Corrupt Practices (44 page)

“What happened the night Deanna was killed?”

She touches her forehead with her free hand, revealing a large perspiration stain on her dress. She comes toward me. As she approaches, I avoid looking at the knife by keeping my gaze fixed on her. When she gets close, I detect a sour oniony odor. She hasn’t bathed in days.

“Deanna was so awesome,” she says. “A goddess like the one she was named for, the goddess of the hunt. Truthfully, you know how she found me? She found me through my tattoo artist. Yeah, she was able to find him because she was a hunter, she could hunt for people with tattoos. A couple of her friends own ink shops themselves, you know.” She coughs in my face. For a split second, I think it’s intentional, but then the cough persists, dry and hacking. When it finally stops, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Are you all right?” I say.

“I feel wonderful. How do you feel?”

“Tell me what happened that night.”

“I guess Deanna asked around until she found the guy who remembered drawing an ankle tattoo that looks like mine.” She half lifts her leg and gestures toward the drawing. “It stands for strength. It’s unique. I’m unique, you know.” She giggles weakly. “Truthfully, Deanna told me that she knew that once I got the first tattoo, I’d get more. She was right. She was
so
right. The tattoo guy I went to had my cell phone number.” She does a childish pirouette, grabs the hem of her dress, and lifts it to her waist. She’s wearing thong panties, a hideous lime green color probably intended to match her awful dress. The small triangular patch of cloth is badly frayed. On her scrawny right buttock is a cartoonish tattoo of a hooded woman with antlers growing out of her head. “Look. Isn’t she beautiful?”

I avert my eyes. “Cover up, Grace.”

She thrusts out her lower lip, then lets her dress fall back to her knees and smoothes it down roughly. “What the fuck, Parker. I just wanted to show you my Beiwe. She’s the Sami goddess of sanity. She’s on my ass, and I just wanted you to . . .” Her voice falters. She lowers her eyes, then tugs at her hair. She jumps forward, and with a roundhouse motion swipes at my chest with the knife. I twist sideways and lean back, but the point of the blade rips my shirt and slashes my arm. I grab for her, but she takes a step back, more agile than I anticipated. I should run or throw a punch, but I do neither. I still need to hear what she knows about Rich and Deanna.

We stare each other down. Finally, she lowers her eyes and gapes at her hand in wonderment, as if it belongs to someone else. Her fingers unclench, and the knife falls to the floor with a harmless clatter. Without taking my eyes off her, I reach down and snatch it up. I don’t really know what to do with it, except that I want to keep it close to me and far away from her. I slide it into the back waistband of my jeans, hoping I’ll remember not to bend or twist the wrong way and stab myself.

“Jesus, Grace.”

She gapes at me. Her jaw starts quivering. “Omigod, Parker. Omigod. Omigod.” She covers her face with her hands. After a while, she lowers her hands and shrugs helplessly. “I’m so sorry,” she mumbles. “Please forgive me. It’s just that I’m so frightened. I didn’t really mean to . . . Please forgive me.” She points to my upper arm. “Omigod, you’re hurt. Please forgive me.”

The blood has soaked into my shirt. I roll up my sleeve and look at my arm. Luckily, it’s more of a scratch than a cut. “You want me to believe that you didn’t mean to hurt me? Tell me what happened the night Deanna was killed. Tell me what you know about the embezzlement scheme.”

“OK. OK. Yeah. I can do that.” She takes a deep breath, then another. “OK. I didn’t want to meet with you that night. I don’t . . . I didn’t trust you. But Deanna told me I should. She swore you’d help me.” She stifles another cough.

“I would’ve helped you. I’ll still help you if I can.”

“I wasn’t going to go into her store until I was sure, until I could sample your vibrations to see if they were crystalline.”

She’s using Assembly-speak, despite her excommunication. I wonder what she thinks of my vibrations at this moment.

“I hid behind the dumpster in the alley,” she continues. “I waited. Deanna said you would come through the back. I was supposed to follow. When I heard the shots, I ran away. I thought you killed her.”

“I didn’t get there until after she died. I would never hurt Deanna. You know how close Deanna and I were.”

“Yeah. The two of you had sex together sometimes, right?”

“Did you see anyone else go into The Barrista that night? Before Deanna was killed?”

“I didn’t see anyone come through the back.”

“What were you and Rich looking for?”

“Someone was embezzling the Assembly’s money. Millions had been funneled out of their accounts. I didn’t care. They kicked me out of their church. But Rich cared, and so I agreed to help him even though we both knew it was dangerous. I loved him, you know.”

“I know.”

“But he wouldn’t sleep with me like you and Deanna did together. He loved
her
.”

“Monica.”

She sneers at the mention of the name. “That woman. She stole him away from me.”

“Rich told me that he found some notes that Harmon wrote. Do you know anything about them?”

“Rich found them on a DVD. But someone got into the apartment and took it. You already know that. Anyway, they sabotaged Rich’s computer and framed him to make it look like he stole that money.”

“Someone from the Assembly? Christopher McCarthy, maybe?”

Her laugh sounds more like a shriek. “I don’t think that guy knows how to power a computer on.”

“Then who had access? That landlord? What was his name, Dale Garner?”

“That creep. Always trying to take photos up my skirt. But no, not him.”

“I came here to find Harmon’s notes.” I gesture at the boxes around the room. “Can you help me look through all this crap?”

“There’s no point.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve already found them.”

“Call your next witness, counsel.”

Frantz rises and mugs for the jury before saying, “Your Honor, having met its burden of proof, the plaintiff rests.”

This is gamesmanship. He could have said the same thing when we adjourned on Friday, but he wanted me to think he had more witnesses so I wouldn’t prepare my case-in-chief for this morning. Since I found Grace yesterday, I’ve done nothing else.

Judge Schadlow invites me to make my opening statement. I nod at Raymond. Lovely isn’t in court—she’s with Grace. We’re afraid if we leave her alone, she’ll run. Jonathan and Kathleen aren’t here. I’m sure they’re finished with me.

I walk to the lectern. Like Frantz, I work without notes. This is the first time since the trial started that I’m not on antianxiety medication. I’m not afraid, don’t even have butterflies. My clear-headedness is oddly disorienting, like breathing pure oxygen.

“Your Honor. Counsel. Members of the jury. You’ve just heard Mr. Frantz announce in open court that the Plaintiff has met its burden of proof. It’s not true. In our legal system, the plaintiff gets to go first. So far, you’ve only heard their side of the story. You, as jurors, can’t come to a fair and just decision until you’ve heard both sides. That’s not only the law, it’s what we teach our kids from the day they can reason—you always have to hear both sides of the story before you can make a fair decision. And when you hear our side, you’ll understand that the evidence doesn’t show what Mr. Frantz says it does. It shows the exact opposite.”

The jurors are attentive, even rapt, probably because I have some passion in my voice. I must have underestimated how much the Xanax–Valium cocktail suppressed my affect. Until now, I’ve probably sounded like I’ve been talking in my sleep.

I start by telling the jury who Rich Baxter was—a loving son, husband, and father, an amiable work colleague, a loyal friend. I talk about his representation of the Assembly, how he became the Assembly’s lawyer and devoted his career and then his entire existence to the Church. When I launch into a description of the Assembly’s peculiar beliefs, Frantz objects.

“Overruled,” Schadlow says. “Let’s hear the actual evidence, and we’ll decide its relevancy then.” Last week she would have sustained the objection. My resurrected courtroom abilities seem to have influenced her interpretation of the rules of evidence.

I go on to describe the Assembly’s belief in alternate universes, its view on suicide, its aggressive conversion techniques, its quest for political power not only in America, but worldwide. I tell the jury that this evidence will prove critical to exonerating Rich Baxter.

“In conclusion,” I say, “I’d like you to remember the testimony of Special Agent Holcomb, the FBI’s forensic accountant. She told you that the Assembly’s money went into a bank account in the name of a shell company called The Emery Group. But she didn’t tell you where that money went after that. It was paid out to someone, but she didn’t know to whom. Members of the jury, when we’re done with our case, you’ll know exactly where that money went. And it wasn’t paid to Rich Baxter. Rich wasn’t a criminal, he was the one trying to
stop
the crime. He was loyal to his client and his church, and in the end his loyalty cost him his life.”

Raymond Baxter is my first witness. On the stand, he looks tired and frail, a bereaved father forced to defend his child’s good name. He describes Rich’s childhood, college years, and legal career up until the religious conversion. By the time we’re done, he’s breathless. The jurors seem uncomfortable, but also sympathetic. When I pass the witness, I brace myself—Frantz tore Raymond apart in deposition.

As it turns out, Frantz can’t push Raymond without looking like a street thug. This isn’t a conference room where the only observers are the videographer and court reporter. The jury won’t like a lawyer who bullies a grieving father. So Frantz asks just three questions.

“Mr. Baxter, you lost touch with your son after he joined the Sanctified Assembly, did you not?”

“Correct. According to the Assembly, his late mother and I were contaminated because we were nonbelievers. So he had to . . .
disengage
is what those people call it. I didn’t have contact with him after that until he called me from the jail two days before he was . . . before he died.”

“Would you say that your son changed after he joined the Assembly?”

“Yes.”

“Changed so much that you didn’t know him anymore?”

“Absolutely. Those Assembly people . . .” Raymond realizes his error, but too late. He’s just proved Frantz’s point—once Rich joined the Assembly the son that Raymond knew ceased to exist. The new Rich could have been a thief.

“No further questions,” Frantz says.

When Raymond sits down, I say, “The defense calls Christopher McCarthy.”

McCarthy strides confidently to the witness stand. In theory, he’s my witness, which makes this
direct
examination. On direct, it’s usually the witness who does most of the talking because his lawyer can only ask open-ended questions. Leading questions—those requiring a
yes
or
no
answer—are the purview of
cross
-examination. But the rules make an exception for an adverse witness, and McCarthy is downright hostile. So I’ll be able to cross-examine him with yes or no questions, and if all goes well, lead him where I want him to go.

“The Church of the Sanctified Assembly is your client, is it not?”

“As I testified to earlier in the trial, that’s right.”

“And you promote the Assembly’s interests worldwide?”

“That would be accurate.”

“And like any other consulting firm, if you don’t succeed, your client has the right to fire you?”

“I suppose so, but the TCO is the only consultant the Assembly has ever had.”

“You work hard to keep the Assembly happy, don’t you?”

“I devote most of my waking hours to the Assembly, sir.”

Having established that his major goal in life is to advance the Assembly’s cause, I switch topics, getting him to confirm what I told the jury during my opening about the Assembly’s belief system. True to form, he views my questions as a chance to proselytize. By posing questions in a respectful, yet mildly incredulous tone, I do an effective job of exposing him for the religious fanatic that he is.