Apex Predator (58 page)

Steven had had enough, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about others coming after me, is there?! If they’re going to come, they’re going to come, no matter what. I have people in place, but you and I both know that if someone is willing to sacrifice themselves, there’s no way to stop them.”

She nodded, “That is right, but I do not think anyone will be sacrificing themselves to get to you. These people, Barlow and those around him, do not do what they do out of a sense of duty or in pursuit of a cause. You have read about them, it is what your whole argument is based on. They are predators, predators with vast resources and connections and in positions of power whose ultimate purpose is to prey on others. I just wanted to leave New York with a clean conscience, and now I can. I advise you to send your family somewhere safe, somewhere you know and where they know you.” She gave this last warning while holding Steven’s eyes directly.

He knew what she was talking about; she was saying he should get his family out of the country and to somewhere familiar where he had people he could count on. Steven could think of a few places like that. Over his career he had visited hundreds of cities all around the world and he had made more friends than enemies, so there were plenty of places he could think of. The problem, and it would be a huge problem, would be convincing Beth to leave. He needed to think things over, but he was thankful to this woman for the warning, “Thanks, I do appreciate it, Ms. …? The woman’s smile reappeared on her face, “You can just call me Diana. And you are welcome. Good luck to you, Mr. Loomis.” Steven nodded and got up from the booth. He got back in the car and told the driver to head to his lawyers’ offices.

On the way, he gave more thought to what Diana had said, ‘send your family somewhere safe.’ It stood to reason that if she had done the job for Barlow, she knew Beth was in New York and the rest of his family was in Vermont. The media made sure his location, as well as his family’s, was known by all and she obviously did not think they were any safer in Vermont than they would be in New York. As he thought about the situation more carefully, he realized that the intensity of the media attention would actually help to keep his family safe. Whoever or whatever came for them would have a virtually impossible time going unnoticed. Still, she was right, if Barlow or someone like Barlow, someone with the kinds of resources she had mentioned, wanted to get to him or his family bad enough, there was no way he would be able to stop them, not with the trial going on and the eyes of the world on him.

Well, he couldn’t do anything about the trial, but he damn well could do something about putting his family somewhere safe. Beth would just have to understand, he would make her understand, but to do that he was going to have to tell her everything, and he was truly at a loss about what she might do. He also knew that with all of this, with everything he had learned from Diana, he would have to tell the General. Damn, he hated being put in a position where he really had no choice, where he
had
to do something. Being a successful Special Forces officer meant having options, backup plans to backup plans, and right now he really felt like he did not have very many options, not options that made sense anyway.

As they pulled up in front of the building,
Steven was once again completely blown away by the number of cameras and reporters in front of the building. Every time he thought there simply could not be any more, more appeared. The driver drove into the garage where security was situated in order to keep adventurous reporters from following the car into the parking garage. As soon as Steven got out of the elevator, Drew was already there, “Damn it, Steven, pick up the goddamned phone once in a while, will you?” Steven gave him a half smile, he was used to Drew’s tantrums, “Alright, I will, but Drew, it’s not even eleven. I wanted to sleep in today, alright?” Drew, now joined by Max and Ray, smiled, “Yeah, right, you know that’s bullshit. I called your house and talked to Beth, she said you’d been gone since before she woke up.” Steven, now smiling more broadly, headed to where he knew the coffee was brewing, “Alright already, you got me. I just wanted a few minutes to myself, just to get away from all of this for a while, okay?”

Now, with all four men in the coffee room, it was Max who spoke up, “I think we can all appreciate wanting some time alone, Steven, but with everything that’s happened, you can’t just disappear, you know what I mean? From this point forward, we all have to be like one, working together, strategizing, everything. If we are going to sell this argument, we all have to be on point all the time, okay?” Steven hung his head, “You’re right, you’re right, there’s no excuse. It’s just that sometimes I feel like every single little thing I do is blown up, analyzed and dissected, and I just wanted to breathe a little, but I will not disappear again, you have my word.”

The four men walked into Max’s office. Drew and Steven sat on the sofa in the room and Max and Ray sat in front of Max’s desk in two chairs turned to face the sofa. Ray leaned forward, “So, Steven, we’ve been strategizing and we’ve decided that we’re going to defer our opening statement in the trial.” He let that hang in the air, expecting some sort of response from Steven, but getting none. Steven looked from Ray to Drew to Max, “I’m not quite sure what that means, guys. You need to give me a clue here.” Drew explained, “At the beginning of the trial, each side gets to give an opening statement where each side explains what they will be looking to prove to the jury. The prosecution goes first and then the defense. That’s how it normally goes, but every once in a while, the defense will hold their opening argument until after the prosecution presents their case. We think that’s what we should do here, let the prosecution present their case and then we make our opening argument.”

Steven nodded, “Okay, if that’s what you guys think is best.” Ray spoke up, “We do. I mean, think about it, when the prosecution presents their case, what is it that they’ll be presenting? What
can
they present? The who and how are already well established, so they’ll be simply trying to convince the jury about the why.” Max went on, “It’s true, all they will be able to argue is the why, but it will still be an uphill battle for us. I can guarantee you that they will move on with the argument that you did what you did in a fit of rage after learning about what happened to your daughter, and it will most definitely be a battle to convince the jury otherwise. They’re human beings, Steven, and they will be thinking about how they themselves would react if one of their children suffered the same fate.”

Steven was listening to his lawyers and trying to understand the subtle legal maneuvering they were making reference to, but it was hard to do so after his meeting with Diana. Still, what Max had just shared seemed like it would bode well for him, not against him, “Well, isn’t that a good thing? I mean, don’t we want the jury to feel sympathy for me?”

Now Drew jumped in, “Yes and no. We want them to feel for you, for what happened to you, but we don’t want them putting themselves in your place, because if they do they will come to the conclusion that you probably did what you did out of revenge. That’s what they would have done in your place. You have to understand, Steven, most people are not former Special Forces operators and senior executives at security firms. They do not have the self-control and deliberation that you have. Most of them are just regular people with regular jobs and regular lives, and those kinds of people would not have undertaken everything you did when your daughter went missing. They can relate to losing your mind and shooting your daughter’s murderer because of grief, anger, revenge any one of the expected human emotions after experiencing something like this because that’s exactly what they might have done. Our task is to convince those people that it was none of those things that drove you to do this, that you did what you did because of what you found in your research and that, Steven, is going to definitely be an uphill battle. We have to convince 12 people that Donald Riche was not a human being, that he was a part of the species you read about. In other words we will be asking them to put aside everything they’ve known about the human race and to accept that there is now a species higher on the food chain than humans.”

Ray spoke up again, “That’s not quite accurate, Drew, we need to convince these people that Riche
could have been
one of these things, which means that what we really have to work on is convincing them the species is real, that it exists. If we do that, then moving them into believing Riche could have been one of them becomes doable.” Max was nodding, “That’s right, and the way we are going to convince these 12 people that you didn’t do this out of revenge or rage is by having you explain that if that had been your motivation, you could have done it and gotten away with it.”

Steven was taken aback by this, “Wait, are you serious?! You want me to testify that if I wanted to, I could have gotten away with it?! That doesn’t sound like something you’d want someone accused of murder saying, especially to the jury.” Max leaned in, “You’re right, in any other murder trial it would be crazy for a defendant to say that, but you have to, Steven, you absolutely have to. Think about it, how else are we going to convince these 12 people that you didn’t do this out of revenge? The way we do that is by convincing them that if it had been revenge you wanted you could have killed Riche and walked away. You had an iron-clad alibi and the world was glad to see him go, so most likely you would have gotten away with it. That’s true, isn’t it, if you had wanted revenge you would have gone about it some other way, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t have turned yourself in.”

Steven considered that and nodded, “Yeah, you’re right, I would have just walked and gone about solidifying my alibi, making it air-tight.” Now Drew jumped in, “That’s right, and we will be asking the police how likely it would have been that they were going to catch whoever did it before you turned yourself in. I guarantee you, they will say that they had no solid leads, no suspects for the shooting. They have to because that’s what they kept saying after the shooting, ‘no solid leads’ or ‘the investigation is ongoing.’ I can tell you right now that no policeman is going to get up on the stand and testify that they were on the verge of cracking the case when you turned yourself in, it’d be bullshit and they know it.”

Steven understood the need for him to say exactly what they’d just explained, that he could have gotten away with it. Still, he wanted to make sure that the science, the work of Leonard and others like him, would be kept front and center, “I get it, I really do and I have no problem with testifying to it, it’s the truth, but I want to make sure that the science, the research I did, will play a central role in my defense. That’s the only way the jury will believe any of this. Look, I know you guys are trying to establish an angle and I understand that, but you also have to understand that a big part of what I did, a big part of the motivation, came from fear, from being in the presence of something so far removed from anything human that it grips your heart and fills it with fear. That’s what being in that warehouse was like, like we were intruding in the lair of something unspeakable. There have been mass murderers before, we all know that, and there have no doubt been people that have committed similar atrocities, but this was different and everyone there could sense it. There was an intelligence and a deliberation there that spoke of very careful planning and execution. The fact of the matter is that Riche made a mistake, he took two girls that could easily be associated with each other, but what if he hadn’t? What if he had kept taking girls from vastly different backgrounds and neighborhoods? The police would have admitted that a serial kidnapper, and most likely a murderer, was on the loose. People would have held their children tighter, they would have been more vigilant, but so would Riche. He would have been more careful, his plan would have changed to account for the additional vigilance. And he would have kept hunting. No, gentlemen, the only way we can convince these 12 people on the jury is by showing them the science of what these things are, by reminding them what for centuries society has deemed to be human and showing them how far from that these things are. Think about it, the bottom line is that if they find Donald Riche was human it would mean that he was a part of their species, the human species. If we give them a solid enough option, an option based on serious scientific research by authorities in their field, they’ll take it.”

The three men were nodding, they understood that as much as they could strategize on the legalities of the case, it was human emotion that had to come through and that human emotion would have to be fear. Ray spoke first, “You’re right, only you can communicate that feeling, that fear, and we’ll make sure to set you up to do it. As far as the science, we have to get with Dr. Leonard, Dr. Grossman at Columbia, Shultz to go over his involuntary indicators, and a few other scientists we’ve found who have also done good work, and we’re going to have to prepare them to give their testimony in a way that is understandable to laymen. I think Leonard, Shultz and most of the others should be okay, but Grossman might be a problem. The guy has a stick so far up his ass he has trouble looking down.” The group chuckled at the comment.

Max spoke up next, “Well, let’s bring them in and take them through the case and make a decision then. It makes no sense to try and make decisions before we hear them on the stand.” Steven wanted to know why one name was missing, “What about Scoma, Dr. Jim Scoma at UC Irvine? Aren’t you guys planning on calling him in?” The three lawyers looked at each other, Drew spoke up for the group, “No, we weren’t. His work doesn’t relate to Riche or the case and we thought he might just end up confusing the jury.”

Steven shook his head, “No, I don’t think he will. I mean, I will defer to whatever you guys decide in the end, but the man is incredibly engaging and his work was a big part of what convinced me that this new species was possible. You’re right, his work deals with other types of behaviors, but in the end it is still about something other than what we know as human beings on the face of the earth. Some of his work and the examples he gave me made a lot of sense, it had a balancing effect on me, to be quite honest.” Ray looked puzzled, “What do you mean it had a balancing effect?” Steven answered, “What I mean is that I had doubts, I could not understand how a new species, something beyond human, could manifest itself only in the most deviant and horrible end of what we consider the human spectrum. I mean, think about it, a new species arises, a species more evolved than humans and that new species only manifests itself in the most horrible way imaginable, as a predator hunting humans. I just had a hard time believing that evolution only manifested itself on the evil end of the human spectrum, and Scoma and his work showed me that was not the case, that the new species also manifested itself in other conditions. Leonard was the first to catalogue the species and to name it, but Scoma is also working to define another species that does not manifest exclusively as predators. He hasn’t named it and is still researching the similarities and differences with Leonard’s
Homo predator
.” The three lawyers were considering what he had just walked them through. It was clear they would talk about it again, but at least he had made his wishes known. The four men stayed in Max’s office for the remainder of the day, strategizing about their case and preparing for what the prosecutor was likely to throw at them.