Flat Lake in Winter (21 page)

“So that’s good?”

“Very good,” he said, kissing the tip of her nose as a reward. “The doctors have begun interviewing Jonathan. We’ll know more about that in a week or two. And it seems the rumors about the fire were right.”

“Oh?”

“It certainly looks like Jonathan’s doing. Middle of the night, definite signs of arson, doors locked inside and out. And then, when they asked him about it, he couldn’t say if he’d set it or not. Sound familiar?”

“I’m sure he didn’t
mean
to do it,” she said.

“Exactly the point.”

“So what do you do now?” she asked.

“Now,” he answered, reaching out for her, “is when I take you in my arms, and tell you how terribly much I love you.”

Had he really said that?

* * *

SO IT’S REALLY a lock?” Pearson Gunn asked Roger Duquesne, forty-five minutes and a pitcher later.

“A lock? It is the lock of all locks,
mon ami,”
Duquesne confided. “A
fait accompli
.”

“No loose ends?”

“
Bien sur,
there are loose ends,” said Duquesne.
“Toujours
there are loose ends. Otherwise, private dickheads like you would scream that it is all
trop parfait,
it must be a
frame!”

“Like what?” Gunn asked.

“What ‘Like what?’”

“What kinda loose ends?”

“
Caca
stuff,
mon ami.
Like
peut-être
Deke Stanton didn’t read the young man his rights
très bien.
Or that Bass fellow messed up the footprint trail
un petit peu.
Or only six out of seven hairs were found to be a DNA match. Or crime scene got a little sloppy, handled the knife too much, so by the time the latent-print people got ahold of it, they came up with
rien du tout.
Tell me,
mon ami.
Is that kind of
merde
going to spring your guy?”

“No,” said Gunn. “It sure ain’t.”

But it was good to know about, just the same.

IT WAS THE conclusion of the psychiatrist George Goldstein that Jonathan Hamilton honestly had no recollection whatsoever of stabbing his grandparents to death. That same lack of recollection, however, according to Dr. Goldstein, was “entirely consistent in every respect with Jonathan’s having committed the crime while in a somnambulistic state.”

Jonathan’s first post-event awareness was when he awoke to urinate sometime later in the early-morning hours, and discovered blood on his hands. His first reaction had been confusion. As he’d followed the blood trail to the main house, he’d experienced a growing sense of dread. That dread had changed to full-fledged horror when he reached the scene of the crime and beheld the results of his acts. All of those reactions were typical to incidents of sleep-related violence, as was Jonathan’s prompt phone call to the authorities, in which he’d related that his grandparents had been “hurt real bad.”

To Dr. Goldstein, Jonathan Hamilton presented a classic profile of a sleepwalker. Having familiarized himself with the results of Hillary Munson’s findings, he knew Jonathan had a probable history of fetal alcohol syndrome, or at least its less pronounced cousin, fetal alcohol effect. On top of that, he had reportedly suffered some significant degree of organic brain damage as a young adult, the result of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning during a fire.

Dr. Goldstein found that Jonathan himself seemed to have some awareness that he’d had sleepwalking episodes at various times in the past, though he was characteristically vague when it came to the source of that awareness. As to why the jail records contained no accounts of unusual nighttime activities, that fact could easily be attributed to the medication that had been ordered for Jonathan to combat his sleeplessness. The log entries showed it to be clonazepam, a Valium-like drug Dr. Goldstein often had prescribed to his own patients
specifically for the suppression of night terrors.

Dr. Goldstein concluded by suggesting that a variety of tests be performed. Among his recommendations was first to take Jonathan off all medication, then hook him up to a polysomnograph machine, and - by applying a low-voltage electrical current to the large motor muscles - attempt to artificially induce a sleepwalking episode.

Such an experiment, of course, would require the consent of the jail authorities. Because of that, there’d be no way of keeping it secret from the prosecution; and for now at least, it would remain in the suggestion box.

EVEN AS MATT Fielder spent the weekend playing family with Jennifer and Troy, the defense continued to work. Pearson Gunn crossed off a few things from his list of “Things to Do,” and added a few others. He also started a new checklist, which he called “Things to Think About.” It began modestly enough.

• Turkey or duck for Thanksgiving?
  
• Miranda rights ever read to Jonathan?
  
• Why no prints on knife?
  
• Cut back on ale consumption?
  
• Why only six out of seven hairs?
  
• Enough antifreeze in car radiator?
  

Taking a look at the list, Gunn decided that maybe he’d simply been looking at things the same way for too long. Perhaps it was time for a new approach, a little creativity. They even had a phrase for it these days, like everything else. “Out-of-the-box thinking,” they called it. So why shouldn’t
he
give it a try? After all, what did he have to lose?

Duck it would be.

HILLARY MUNSON WORKED late into the night to put the finishing touches on the report of her meeting with Sue Ellen Blodgett. She knew how important Sue Ellen’s testimony could be in terms of establishing a historical record of Jonathan Hamilton’s sleepwalking. She also wanted to memorialize in writing the chain of custody of Jennifer Hamilton’s letter to Sue Ellen, so as to preempt any attack on its admissibility at trial. And she wanted to have everything finished so she could overnight it to Matt Fielder before the holiday weekend began.

Hillary was actually a little bit nervous about the holidays. She was driving down to New York (more specifically to Whitestone, Queens) to spend the weekend with her parents, her brother, and her aunts and uncles and cousins - all of whom she hadn’t seen in almost two years. And, at her mother’s urging, she’d agreed to bring that “special friend” she’d been talking about for some time, but whose name she’d kept secret all this time.

Oh, were they in for a surprise!

THE SECOND DOCTOR to go into the Cedar Falls jail and interview Jonathan Hamilton was a clinical psychologist by the name of Margaret Litwiller. Dr. Litwiller brought with her a briefcase full of materials - standardized test forms, blank paper, crayons, playing cards, stick-figure drawings, black-and-white photographs, inkblot cards, anatomically correct dolls, and tiny colored blocks shaped like houses, cars, and other everyday objects.

She spent nearly three hours with Jonathan, during which time (at least according to the visiting-room guard’s observations, dutifully noted in the log book) the two of them “did proseed to play with alot of little toys.”

In the confidential report she would submit to Matt Fielder some two weeks later, Dr. Litwiller would conclude that Jonathan, “while marginally oriented to person, place, and time, possesses only the most primitive level of insight into his own ideation and thought processes. . . . In particular, his MMI profile reflects almost childlike responses to his surroundings. . . . Notably, however, his Rorschach responses reveal surprising levels of hostility. Confronted with cards in the series six-a through eleven-c, normally suggestive of butterflies, songbirds, and teddy bears, Jonathan instead sees bats, birds of prey, and grizzlies. This hostility, while deeply suppressed, seems largely directed toward authority figures, in particular parents and grandparents.”

In Dr. Litwiller’s considered opinion, it was quite evident that while asleep, and accordingly freed from the constraints of his superego, Jonathan had simply “acted out” his anger against the most convenient authority targets available.

* * *

THANKSGIVING DAY FELL on the twenty-seventh of November. A low cloud cover blanketed the Northeast, but a promised cold front stayed just above the Canadian border. Matt Fielder joined hands with Jennifer Walker and her son Troy as they said grace over the fold-down aluminum tabletop in the trailer park just north of Nashua, New Hampshire, before feasting on a small turkey. In Tupper Lake, New York, Pearson Gunn carved crisp duckling, stuffed with homemade venison sausage, for his wife and himself in their A-frame. Hillary Munson and her companion, Lois Miller, sat down with a roomful of slightly stunned family members, to a five-course dinner featuring rock Cornish game hen, in a split-level in Whitestone, Queens.

And in Cedar Falls, New York, Jonathan Hamilton was slipped a plastic tray through the bars of his cell. The tray was machine-stamped with little compartments, which this day had been filled with breaded chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, frozen peas, and jellied cranberry sauce. Some jailer’s version of a Thanksgiving Special.

ON THE MONDAY following Thanksgiving, Matt Fielder drove west from Nashua to Albany, and attended a meeting at Hillary Munson’s office. Mitch Dinnerstein, of the Capital Defender’s Office, had driven up from New York for the occasion, representing Kevin Doyle. Pearson Gunn was there, as well as Drs. George Goldstein and Margaret Litwiller.

It was Fielder who had called the meeting, and he spoke first. He’d brought the group together, he explained, because he wanted to address a problem and get the reaction of everybody present to a possible solution. The problem was the adverse publicity they were getting in the press. With each passing day and every court appearance, Gil Cavanaugh was consolidating his manipulation of public opinion. The defense camp, meanwhile, had so far remained silent, fearful that anything they said could only make things worse for Jonathan.

It took the group all of a minute and a half to reach a consensus that they were indeed taking a beating from the media. The discussion quickly shifted to the remedy Fielder now proposed: floating the sleepwalking defense to see how it might play out there.

The two doctors spoke first. Both were completely convinced that Jonathan had held no conscious malice toward his victims and that the killings could only be explained as an act of somnambulistic violence, for which he should not be held criminally responsible. Both were satisfied beyond any doubt that Jonathan was neither malingering nor attempting to dupe them; he simply lacked the intellectual capacity necessary to pull off that sort of deception. Both were willing to stake their reputations on their findings, and both voted wholeheartedly in favor of going public.

Hillary Munson agreed in principle, but raised a yellow flag. Defense lawyers, she cautioned, lately had been feeding the public an ever-increasing diet of exotic defenses. Over the past decade or so, there’d been high-profile trials attributing sensational crimes to insanity, alcohol abuse, drug dependency, gambling addiction, spousal violence, childhood sexual abuse, multiple personality disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, racial injustice, and a variety of other claims. Alan Dershowitz had even published a book on the subject, titled
The Abuse Excuse.
Hillary’s fear was that a saturation point was being approached and that society might well be headed for a period of backlash, in which juries might finally reach the point of not caring
why
a particular defendant had committed a crime, so long as he had in fact committed it.

Mitch Dinnerstein spoke up. First he wanted to know if they weren’t jumping the gun. “Are you sure you’re ready to concede factual guilt?” he asked.

Fielder looked across the room, in the direction of Pearson Gunn. After all, Gunn had conducted the bulk of the defense investigation, and it was Gunn who had a confidential source close to the prosecution’s team. But Gunn was gazing off to one side, and Fielder failed to catch his eye. He wondered if the investigator might be feeling just a bit intimidated by the others in the room. Gunn was a high-school dropout, surrounded by a roomful of advanced-graduate-degree holders. But there was too much at stake to worry about such considerations.

“How about it, Pearson?” he asked. “From what you know, do

you have the slightest bit of doubt that Cavanaugh can prove Jonathan did it?”

Gunn shook his head slowly from side to side. “The way his people are talking,” he said, “you can stick a fork in the kid right now.”

Which was simply another way of saying,
He’s done.

“Then it seems to me,” said Dinnerstein, “that you’ve got nothing to lose. Always try to remember what the goal in these cases is. It’s not to
win,
at least not in the traditional sense of getting somebody acquitted, walking him out the door. What we’re doing comes down to
triage.
It’s saving lives. You go public with this, come right out and say your client did it, first thing that happens is you’re going to score points for honesty. Then, when you tell them he shouldn’t be held fully responsible because he was a
known sleepwalker,
they’ll at least be listening to you. Of course, you’ll have to be ready to put your money where your mouth is. Can you do that, when push comes to shove?”

“We’ve got proof,” Fielder said, “documentary proof that Jonathan was sleepwalking at least as early as ten or twelve years ago. Probably a lot longer than that.”

“And we can back that up with test results,” chimed in Dr. Litwiller.

“Then fucking
go
for it,” Dinnerstein said. “If you can sell it in the court of public opinion, Cavanaugh will blink. As soon as he sees that Joe Six-pack doesn’t want to kill this kid, he’ll come to you and offer you elwop.”

“‘Elwop’?” asked a confused Dr. Goldstein.

“Life without parole,” Fielder translated.
“L-W-O-P.”

“What we really call it,” said Dinnerstein, “is a home run.”

But Fielder, whose call it was, still wasn’t fully convinced. “Supposing you’re right, Mitch: It’s all well and good. We get a little public support, force Cavanaugh’s hand, see where it all takes us. But suppose Hillary’s right: Suppose it turns out the public couldn’t care less. How do we know the whole thing’s not going to blow up in our faces?”

“That’s the chance you take,” Dinnerstein said. “But, hell. Wouldn’t you rather find out now, instead of down the line, when the jury brings in its verdict?”

“I sure wish,” said Fielder, “there was some way we could gauge ahead of time how the public’s going to react to this.”

“Maybe there is.” The voice was Hillary Munson’s. “What do politicians do when they want to try out an idea? Or Madison Avenue types, when they need to see how an ad campaign is going to play?”

“They test-market it?” Fielder guessed.

“Exactly.” Hillary nodded. “They try it out on a
focus group.”

Fielder inched forward on his chair. “You mean we ought to go out and find a bunch of housewives, ask them what they think of the idea?”

“Something like that,” Hillary said, “but be careful some feminist doesn’t hear you talking like that.”

“Right,” said Fielder. “But I can’t go to the judge and ask him to sign an order allocating funds for market research. He’d throw me out on my ear. Worse yet, he’d make me tell him what the nature of the defense is, that we want to do the research on. And as soon he knows, Cavanaugh will know. So we can’t go to the judge. And if we can’t, where else would we ever get the money to do something like that?”

It was at that point that all eyes slowly turned in the direction of Mitch Dinnerstein.

“All right, all right,” he said after a moment. “I’ll run it by Kevin. Who knows? He might just be crazy enough to go for it.”

BY THE SECOND week of December, autumn in the Adirondacks is already a distant memory. The cold has set in for good by that time, after a series of false starts and temporary reprieves. But it is by no means the cold that is the worst part of an upstate winter. Nor is it the snow, which traditionally falls far more heavily in the western regions of the state. Nor is it even the wind, for that matter, though on a blustery day that can be a pretty serious contender for the honors.

Ask almost anyone who lives in the heart of Adirondack Park to tell you the single thing he or she hates most about winter, and the answer you’ll hear isn’t the cold, or the snow, or the wind.

It’s the
darkness,
hands down.

And when they talk about darkness in the Adirondacks, it isn’t simply a matter of the tilt of the earth producing a later sunrise and an earlier sunset as you move farther north. No, the elements have gotten together in a conspiracy that reaches far deeper than that. What little daylight there is in winter comes from a sun that crosses low in the sky, where its path is not only dramatically shorter, but where its rays are often obscured by high mountains, filtered by the boughs of tall evergreens, and angled through an increasingly thick layer of clouds, water vapor, and other atmospheric particles. Instead of being light by five or six in the morning, the sky remains pitch-dark until nearly eight. It takes almost to noon before anything remotely approaching true brightness is achieved, and by then, it seems, the sun is already thinking about setting. By three it is dusk; by four you need your headlights to drive.

For the locals, it all adds up to fewer hours spent outdoors, less opportunity for physical exercise, and a dramatic increase in cases of breathing disorders due to molds, spores, and dry wood smoke. This is the stuff that depression is made of. The Adirondacks are where the term “cabin fever” originated. It’s little wonder that the upstate suicide rate is said to nearly triple during the period from early December to mid-March.

For Matt Fielder, the shortened days brought a slow but steady retreat into the confines of his heated living room. That meant fewer hours of cutting wood, and more of burning wood. As esthetics gradually yielded to survival, the doors of his stove stayed shut almost around the clock. Fire had become a commodity to be felt, rather than a luxury to be watched.

Beyond that, the diminished daylight provided Fielder with even more time to himself. More time for reading, for writing, and for attending to some much-needed repairs to the interior of his cabin. More time to focus on Jonathan Hamilton’s case, and to miss Jonathan Hamilton’s sister.

In Fielder’s mind, the two things had become hopelessly intertwined. Sure, there were all the usual reasons for wanting to prevail in the case. In spite of what he’d done, Jonathan remained a hugely sympathetic figure, a profoundly damaged boy trapped in a man’s body and subjected to forces about which he had little understanding, and over which he had no control. The enemy was a pompous, self-serving politician with an agenda that had nothing at all to do with fairness or justice. And the stakes they were playing for were enormous: Nothing less than Jonathan’s life hung in the balance.

As always, there was the driving force of Fielder’s own ego at work, the innate competitiveness that had driven him to this strange line of work years ago. Like any criminal-defense lawyer who’d ever walked into a courtroom, Matt Fielder loved to win, and - even more - hated to lose. So the case ended up being one that consumed him like no other. It was a case he took to sleep with him each night and woke up with each morning.

And yet there was even more.

There was Jennifer.

Here Fielder had finally succeeded in leaving his former life behind him - and with it the never-ending grind of work, the suffocating closeness of the city, and the absurd, complicated strategies of remaining single in a world that seemed created for couples, families, and groups. Here he was, living out his
Walden Pond
fantasy in his cabin in the woods, away from it all, a million miles from civilization, thumbing his nose at the rest of the world. He had everything he needed, and nothing he didn’t want. It was the culmination of a dream, a time he should be reveling in and celebrating, as the happiest man on the face of the earth.

And he was miserable.

He was in love.

He knew he didn’t want to win this case just so he could save Jonathan, or beat Cavanaugh, or strike a blow for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. He didn’t even want to win it just to satisfy his own precious ego. No, he wanted to win it for
her.
He wanted to free the prisoner from the dungeon so that the real prize could be his. In dream after dream, Fielder saw himself scooping up the waiting princess in his arms and carrying her off from her wretched trailer park to his magical clearing in the forest. There he’d even build an addition to his cabin, so there’d be room for her son as well.

Though he figured the one bathroom should still be enough.

AS IT TURNED out, Kevin Doyle
was
crazy enough to like the idea of market research into a sleepwalking defense. The problem was, he simply didn’t have the money to commit to it. Governor Pataki was already hounding the legislature to cut back funding on defense expenses in capital cases. Why, the governor wanted to know, had the Court of Appeals set the rates for defense lawyers so high? Why couldn’t they pay them the same $40 in court and $25 out of court they paid them in other cases? Surely they’d still have plenty of takers, if only for the publicity value generated by the cases. The purpose of the death penalty was to deter murderers, after all, not to enrich defense lawyers. And why take the taxpayers’ hard-earned money and spend it on all these fancy, unnecessary defense experts, like mitigation specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and the like? It was all so very simple in the governor’s mind:
You really want to deter somebody, you execute him. Then see how quickly he goes out and kills somebody else.

Doyle was simply too busy trying to hold the line against cutbacks to stick his neck out and allocate funds for what Fielder’s team wanted. But he did have a suggestion. “Call Allie Newhart,” he said. “She’s down in Washington, at the NJRI. It sounds like the kind of thing they might be interested in.”

The NJRI, or National Jury Research Institute, is a privately funded, non-profit group established to analyze the processes by which juries reach their verdicts. Its studies are published in various scientific texts and journals, and are available to any interested party, prosecution and defense alike. Its methodology includes questioning real jurors who have sat on actual cases and are willing to be interviewed, as well as the staging of mock trials during which the mechanics of jury deliberations can be observed.