Aftershock (41 page)

“And when you found out that Danielle was involved with them again?”

“That’s when I knew I couldn’t stop her after I left. I knew I could never stop
them
. I was supposed to be going to summer camp. For softball. It’s like a showcase. The coaches would all be there. Then, if they liked what they saw, I’d have my pick of scholarships.”

“You couldn’t stop Danielle, but …?”

“I
could
stop them. I remember thinking that: I could stop them. The next thing I really remember is the police. They probably wouldn’t even have grabbed me except there was nobody else. In the hall, I mean.”

“Did you intend to kill Cameron Taft?”

“I … don’t know. I don’t know much about guns. But I meant to shoot him, I know I must have. Him and any of the others. Danielle is my sister. My baby sister. She was smarter than me, okay, but she didn’t have any … experience.

“If you knew my mother and father, you’d understand. She was like my own baby. I knew I had to … protect her. And I thought I was. Until the doctor—I mean the doctor that testified here—until he said what Danielle really was, I …”

MaryLou started crying then. But she never dropped her eyes, staring at the jury as if challenging them to say a word about it.

Swift sat down.

MaryLou turned slowly and looked over at the prosecution table. Tears were still running down her face, but the eyes they came from were lasers.

T
he last of the prosecution team must have been saved just for this one job. He was a little older, a little better dressed than Fat Face. All that told me was that he’d been around longer.

“Don’t people call you something besides ‘MaryLou’?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, now. Are you saying you never heard anyone call you ‘Mighty Mary’?”

“Only in the papers. Or, sometimes, people would shout it at games. But nobody ever
called
me that, like a nickname or something.”

“I see. Well, let me ask you this, then: were you personally afraid of Cameron Taft?”

“No.”

“In fact, if he so much as touched you, there isn’t a doubt in your mind that you could have fought him off, is there?”

“No.”

“In fact, you could probably beat him to a pulp, isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know. But … yes, I guess so—a coward like him, he’d quit before I would.”

“So tell us, why did Mighty Mary need a
pistol
to send a message to Cameron Taft?”

“Message?”

“A message to leave your sister alone.”

“Oh. Beating him up, that wouldn’t work. He’d never take that kind of humiliation—it would just make him more evil. And he’d take it out on my little sister.”

“Why didn’t you get your retarded boyfriend to beat him up? He’s certainly big enough, isn’t he?”

Insulte sa mère!
I thought.
Le fils de pute finit enfin par conger!

You could see MaryLou calling on every vestige of self-control. You could also see the blood-flash in her eyes.
Sure
, I tried to tell the jury with my mind,
MaryLou might snap like a dry twig. Then maybe snap
you
like a dry twig. But she’s a teenage girl, not some icy assassin
.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she finally said.

“You don’t know of one Franklin Wayne?”

“Yes, I know him. He’s one of my best friends. Probably my best friend.”

“Isn’t he better known as Bluto throughout your school? And isn’t that because he’s retarded?”

“I never heard him called that name,” MaryLou gambled on the lie. Or maybe nobody ever called him that when
she
was around—now that
would
be retarded.

“And you
don’t
know he’s retarded?”

“How would I know that? Franklin’s the same age as me. If he was so retarded, how did he pass all his courses?”

“Perhaps because he was a star football player?” the prosecution’s ace asked.

You just cut your own throat
. I felt the pounding in my head.
You’re telling this whole town that they looked the other way to get a football player. Why not just go up to the jury box and spit in their faces?

“I don’t understand,” MaryLou said, playing it perfectly. Easy to do when telling the truth is the only job you have.

The prosecutor retreated, but it was already too late. The best he could do was “So you
had
to kill Cameron Taft?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you crying about?”

MaryLou wiped the tears away with one hand, sweeping them over her prominent nose in the same gesture she might use to brush
off a punch to the head. She looked at the prosecutor, as if deciding what to say. Finally she settled on, “I’m not sure.”

“Are you crying because, after sitting in this courtroom, you
now
realize that Cameron Taft was completely innocent? In fact, it was Danielle who came to him, not the other way around, wasn’t it?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t know any of that when it … when it happened.”

“You mean, when you murdered Cameron Taft in cold blood?”

“I guess so” was MaryLou’s only response.

“So you
thought
that young man was going to rape your sister after you left for this summer-camp thing, and that
thought
made you carry a concealed firearm to school? And that
thought
made you shoot that same young man in the face, killing him instantly—is that about right?”

“I didn’t
think
anything.”

“Oh, now that you’ve heard the good Dr. Joel testify that you might have been in a ‘fugue state,’ you decided to go with that, huh?”

“I don’t even know what that is. I said I didn’t think anything because that’s the truth. I knew something was going to happen. And I knew I couldn’t let it.”

“Well, you made sure of that, didn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Is that going to be your answer to anything I ask you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s see, then. Why didn’t you reload your weapon after it was empty?”

“I didn’t have any more bullets.”

“So, if you’d had more bullets, you would have shot even more innocent teenagers?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. By the time the thing kept clicking, there was nobody around, anyway. Nobody but me.”

“You and the dead body of Cameron Taft.”

“I guess so. I didn’t look at anyone. I just pulled the trigger over and over again. Then I threw the gun away. And I sat down.”

“Why didn’t you bring more bullets with you?”

“I didn’t know where any more bullets were. I just grabbed the gun from where my father always kept it—under the cushion of his big chair.”

“Why didn’t you wait?”

“I was already late for school. And I knew Friday was my last chance.”

“Your last chance to kill Cameron Taft?”

“My last chance to …” The tears came again, but MaryLou ignored them. “My last chance to save my little sister from … them.”

“But
now
you know—”

“Objection!” Swift cut him off. “What the defendant
now
knows is more than merely irrelevant; it is a blatant attempt to torment her. This is nothing but another attempt by the prosecution to poison the jury!”

“Sustained,” the judge said. “I will not tell you again, counsel.”

“Then I have no more questions of this witness,” the Fat Face substitute said, and sashayed over to his table like he’d just won the case. But before he sat down, he whirled dramatically, said, “With the court’s permission?”

The judge made his waving motion again. The deputy took that as encouragement. MaryLou hadn’t moved.

“You said before that you couldn’t go to your mother or your father?”

MaryLou just stared straight ahead. Not looking at him; not looking away, either. And not going to answer a question that hadn’t been asked. I wondered if the jury understood that the question itself was the obvious answer.

“MaryLou, now that you know the truth, do you even
care
that you killed a man?”

“I … I don’t think so.”

“Caring isn’t something you
think;
it’s something you
feel
. Don’t you feel anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think, if the court gave you sufficient time, you might come up with an answer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there anything you
do
care about?”

“Now?”

“Yes,” the deputy said, making his own disbelief clear. “That’s what I’m asking you: what do you care about
now
?”

“Now? Now, I guess I don’t care about anything.”

“Not even the innocent man you—”

“Judge, can we
please
see
some
offer of proof from the prosecution? A declaration of ‘innocence’ on behalf of the dead rapist coming out of the mouth of the prosecution’s office is not only objectionable as a matter of law, it is objectionable as not being a question for the witness at all. It is an utterly self-serving
excuse
for the failure of their office to prosecute one single perpetrator of the numerous gang rapes Detective Lancer has already testified to.

“It is the heart of our defense that MaryLou McCoy had no idea, no hint, no
concept
of the so-called innocence of the man she shot. All she knew was that he was the leader of a gang who specialized in the rape of young girls. The prosecution is welcome to disprove that, if they can. But they cannot be allowed to foul the record with their weak attempt to defend
themselves
.”

“Your Honor …” The deputy stepped in, more to stop the damning accusations coming from Swift than anything else. He wasn’t prepared for the dead silence that followed.

Swift stood waiting, his whole stance suggesting he was just waiting to hit back. MaryLou went back into her thousand-yard stare. The judge’s stare was a lot shorter, but his was loaded for bear.

The deputy sat down.

“S
ummations are a little different here,” Swift explained again. “The prosecution goes first, then it’s our turn, and then they get another shot.”

“You knew the job was bad when you took it, hoss,” was all T.D. said.

“I knew the rules, sure. But I’ll be right up front with you—I’ve never tried a case like this in my life.”

That was too much for Dolly. “I’m sure everyone on this planet who ever accomplished something for the first time would say the same thing before they actually went out and did it.”

“The only ones who can’t are the ones that never got it done,” Debbie backed up her girlfriend.

“I’m not looking for sympathy here,” Swift said, nice and calm. “I’m trying to explain criminal-trial procedure, so when you see them getting two bites at the apple you won’t think this is something special the judge gave them.”

“Oh, I don’t think the judge is on their side at all,” Debbie said.

“That’s the truth,” T.D. said. “One look at you, and that old bird was ready to tear up the scarecrow to get at the cornfield.”

I was used to Debbie’s blushing by now, but this was a beaut.

I
f there was any argument about who was going to deliver the prosecution’s closing, it must have been behind closed doors. The woman whose name I didn’t know stood up and addressed the jury in a stiff, formal manner, ticking off the various crimes MaryLou had committed.

In a way, she reminded me of MaryLou herself. She was tall and lean, not a girl who ever got by on her looks. She was absolutely
methodical. And she might as well have been talking to a wall. All the jurors had a “tell us something we don’t know” expression on their faces.

And that was something she couldn’t do.

S
wift went right for the carotid. He stood up, looked around the packed courtroom, then walked slowly over to the jury box as if the audience was following right behind him. He began speaking as he closed in. “When this trial began, you heard a lot of promises from the defense. We have kept every single one of those promises. The judge will instruct you on the law of ‘Justification.’ And you will see that
every single element
of that defense was in play during the commission of
every single act
the prosecution has endlessly repeated.

“We do not deny the truth. We have
never
denied it. MaryLou McCoy did discharge a firearm in school on Friday, the thirty-first of May, 2013. As a result of that act, one individual died, and two others were wounded. Was this conduct wrong? Of course it was. But was this conduct
criminal
? That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is not the same question.”

Swift closed in on the jury box, as if what he had to say next was just for their ears: a shared confidence.

“Let’s say a day-care center is on fire. And when a woman tries to get inside to save her baby, a man bars her way. If the mother shoots him, would that be justified? Sure, it would, and I doubt there’s a decent person in America who would deny it.

“Now let’s change the scenario a bit. That day-care center is still on fire, but it has already been completely evacuated. And the person barring the mother’s way is a fireman, acting in the lawful discharge of his duty. If the mother didn’t know any of that, then would that same shooting have been justified?

“The judge is going to explain that the answer lies not in objective fact, but in the mind of the mother. If she thought, if she
believed
, that her baby was still upstairs, the fact that her baby was
actually
safe wouldn’t change things. Not one bit.

“Why? Because, even though it was
later
proven wrong, the mother’s belief was reasonable, based on her own knowledge of the operation of the day-care center, and not contradicted by any fact actually communicated to her.

“Was that mother ‘insane’? Of course not! She might have perished in that same fire, but she was a
mother
protecting her child. She didn’t stop to ‘analyze,’ she didn’t do ‘research,’ she
acted
. And she acted because she believed that if she
didn’t
a horrible thing was going to happen to someone she was morally bound to protect … no matter what it might cost her.