Aftershock (34 page)

“What’s wrong with you, baby? You’ve got nerves jumping under your skin. That’s not you.”

“It’s me when I think a heroic girl gets paid back for trying to protect her foul little sister with life in prison.”

“If she does, it won’t be from anything you did. And if she doesn’t, it will
only
be because of you. Of what you did.”

“What if it was something I
didn’t
do?”

“Dolly …”

“Listen, Dell. Please. I have to say this. I thought I was so ‘with it,’ you know? So … how do you always say it … plugged in? But I never even heard of this Tiger Ko Khai vermin. I must have had hundreds of girls walk in and out of this house, and not a single one ever so much as … mentioned it.”

“Why would they?”

“Dell!”

“Stop, Dolly. You think you’re some kind of geologist, drilling a sample core out of this whole town? You’re not. You deal with the girls who come to you. Just those, not more. Your sample wasn’t representative, it selected itself. You think any girl could have told you about these
salopards dégénérés
without you doing something about it? You think they don’t all
know
that?”

“But—”

“Shut up,” I said, pinching her bottom hard. It didn’t make her giggle, but it did shut her up. “Be proud of your reputation, Dolly. Not ashamed of it. Remember Médecins Sans Frontières. You’re not ashamed of that, are you?”

“Of course not,” she said, pinching my biceps harder than I’d pinched her bottom. The difference was, I had to act like I didn’t feel it. Which she knew, the little … “To have served with them is a badge of honor.”

“Will you please let me finish,” I said, pinching her harder than she
could
pinch.

She squealed. It was the sweetest sound I’d heard in days.

“A man shows up, unannounced. He tells you that he wants to go in with you on a Médecins Sans Frontières flight. The weapons he carries, they’re only to protect your team. What do you do?”

“No weapons,” she said firmly.

“But there’s more, isn’t there? You’d know he wasn’t there to protect you; he was there to get info on wherever you set up camp. Then he’d disappear. And the next thing you know, you’d all be captives. Or dead.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s right.”

“Anybody ever try that?”

“Nooo …” she said, dragging the word out.

“Because they’d be nailed in a second. Transparent. And that’s the same reason none of your girls ever mentioned Tiger Ko Khai—they
knew they’d be opening the gates of hell if they did. They weren’t protecting Tiger Ko Khai,
précieuse
, they were protecting you.”

She snuggled against me. “Dangerous, huh? I’ve never been called that before,” she whispered.

“Maybe if you opened up a little more …”

T
wo days later, Swift called me. I didn’t have to burn another cell—this was the same number I’d given out all over the place, in my role as “investigator.”

I just said: “Office?”

He said yes. I hit the “off” button.

When I arrived, Jeannine looked as happy as if she’d been entered in a pie-eating contest, installed as the odds-on favorite.

“Go right on inside,” she sang out. “He’s expecting you.”

I closed the door behind me. Swift motioned me to move closer. “I don’t trust anything anymore. Do you know a place where we can talk with no chance of being overheard?”

I
took Swift to “his” other office. Told him I’d swept it myself that morning, and the motion detectors hadn’t registered any intrusion prior to mine.

He made himself comfortable on the carpet, where Debbie had thoughtfully covered a large spot with some Indian-pattern carpet.
Wanted T.D. to feel right at home
, I thought to myself at the time.

“They’re in a purple panic,” he said.

I made a “Who?” gesture.

“The DA’s Office. From the top down.”

“You know this because …?”

“They asked me to come in for a conference. That’s weird enough, all by itself. It’s always the defense attorney who asks for a conference.”

“Again, because …?”

“Because ‘conference’ is a fancy word for ‘make a deal.’ ”

“
They
want to make a deal?”

“They’re desperate to,” Swift said, unable to keep the smile off his face.

“What kind of deal?”

“Essentially, it boils down to a kind of insanity plea. We agree to have their shrink see MaryLou. If he says she was out of her mind at the time of the shooting—and he will—they’d go for a probation-with-treatment deal.”

“
She
wouldn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I already asked her. She is not going to say she’s crazy. Not now, not then.”

“You’re sure?”

“Hell, yes. I did my best to talk her into it, but she wasn’t having any.”

“You mind if we go over and see her now?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“For
her
sake. I need to hear the whole thing. Why you’re so sure they’re scared, and whether they actually offered this deal, or you’re just confident you can talk them into it.”

He nodded. “Okay, you’re right. Or your guess was right, maybe. They haven’t actually offered that deal. But here’s why I’m dead sure they will: they never try cases unless they can’t lose. Like the one they just did: a sex offender with a record going back sixty years! They had him on peeping, masturbating in front of little girls, porno on his computer, you name it. And they knew he couldn’t even get on the stand to deny anything. His lawyer probably told
him, what the hell, if they weren’t going to give him a decent deal, he might as well take it to trial. Guess what happened?”

“Don’t tell me he got off?”

“No. He was convicted … of two misdemeanors! This … I don’t know what to call someone like that, this person is in his late seventies, but he’ll
still
get at least one more chance to keep on attacking kids.”

Soft as warm custard
rolled through my mind, but I didn’t say anything.

“The whole office is like that,” Swift said. “Like the DA’s personality infected them all. There’s a kind of … culture to that place. Even if you came in right after law school, wanting to fill up the prisons with people you convicted, you’d be one of the boys soon enough. Some of the prosecutors have been there forever, and they’re not going anywhere.

“But there’s even more. When you walk into a room and there’s four deputies,
and
the DA himself, you know they’re terrified. That was supposed to be a show of force, but, to me, it was a show of fear.

“After a while, the others left, and there was just the DA and me. That’s when I reminded him that a trial is just like an election. Only, in this one, I just need a couple of votes, and he needs all the rest.”

“I thought a jury verdict had to be unanimous.”

“Not here,” he said, eager to get on with his story. “By ‘election,’ I was talking about the one coming up. And the DA knew it. That’s why he sent the other ones out. So we could talk alone.

“Okay, now here’s where it gets tricky. He already knows we’re not pleading insanity. You have to file a notice if you’re going to do that. That’s what scares him to death. If we’re not going to try an insanity defense, what does that leave?”

“Justification?”

“Bingo! See, he has to offer the insanity deal. That’s the only explanation this town would ever accept—that MaryLou just
‘snapped.’ But he doesn’t get to choose the defense; we do. And if we
don’t
go with temp insanity, there’s always a chance he’s going to lose. That’s the one thing people will remember about the trial, that he lost.

“When you lose a big trial like this one, and the jury verdict is the same one the town itself would have brought in, you’ve made yourself very unpopular. And this DA spends all his time running for office. Making friends.”

“Anything else on our side of the table?”

“Oh yes!” he crowed. “They checked out our experts, and now they
really
don’t know what to do. No disrespect intended to Ms. Rollo, but Dr. Joel’s name scared the holy hell out of them. They’d need a forklift just to carry the transcripts of cases where he’s testified—as a witness for the government! He’s never exaggerated his résumé. Never changed his testimony under cross-examination. I don’t know where you found him, but that’s a five-hundred-pound gorilla in a jungle full of spider monkeys.”

“Ms. Rollo found him.”

“Then you found Ms. Rollo.”

“No, Mr. Swift, you did. You found them both.”

He sat there for a couple of seconds, then he just nodded.

“Doesn’t matter. This was teamwork, any way you slice it. But, bottom line, if Dr. T. D. Joel says MaryLou snapped, she snapped. That’s what every single therapist they asked already told them—I could see it right on his face.”

“Let’s go,” I said. “Maybe with this new info, you’ll have better luck than I did.”

I
should have waited, but I couldn’t. Even if it meant burning some of my credibility with Swift, I had to risk it—I
wanted
to be wrong.

But I wasn’t. “Not a chance,” MaryLou told Swift. “That’s the one thing that could stop me from the scholarship. And even if it wouldn’t, I’m not walking around wearing a psycho jacket for the rest of my life. And come on, okay? If I ‘snapped’ once, there’ll always be people who think I could do it again.”

“But, MaryLou—”

“It’s no use,” she said, no longer bristling at the use of her first name. “Uncle Dell here—that’s how he first got in, you know, with my aunt Dolly—he already asked me about all that. Not in so many words, but I knew where he was going. That ‘evaluation’ thing, he knows I’d pass. I’m not crazy, and I never was. And I’m not
saying
I was.”

“So you killed Cameron Taft because …”

“Because I had to.” She ended the sentence and the conversation with those four words, getting up and smacking the door with her palm to tell the guards she was ready to go back to her cell.

“I
s she going to take the stand at all?” he asked, on the short drive back to his office.

“You can’t make her, right?”

“No. If I even tried, she could turn around and fire me, right in front of the jury. And she’d be within her rights to do so. That’s what the Fifth Amendment is: you can’t make anyone testify against their will unless there is no way their testimony could possibly be self-incriminating.”

“But you
can
make her sister testify, like you said?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Please trust me on this. I’m not a lawyer, but I know people. Certain kinds of people. And I’m telling you, if Danielle gets up on the stand and tells her story, the second MaryLou realizes what’s going on, you won’t be able to
keep
her off the stand.
MaryLou is one girl who can take a punch. And hit back a lot harder than she took.”

“Justification,” he said.

“Justification times seven,” I reminded him. “And Danielle doesn’t make eight. She’s not just one more witness; she’s a
multiplier
.”

“O
h, they’re losing their minds over there,” Swift told me later that afternoon. “When I filed that motion for a sealed witness order on the ground that each witness could be in mortal danger if her name was to be revealed, they went bats.”

“You think they know?”

“The names? No. How could they—?”

“If the Tiger Ko Khai thing was something they already knew about, why not?”

“I hate to admit this, but, sometimes, not knowing what’s going on can make you innocent. Stupid, sure. But innocent—that, too.”

“I don’t get it. Are you saying—?”

“I’m saying that this DA would think Tiger Ko Khai was a new dish in a Chinese restaurant.”

“Doesn’t have a clue?”

“Not a chance.”

“But with thirty-nine rapes being reported …”

“By who, the SANE nurses? We’ve had six different ones in the past five years. That’s an amazing turnover, especially since most people want to live in this part of the state. You know, the sacred coast. That’s how our economy can actually live on tourism alone.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“They probably left because no amount of nice living could
compensate them for a system where they examine rape victims and report the rapes, and yet nothing ever happens.”

“The DA is the one who—?”

“That’s not fair, either. Maybe at one time. But, lately, the police don’t even bother to ask for warrants, never mind indictments. Why? Maybe they got sick of nothing happening, too. Maybe they were worried about being sued. Maybe the girls refused to name names. I don’t know. There’s no way
to
know.”

“But that one girl, the one who said she’d be glad to report the most recent time she got raped if the DA would just prosecute those scum who raped her
first
. The one they told that they don’t make deals with victims.”

“That’s true. They don’t make deals with victims, only with perpetrators. Still, that doesn’t say anything about the SANE nurses quitting.”

“I think it does,” I said, remembering what Dolly had told us. “Rape Trauma Syndrome, it’s not just for those who got raped. It probably hits those who have to watch the rapes even harder.”

“They didn’t—”

“Yeah, they did. Okay, they didn’t actually watch rapes take place, but when you enter a profession to do something, and the harder you try, the more you get laughed at, that’s pretty much the same thing. Why be a SANE nurse at all if you don’t want to do something about sexual assault? Okay, now a victim comes into the hospital where you work. You examine that victim. You say there’s no doubt she was raped. None. Not based on what she said, based on medical evidence. Not an opinion, actual medical proof. And
still
nothing happens. The way I understand it is that, after too many of those, they start suffering from Rape Trauma Syndrome themselves.”

“This is getting wilder by the minute. If it gets too complicated, no jury is going to follow it.”

“It’s not fucking complicated,” I told him. Quietly.

He looked frightened. I shook my head to get rid of the red haze. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I shouldn’t have said that. Look, I’m not any smarter than the average person. I could even be on a jury. I register to vote; isn’t that how they pick you?”