Escape (37 page)

Karp looked down at his pad and then back to the jurors. "When the defendant accomplished the deed she'd planned so carefully, Jessica Campbell moved on to the next phase. She retrieved the footlocker and placed the bodies of her three children in it, dragged it through the house—we will show you a photograph in which you can see the scratches the footlocker caused on the hardwood floors—to the family's Volvo station wagon. The locker had to be heavy, about 150 pounds, but she managed to lift it up and into the car's cargo space in the back.

"After Mrs. Campbell's arrest, crime-scene technicians went over the entire house and discovered that everything was clean and in seemingly perfect order. In fact, we will learn from the evidence that the main floor bathroom was so clean that it was nearly impossible to get even one clear fingerprint. Imagine that—two adults, three children, and not a single fingerprint.... There was certainly no blood, and in fact, the bathroom was so spotless that it was difficult to imagine that it was the place where the defendant had ruthlessly snuffed out the lives of her three trusting children. The defendant, Jessica Campbell, had gone to great lengths to clean the scene of the murders, and she went to these lengths to hide what she had done, aware of the enormity of what had happened. As a further part of her premeditated plan to cover up the murders, Jessica Campbell drove the Volvo north to the little town of Staatsburg, a village on the Hudson River she'd known growing up, and rolled the car, containing the trunk with her children's bodies stuffed inside, into the river."

Over the next half hour, Karp outlined how "a unique and effective group of forensic investigators" had figured out how to find the car and what its contents had revealed. "It showed that this was no spur-of-the-moment decision. No bolt out of the blue," he said. "These murders were well-planned, well-executed crimes committed by a person who had plenty of time to consider the nature and consequences of what she was doing and who took elaborate, diabolical steps to avoid detection. Even months after she committed these crimes, she refused to tell anyone where the bodies of her children were hidden, not even to allow them to be brought home to be buried decently."

The courtroom was still, the loudest sound the soft crying of Liza Gupperstein. Karp used the moment to check his notecards and then strolled to the front of the jury box, his arms folded across his chest.

"You're going to hear a lot of talk about mental illness and psychological terms like 'postpartum depression' and 'psychosis.' The defense will be trying to tell you that Jessica Campbell was legally insane at the time of these crimes and therefore not responsible for her actions. I think we can all agree that acting purposefully and intentionally killing another human being, except in self-defense or in the defense of others, may be just plain crazy," Karp said. "At least in our everyday use of the word. But that's not how the law defines insanity. With the law, it's all about responsibility. And to determine if the defendant is responsible or not, the law asks you to hear and see the evidence and then answer two questions: Did the defendant know the nature and consequences of her actions? And did she know that it was wrong?"

Karp rocked on his heels as he looked at the jurors, making eye contact with several of them. "And when you have answered these questions, and have come to the inevitable conclusion that the defendant knew the nature and consequences of her acts and knew what she did was wrong, I will ask you, in the name of the People of the State of New York, to find the defendant, Jessica Campbell, guilty of the murder of baby Benjamin, guilty of the murder of his four-year-old sister, Chelsea, and guilty of the murder of seven-year-old Hillary."

Karp returned to his seat and stole a glance around the courtroom. Jessica sat furiously drawing on the sketch pad as if her art mattered more to her than the proceedings.

Charlie Campbell sat turned slightly away from his in-laws, who were ignoring his existence. Ben Gupperstein had his arm around his wife, who leaned her head against his chest, her eyes closed.

Linda Lewis rose from her seat, flipped through several pages on a legal pad she had on the table, and then walked to the lectern, where she stopped for a moment with her head down, as if listening to an inner voice.

"What if God was one of us?" she asked, then smiled. "Yes, I know, those are the words of a Joan Osborne song, but what if God really
was
one of us? In human form, walking around, talking to us, asking us ... no, telling us ... what He wanted us to do? How would we recognize Him? Or what if God simply spoke to us in our minds? How could we distinguish that from a mental illness?"

Lewis walked behind Jessica Campbell and rested her hands on the shoulders of her client. "And if we believed, we really and truly believed, that God was speaking to us, would we not listen? And if God, or what we believed to be God, told us that in order to save our children's souls, we would have to sacrifice them, would we do it?"

She shook her head. "Only if we were insane." She looked over at Karp and Katz. "The chief prosecutor just told you that murder is an act of insanity, and maybe it is, but there are different degrees of insanity. Shooting somebody over a drug deal or even raping and murdering a college coed, as heinous as those crimes might be, do not rise to the level of insanity of a good and caring mother taking the lives of her three children because she believes that's what God has ordered her to do."

Lewis kept her eyes on Karp. "It's easy for the prosecution to dismiss mental illness as a 'bad excuse.' But that sort of thinking belongs in the Dark Ages, when we used to throw mentally ill people into dungeons or burn them at the stake. Fortunately, right-thinking people today understand that mental illness is just that—an illness that can be treated. It is not something that the patient brought upon herself. And just as other serious illnesses can sometimes be cured, and the patient can return to a normal life, so can the mentally ill be cured and returned to a productive, normal life."

Lewis went into a "layman's explanation" of the role of chemicals in the brain and their effect on postpartum depression before addressing some of Karp's opening statement. "Why did Jessica drive to Newark to purchase the footlocker and other items?" she asked. "Yes, it was to avoid detection. But not for the reason the prosecution said. She wanted to make sure that no one could stop her from obeying God's commandments. Not the police, nor her husband, Charlie Campbell. You will learn that Charlie Campbell ignored a psychiatrist's very strongly worded advice against Jessica having more children and instead pressured her to conceive again because of his own selfish political motives."

Everyone turned to Charlie Campbell, who bravely lifted his chin for the press, a man ready to accept his punishment and throw himself on the court of public opinion. Lewis threw him a bone.

"Most of us don't really understand how the brain works," she said. "How could Charlie Campbell, who went to school to be an attorney, be expected to give credence to this warning when the district attorney's office, which deals with mentally ill people every day, still doesn't get it? If Charlie erred in his judgment, then surely the DA is erring in prosecuting Jessica Campbell for something she could not control, and that she cannot even remember." The courtroom stirred at the contention that Jessica had amnesia about the killings. This was new.

"Yes, that's right," Lewis said. "If you listened to Mr. Karp, you would think there was no explanation for why Jessica would not help them find her children except that she was trying to get away with something. But in reality, it's because she didn't know where they were. As a matter of fact, Dr. Niki Nickles, one of the country's leading psychiatrists, will testify that Jessica Campbell experienced a disassociative episode where, for all intents and purposes, she wasn't in control of her mind. One moment, she's watching her husband leave for his meeting, battling the voice in her head that is urging her to save her children's souls, and the next thing she knows, it's twelve hours later and she's lying in bed, her children are nowhere to be found, and all she can remember is that she sent them to be with God." Lewis went back to her place behind Jessica Campbell but this time placed only one hand lightly on her shoulder. "Imagine how she feels now that with the aid of modem medicine and counseling, she knows what she did back then," the attorney said softly. "Her babies are dead, and she killed them. If you don't think that's a punishment that will last for the rest of her life, then it's because you haven't watched her deal with her grief as I have over these past months. But you must remember that while she may remember now, even if it's in bits and pieces, at the time of this horrible tragedy she could not help herself. And we will ask you to return a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Thank you."

The opening statements were concluded by late afternoon, and Judge Dermondy sent the jury home. Karp excused himself from Katz and Guma, who'd showed up to watch. "I have to make a few calls," he said and quickly made his way back to his office.

Mrs. Milquetost was gone, having left a Post-It note on his desk reminding him that he'd said she could get off early that day to meet her "friend" for a black-tie opening at the Guggenheim Museum.
Good timing,
he thought as he walked into the inner office to find Jaxon waiting for him. "Were you able to contact the Russian authorities?" Karp asked.

"I was indeed. In fact, we're going to meet later tonight. In the meantime, would you like to go to dinner?"

"Sounds great," Karp replied. "My gang's all over at Grandpa Ciampi's for a few days, and I'm starving. Where do you want to go?"

"How about Chinese?"

The bum shuffled along the sidewalk, passing in and out of the shadows of the 200 block of Bowery Street. He was only a few blocks from the expensive bars, art galleries, and restaurants of Little Italy and SoHo, but this wasn't that part of the Lower East Side. This was its dark heart where the tourists didn't venture after sundown—at least not if they had any sense.

Even the streetlights had stopped working on this particular block. The comers of buildings and stairwells reeked of urine and vomit. Here and there in the semi-dark, knots of tattered men and a few lost women stood talking and smoking, or leaned against the big brick building that stretched along the east side of the street. A few were in wheelchairs or balanced on crutches—casualties of alcohol-induced diabetes and untreated wounds.

They tended to be segregated by race; apparently the common obstacles of poverty and addiction did not make them brothers. And they kept a wary eye on each other and sized up newcomers—or the occasional stragglers from the nicer part of town who hurried along, even crossing Bowery to avoid contact.

The bum glanced up at the small sign that glowed red in the dark above the only lit doorway: Bowery Mission. Something of a New York City history buff, he knew that the mission had been founded in 1879 and was the third-oldest Gospel Mission in the United States. It still served three meals and a dose of religion daily to the city's homeless, who could also get a shower up to three times a week, free medical attention, the occasional clean change of clothes, and a bed if he or she got there early enough and was sober.

This bum wasn't looking for a bed or a bath. He was searching for one person, but it wasn't until the other man lurched up to him like a sailboat tacking in the wind that he recognized him. "Hey, buddy, can you spare a dime?" The bum, Espey Jaxon, did a double-take at the rugged facial features and the long black hair beneath a battered New York Yankees cap. "A dime won't buy much these days," he replied in the pre-arranged greeting. "Jesus, John, nice getup. I didn't recognize you."

John Jojola grinned, then held a hand up to listen to the radio transmitter he had plugged into one ear. Satisfied with what he heard, he looked back at the agent. "Yeah, nobody wants to know a drunken Indian. We can be damned dangerous. But you don't look like an upstanding member of the community yourself. And by the way, Tran just confirmed we're in the clear. If you had a tail you lost him."

Jaxon relaxed. He'd gone to dinner with Karp and then wandered around aimlessly in Chinatown for an hour before suddenly slipping into the Shanghai Emporium, a tourist shop owned by Tran, who used it as a front for his other "business activities."

Led to the back office, Jaxon changed into his "bum disguise" and was then shown the door to an alley. He spent another hour following a set of directions that would take him past various members of Tran's gang, who of course blended in with the rest of the Chinatown population, not so easy for anyone else who might be following the city's newest panhandler. He never knew which of the characters he passed on the sidewalk were Tran's men. It could be any one of the shop owners tugging at the arms of tourists on the sidewalk, urging them inside for the "best prices anywhere," or a tough-looking teen in a Mohawk and metal-studded leather clothing.

The instructions gradually took him over to Bowery, which he'd followed north to the mission to meet Jojola. If the Indian had asked him for a dollar, Jaxon would have moved on. Asking for a dime meant the coast was clear.

"Busy night," Jaxon noted, nodding toward the men queuing up in front of the mission door. "Hoping for a bed, a hot meal, and maybe a hot shower," Jojola replied. His eyes suddenly shifted to something over Jaxon's shoulder.

A large young black man approached, having decided that the old bums looked like easy marks. "Hey, muthafuckas, got any money or grass on you?" he demanded. He gave them his best 'I might be crazy' glare, which generally was enough to get what he wanted.

"Get lost," Jojola replied.

"What'd you say?" the young man snarled. "I'm gonna fuck you up ..." The young man's voice trailed off as he felt a sharp jab in his ample stomach. He looked down at the biggest knife he'd ever seen.

"I said, 'Get lost.' Now, what part of that didn't you understand?"

"Easy, old man," the thug said. "I was just messin' wif ya."

"Then I'm giving you this opportunity to leave before I cut off your nuts and stuff them in your mouth," the "old man" replied. "I've been watching you shaking down these guys all night, and I don't like it. If you're still on this block when I come back, I'm going to let the knife drink deep.
Comprende?"

"
No ... no ... no problem," the young man stammered. "I got to be getting on anyway." He backed away and then ran off into the night.

"That was easy," Jojola said. "Guess he prefers picking on drunks." He looked over at the derelicts next to the building. "I was one of them for a while after I got back from 'Nam. It's hard enough losing your pride without some asshole taking your last dollar, too.... What?"

"I didn't say anything," Jaxon replied. "I was just thinking about the times when that pig-sticker of yours would come in handy in an interrogation room."

"Can't say I ever used it at the pueblo for police work," Jojola replied. "Been tempted a time or two, but I'm sure the ACLU would have bitched about any confessions 'volunteered' under such circumstances. However, there might have been once or twice where I made sure it was lying around in plain sight."

Jaxon laughed. He knew the history of the knife—bone handled with a razor-sharp nine-inch blade—which had been handed down from generation to generation and finally to Jojola from his grandfather just before he shipped off to Vietnam in '68 as a U.S. Army commando. The Jojolas belonged to a Taos Pueblo warrior clan whose traditions went back until before the first European arrived in the area in the late 1500s.

As quickly as the knife had appeared, it was again sheathed and hidden beneath the old army jacket Jojola wore. The Indian set off for the end of the building, which led to a narrow passageway and a set of stairs up to a side door, above which hung a sign that said "Emergency Exit Only."

"For an Indian from the desert, you seem to be adapting well to city life," Jaxon noted.

Jojola grunted. "I learned a long time ago that you adapt to your surroundings or you don't live long. I don't like it though. I always feel dirty here, even when I'm not playing a bum. I can't seem to get the smell of the city off of my skin. Next time I talk to my boss, I'm going to ask for a little time to get back to the res' for some R&R. I feel the need of a sweat lodge to get the junk out of my pores and out of my mind for a bit."

"Let's finish saving the world," Jaxon replied, patting his friend on the shoulder. "And then you're free to sweat all you want."

"Thanks, chief." He moved up the steps and knocked on the door with Jaxon close behind him.

The door opened into a dark hallway. A flashlight beam blinded them. "How you ... fuck me oh boy oh boy ... doing, Mr. Jaxon?" asked the voice on the other end of the light.

"Fine, Warren, thanks for asking. How are you?" Before the little man answered, the agent caught a whiff of something pungent. "And you, too, Booger."

"Ooooh crap ... I'm good."

"'ood, 'ank you."

The men shut the door. A light came on revealing that they were in a long hallway with Dirty Warren and Booger, who'd been manning the switch. Dirty Warren led the way to a door, where he knocked "shave and a haircut, two bits" and opened the door. He motioned for Jaxon and Jojola to go in and closed the door behind them.

The room was apparently used at the mission as a library; a vast array of books, both paperback and hardback, lined a shelf, inviting the visitor to stay and read in one of the tattered but comfortable chairs. A tall, thin man in a friar's robe sat in one of them reading Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
, which he put down with a sigh before rising to shake their hands.

The man was even thinner and paler than the last time they'd seen him. He started to say something, but his hand went quickly to cover his mouth as he tried to suppress a cough. "My apologies," he said softly when the fit was over. "Agent Jaxon, John, good to meet you again, though I often see you more than you see me."

"No doubt," Jaxon replied. "How are you, David?"

Of all the odd characters who seemed to have gravitated into Jaxon's life over the past couple of years, David Grale, a former Catholic social worker, was the most unlikely. Jaxon had spent a good deal of his career with the FBI chasing after killers and psychopaths, yet here in front of him was a mass-murderer extraordinaire. It shouldn't have mattered that his victims were themselves murderers, thugs, and terrorists; there was nothing in the oath Jaxon had sworn to uphold that allowed for vigilante justice. But such were the times that he found himself allied with a killer, and besides, he liked the guy and wasn't losing a lot of sleep over his victims.

"How am I?" Grale repeated. "I'm in the same condition that all men are from the day we're born. In other words, I'm dying. But thank you for asking."

"I know a few docs who work for the government and..."

"Thanks again," Grale said, "but God will call me home in his time. Meanwhile, I have my work to do, which seems to be coinciding with the work of others."

As though on cue, there was another knock on the door. "Come in," Grale answered. He smiled when he saw Lucy Karp enter the room. He'd first met Lucy when she was a young teenager volunteering at the soup kitchen he ran for the church. That was before she, and her parents, had learned that though he was a social worker by day, he spent his nights killing men who'd been murdering homeless people. His crusade had since expanded to hunting other "evil men," who he believed were actually demons inhabiting human bodies. He hid from his enemies and the authorities in his underground "kingdom" of sewers, tunnels, and natural caverns beneath the city's streets with his ragtag army of Mole People, other homeless, forgotten people.

Lucy was followed by a tall man wearing a black eye-patch. The side of his face was scarred and had the waxy, melted look of skin that has been exposed to intense heat. But except for the physical disfigurement, Ivgeny Karchovski could have been mistaken for his cousin, Butch Karp.

Now, here's as odd a band of patriots as any that ever existed,
Jaxon thought. A
religious psychopath, a Russian mob boss, a language-savant-slash-daughter of the New York
DA
,
an Indian police chief and former commando from New
Mexico, and a G-man pretending to be a Rent-a-Cop.
His musing was interrupted when Tran entered.... Oh
yeah, let's not forget the former schoolteacher, turned
VC
guerrilla, turned restaurateur, who now makes his living as the head of a Vietnamese crime syndicate.

The new arrivals took seats or, like Jaxon, remained standing according to their preference. Grale sat back down and nodded to Jaxon. "I believe that you were the one who called this august council together?"

Jaxon nodded and began to brief the others on Miriam Khalifa's story, starting with the night her husband came home drunk. "He was talking about some 'big plan' that was being cooked up at the Al-Aqsa mosque. Then he started babbling about blowing up 'the Metro,' though she thought there was more to the name than that. Have I got it right so far, Lucy?"

"Yep. She also said that her husband had been attending these late-night 'classes' with other men from the mosque. These guys tended to be young and liked to talk about 'jihad,' inspired by Imam Jabbar. After her husband's suicide, this group stopped coming to the mosque. At first she thought they were simply avoiding the place so as not to be implicated in the attack on the synagogue."

"You said, 'at first.' What does she think now?" Tran asked.

"You noticed that, huh? Well, the feds and the NYPD never showed, but these guys still didn't return. She didn't make much of that until a couple of weeks ago when they started drifting back into the mosque community, two or three at a time. It was obvious that they were trying to blend in again. Then she heard through the mosque grapevine that those same men weren't just skipping prayers, they weren't in the city."

"Off somewhere training?" Jojola asked.

"Maybe." Jaxon took up the story again. "Of particular interest to me was that he mentioned a character who calls himself The Sheik. There's a lot of concern in D.C. about what this guy might be up to."

"Jamal also talked about Ajmaani," Lucy noted, looking at her uncle. "My old friend, Nadya Malovo," Karchovski growled. They'd been lovers when he was with the Soviet Army in Afghanistan and Malovo had been assigned there with the KGB. More recently, though, it had been a relationship based on who would kill the other first.

"Yes," Jaxon replied. "And when you have Malovo, The Sheik, and a dozen young men who believe they are working for Allah, including one who already killed himself and others in a suicide bombing, it adds up to something big."

"What about Prince Esra?" Lucy asked. "Where does he fit in?"

"The timing and the 'coincidence' of Khalifa belonging to the very mosque to which the prince was giving a lot of money can't be ignored," Jaxon replied. "But is the prince part of a plot, or is he the target?"

"Why kill the prince?" Tran asked. "What would that accomplish?"

"It would certainly be a major blow against the Saudi royal family," Jaxon said. "If it happened here, it would strain U.S.-Saudi relations. One of the primary objectives of Islamic extremism is not just to remove U.S. troops from the Middle East, but to establish a religious dictatorship, the caliphate, throughout the Muslim world and beyond ... starting with Saudi Arabia. And that means getting rid of the royal family. It wouldn't take much to ignite a popular uprising, and we'll be viewed as having supported an oppressive government. I think we're all old enough to remember— well, maybe not Lucy—but the U.S. supported the Shah in Iran when the people revolted, and look how that turned out. We're the Great Satan and the extremists are viewed as the good guys."