer. He ordered books to read, Ludlum, Clancy, Follett, and pretended that the dialogue
in them was conversations with his shipmates. He likened the twenty-three hours a day that he was confined in the concrete
coffin to the seventy-some days he spent submerged, and convinced himself how lucky he was to have a four-inch slit of window
from which he could at least see the sky.

During the twenty-fourth hour, he was given the run of the day room; an ugly place, with a metal picnic table and bench bolted
to the floor, a chin bar, and a shower. Three days a week, he was allowed time in the recreation area, an indoor/outdoor space,
with a basketball hoop and a jogging track.

But always he was alone, in his cell, in the day room, in
the recreation area. As a designated ultra-security inmate, he was not permitted contact with anyone other than his two escorts,
whose purpose was not to make friends or conversation. It was the isolation that got to him the most.

“This is worse than hell,” he told Dana the day after the arraignment, when it had sunk in that he was there for the duration.
“I don’t know how much more I can take.”

“I never promised you an ocean cruise,” she responded firmly. “So you call it anything you like—hell, war, survival—but do
what you have to do to get through it. My best guess, we’re looking at months. The wheels of justice grind very slowly around
here. So I suggest you consider it a test of strength, or a test of courage, or a test of faith. Whichever suits you best.”

Corey liked Dana McAuliffe. She was smart and assertive in a very feminine way, and he considered it a stroke of genius for
the law firm to have assigned her to represent him in this matter. It filled him with a sense of confidence that his nightmare
would someday be over, and he clung to her words as a drowning man would to a bit of driftwood.

Aside from unlimited access to his attorney, he was allowed visitors for only three hours each week: Saturdays, Sundays, and
Wednesdays, between six and seven in the evening. They met in the visiting room, a long narrow space, divided down the middle
by a thick Plexiglas wall, and partitioned into cubicles. They sat opposite each other in one of the cubicles, and conversed
over a telephone. He hated that Elise had to see him in shackles, and that he couldn’t touch her, or smell her, or even talk
to her, except over the damn phone, but he didn’t hate it enough to tell her not to come.

“You look pale,” she said, two days after the arraignment. “Are you sick?”

“I’m not sleeping very well,” he told her. “The food’s not too good, and my stomach’s upset most of the time.”

“Did they let you see a doctor?”

“Sure. He gave me Turns.”

Tom Sheridan came to visit. The pastor of the Puget Sound Methodist Church was a large man, fifty-seven years old, with a
broad smile, a booming voice, light eyes, and prematurely gray hair that several of his colleagues had, for some metaphorical
reason, perhaps, compared to a steel helmet. He sat calmly on his side of the Plexiglas wall, with the telephone wedged between
his ear and his shoulder, and read to his parishioner from the Bible in his deep, persuasive voice.

“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not
be weary, and they shall walk, and not faint,’” he recited from Isaiah.

“Oh yes,” breathed Corey.

And from Joshua,” ’Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed; for the Lord thy God is with
thee whithersoever thou goest.’”

“Amen.”

“How are you holding up?” Dana asked her client on Friday.

Corey shrugged. I’m doing a little better, I guess,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about your test of faith thing, and I’ve
been praying a lot.”

“Good,” she said with an encouraging smile. “That means you’re learning to cope.”

“You were right about months, weren’t you?” he asked. I’m going to be here a long time, aren’t I?”

Dana sighed. “Longer than you’d like,” she conceded. “Even mistakes can take a while to sort out.”

“That’s what I hold on to,” he said. “That this is just a mistake that’s got to be sorted out.”

“I’m going to see Elise tonight,” she told him. “Any messages?”

His eyes lit up at the mention of her name. “Just tell her I love her,” he said. “And I can’t wait to see her.”

Ignoring the camera trucks and the swarm of reporters trampling the rosebushes, Dana walked up the front steps of the little
brick house on West Dravus and rang the doorbell. It was six-thirty, and she had come directly from work, wearing what she
referred to as an office uniform; in this instance, a tailored suit in soft taupe. Elise Latham answered the door in a short,
clingy black dress that would not have been appropriate in a workplace.

“I’m having dinner with friends as soon as we’re through here,” the young woman explained when she saw her visitor’s eye wander.

Elise was close to six feet tall, which was almost two inches taller than Dana. And where Dana would be considered trim, Elise
was thin, with just a suggestion of curves beneath the sleek fabric. Her hair fell straight and shiny to her shoulders, and
was of a color halfway between platinum and straw. Her eyes were wide-set, thick-lashed, and frosty green. Her makeup was
fresh and perfect.

“We expect the prosecutor will go to the grand jury sometime within the next ten days,” the attorney began when the two women
were seated on a rattan sofa in the small living room. “And at this point, we’re pretty sure an indictment will be handed
down.”

“Okay,” Elise said tonelessly.

“I know, in many ways, what’s happening here is just as hard on you as it is on Corey,” Dana said. “I want to assure you that
we’re going to do everything we can to get him through this as quickly, and as unscathed, as possible, and then hopefully
get the two of you back on the right track.”