Home Invasion (8 page)

In the two months since Jorge Corona and Emilio Navarre had invaded the McNamara home, things had indeed settled down. Nobody in Home had forgotten about the tragedy, but summer was winding down, school was about to start again, and people had to carry on with their lives. The high school football team was already practicing, and so was the marching band. Some families got in last minute vacations.

For Chief Alex Bonner and the rest of her small police force, the remainder of the summer had been quiet. A few wrecks out on the state highway, some vandalism by bored teenagers, the occasional drunk and disorderly or domestic violence call.

No murders, and no burglars gunned down by homeowners. Alex knew now to appreciate that tranquility.

The interest of the news media had flared up once again in mid-summer, when the district attorney announced that he was dropping the attempted murder charges against Navarre. The man would be prosecuted for trespassing and for possessing a weapon illegally, as well as violating immigration laws, but that was all.

The announcement prompted outrage in Home, and a few people even took to the streets to protest. Alex could have told them it wouldn’t do any good. The camera crews would just take pictures of them and the reporters would make it sound like the protestors were more violent and intolerant than the KKK and the Nazis put together, when all the people were doing was expressing their legal right to make their opinions known.

But in this warped version of what America was becoming, tolerance for the opinions of others only cut one way.

At least the district attorney had withstood the continuing pressure from Clayton Cochrum, who still wanted Pete McNamara charged with murder and attempted murder. Cochrum wasn’t the only one beating that particular drum. The Mexican government had made a formal protest concerning the death of Jorge Corona and the wounding of Emilio Navarre and demanded that the United States Justice Department launch an investigation into whether or not the civil rights of the two men had been violated. Several prominent Hispanic groups within the U.S. echoed that call, as did numerous international civil rights organizations, and the government of more than one European country, although what business it was of theirs, nobody seemed to know.

The whole thing was crazy … and it was exactly what Alex had expected.

But at least the story wasn’t front page news everyday anymore. The administration in Washington was busy looking for something else to take over. The big targets—the banks, the auto industry, the insurance business, and most of the hospitals—had already been grabbed by the previous administration. The talk now was that because some school districts had more money than others, that was unconstitutional and local and state control of the public schools should be abolished so that the federal government could establish a nationwide school system with strict control over financing and curriculum … “to make everything equal,” you know. The politicians and the news media were already lining up to support the idea, because, after all, they said in their most sincere tones, it would be good for the children, and that was what it was all about, wasn’t it? Of course, anyone who dared to deviate from that line, be they parent, educator, or local administrator, was swiftly derided and accused of being racist, unpatriotic, homophobic (whatever that had to do with anything), and just plain big ol’ meanies.

To people who had even the least lick of common sense, it was the biggest bunch of bullcrap anybody had ever heard. But of course, no one ever listened to them….

But it kept the Navarre story off the front pages and the evening newscasts until the day in August when Dave Rutherford called Alex and said, “Cochrum has convinced the judge to move up the Navarre case.”

Alex had been utterly shocked that Navarre hadn’t taken off for the tall and uncut as soon as he was free on bond. Navarre was still around, though, probably staying somewhere in San Antonio. He was at every news conference that Clayton Cochrum held, sitting in a wheelchair at first, his arm and leg still heavily bandaged. As the weeks passed and he recuperated some, he was able to limp out at Cochrum’s side, looking pathetic like he was in great pain. Maybe he was, but it was no less than he deserved.

Not everybody saw it that way. Navarre was a celebrity. Reporters asked his opinion on everything from politics to who would win the latest reality competition on TV. Women sent him letters proposing marriage, and rumor had it that a famous literary agent was negotiating on Navarre’s behalf for a million-dollar book deal.

It went without saying that movie deals were in the works, too. Every Hispanic star in Hollywood wanted to play this poor, noble, victimized man. So did some of the black and Caucasian ones.

Alex hoped all of that would change once Navarre was convicted, so when Rutherford broke the news to her on the phone, she said, “Good. The sooner he’s behind bars so all this ridiculous hoopla can die down, the better.”

“You don’t understand, Chief,” Rutherford said grimly. “It’s not the criminal case against Navarre that got moved up. It’s the civil lawsuit he filed.”

Alex’s hand tightened on the phone as she leaned forward in the chair behind her desk. “What?” she demanded. “They’re going to try the civil suit
before
the criminal case?”

“That’s right.”

“But… but things aren’t done that way.”

“They are now,” Rutherford said. “The judge in the criminal case has been dragging his feet all summer, and everybody knows it. He doesn’t
want
to try the case. He knows that no matter what he does, he’s going to be in trouble with somebody. If you ask me, he wants the civil court jury to weigh in first, so he’ll have some idea of how to proceed with the criminal case.”

“That’s crazy,” Alex responded, well aware of just how often she had made that statement this summer.

“Yes, but I’m just about to head over to the county seat for a meeting with the district attorney, the Justice Department attorney assigned to the case, and Pete McNamara’s personal attorney. Trial starts Monday.”

Alex knew Joe Gutierrez, the young man who was defending Pete McNamara. Joe’s dad, Manny Gutierrez, had practiced law in Home for thirty years and had been McNamara’s attorney for much of that time. He had taken his son into the firm with him after Joe graduated from the University of Texas law school a couple of years earlier. Then, six months later, Manny had dropped dead of a heart attack, leaving Joe to handle the practice.

Joe was a good kid, smart and ambitious, but Alex wasn’t sure he was any match for a shark like Clayton Cochrum.

“Is there anything I can do to help, Dave?” she asked.

“Not at this point. I’m sure you and your officers will be called to testify during the trial. All you can do then is tell the truth.”

“Do you think that’ll be enough?”

“I hope so. We have right on our side.” The hollow sound of Rutherford’s voice told Alex that he knew how naïve anybody would be to really believe that in this day and age. It used to be thought that whoever had the most money usually prevailed in legal proceedings. That had changed over the past few decades. Now it was whoever had the politicians and the media on their side who won most of the time.

“Innocent until proven guilty” had turned into “innocent until proven politically incorrect.” Once the media pundits and the Washington pontificators had rendered that verdict, it was the Salem witch trials all over again.

“Well, if you need anything, you let me know,” Alex told the city attorney.

“Will do,” Rutherford agreed. “Wish me luck, Chief.”

“Good luck,” Alex said.

But she had a bad feeling they were all going to need a lot more than luck to come through this unscathed.

Monday, the day the case of Emilio Navarre’s civil lawsuit got underway, was also the first day of school. It was Jack Bonner’s senior year. One more year until he could shake the dust of this sleepy little town off his feet and start to live his life in some place more exciting and interesting. He had already applied to several universities. He knew his grades were good enough for him to get in, but he didn’t know if they would get him a scholarship.

He told himself that it didn’t matter. He would work to put himself through college if he had to. He would do whatever it took to get him out of Home.

His friend Steve already had things figured out. Steve was going to Texas A&M as a pre-med, following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a doctor. Jack always felt a little confused and aimless around him. Luckily, Rowdy was even more aimless than Jack and didn’t have any plans beyond the first football game of the season the next Friday night.

Jack’s mom was wearing a dress that morning instead of her usual police chief’s uniform. “I probably won’t be here when you get home this afternoon,” she told him. “I don’t know when I’ll be called to testify.”

“The Navarre case, right?”

“That’s right.”

Jack had kept up with it over the summer. You couldn’t really avoid it unless you never watched TV, listened to the radio, surfed the Internet, or read the newspaper. Jack did all of those things except read the newspaper; print took too long and was boring.

“What happens if he wins?”

“He can’t win,” Jack’s mom said. “He and his friend broke into the McNamara house. They committed a felony. Mr. McNamara acted in self-defense.”

She sounded like she was trying to be sincere, but in the back of her voice was a nagging uncertainty.

“Yeah, but what happens if he does win?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. As crazy as the world is these days … I just don’t know.”

It was rare for his mom to admit something like that, Jack thought. She was always in charge, with such a firm grasp of what was right and what was wrong and no hesitation whatsoever about telling somebody what they ought to do. What they
had
to do, in his case. To Jack’s way of thinking, she had taken the worst traits of being both a cop and a mom and elevated them to even higher levels. Her attitude had driven him crazy for a while, and he had delighted in pushing back against her, until he realized his life would go along a lot smoother if he just let her believe he was cooperating with her. That way, whenever she wasn’t around, he could do what he wanted … as long as he was careful about it.

“Well, don’t worry about me,” he told her. “I’ve got football practice after school, so I’ll be late getting home, too.”

She smiled across the kitchen table at him. “Gonna get off the bench more this year?”

He gave her a thumb’s up and said, “Way to boost the kid’s self-esteem, Mom.”

She laughed, and at that moment, he kind of liked her again. They didn’t have as much of the ol’ give-and-take as they used to when he was younger. He had decided she was too oblivious to get most of his humor and she probably figured he was just a smart-ass kid, but every now and then they still laughed together.

Maybe when he was older, things would be better between them.

She left for the county seat, and he headed for school shortly after that.

Rowdy and Steve were waiting for him in the parking lot. They greeted each other with colorful obscenities, the way teenage boys usually did at the sprawling school. It had been built forty years earlier, but many people in town still called it “the new high school.”

“How’s your mom think the trial’s gonna go today? “ Steve asked.

“She won’t really say,” Jack replied with a shake of his head. “She acts like she’s confident Navarre will lose, but I think she’s worried that he’ll win.”

“Things’ll really hit the fan around here if he does,” Rowdy said. “I mean, how can you break into a guy’s house and then sue him for shootin’ you?

Jack shrugged. “People have been doing that for a long time. And sometimes they win, too. I read about some cases like that on the Internet.”

“You should be a lawyer,” Rowdy suggested. “You like all that legal stuff.”

“Lawyers are weasels. That’s what Delgado says.” Jack and Delgado were still going to the firing range for target practice at least once every couple of weeks.

“How come everybody just calls him Delgado?” Steve asked.

“I dunno. I’ve never heard him say what the J. P. stands for.”

“Justice of the Peace,” Rowdy said. “Anyway, you need to be a lawyer, Jack, so you can defend me when I get arrested.”

Jack looked over at his friend. “What’re you gonna get arrested for?”

“Well, right off the top of my head, I don’t know.” Rowdy grinned. “But a screw-up like me’s bound to get in trouble sometime, right? Probably wind up in jail more than once.” He started to sing. “‘Nobody knows … the trouble I’ve seen….‘”

“That’s enough,” the vice-principal said as they went inside the building. He was standing there watching the students stream past him, and he didn’t seem any happier about it being the first day of school than they did.

As usual, the first day was busy and confusing, even for seniors. Jack had plenty on his mind.

But that didn’t stop his thoughts from straying to the county seat now and then.

He couldn’t help but wonder how the trial was going.

Nine people sat at the defense table: Joe Gutierrez and his client, Pete McNamara; Dave Rutherford, representing the city of Home; Everett Hobson, the district attorney of Hawkes County, and one of his assistants, Janet Garcia; Rosario Encinal, from the Solicitor General’s office in Washington, representing the federal government; and three attorneys representing the manufacturer of the gun Pete McNamara had used to shoot Jorge Corona and Emilio Navarre. It made for a crowded table. In fact, the bailiffs had had to bring in a smaller table and put it at the end of the one normally used by the defense, just to have room for everybody.

Despite that, the defense team seemed outnumbered by the three people who sat at the plaintiff’s table: Navarre, his lawyer Clayton Cochrum, and one of Cochrum’s associates, a stunningly beautiful blond woman.

That was the way it seemed to Alex, anyway, as she sat on one of the benches reserved for spectators. Since she was on the witness list, she would have to leave the courtroom before the trial got underway, but she had slipped in here in hopes of catching Pete McNamara’s eye and giving him an encouraging smile. She had known him for years, even before he’d been Jack’s Little League coach.

Pete had his head down and didn’t seem to be paying much attention to anything around him. His shoulders slumped like he was already defeated. Alex wasn’t really surprised to see that. Pete had taken Inez’s death hard. The few times she had talked to him over the summer, his eyes had been so haunted that he seemed barely there.

Dave Rutherford seemed to feel her looking at the defense table, though, and turned his head to look back at her. She gave him a brief, strained smile, then stood up and came over to the railing that divided the tables from the spectators’ benches.

“You’re not supposed to be in here, Alex,” he told her in a low voice. “You need to be out in the hall with the other witnesses.”

“I know. I just wanted to see Pete. Tell him I said hello, would you?”

“Sure.” Rutherford glanced at the crowd that had filled up the benches. “There are lots of people here from Home.”

“Of course, there are. We stand by our own.”

“I hope they behave themselves. Judge Carson is pretty intolerant of disturbances. If people get loud, it could hurt our chances.”

“I’ll spread the word.”

Rutherford nodded. “Thanks, Alex.”

She stood up and gripped his hand for a second, then spoke to several people in the audience she knew, asking them to pass along Rutherford’s suggestion that everybody be quiet and polite.

One of Pete McNamara’s friends from the VFW nodded solemnly and said, “We’ll try, Chief, but it’s mighty hard keepin’ our feelin’s in when we see poor ol’ Pete sittin’ up there on the wrong side of this trial. It oughta be the other way around.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Alex told the man.

She stepped into the hall outside the courtroom. Chairs for the witnesses lined one wall. A rope line had been set up to keep the press away from them, and a couple of bailiffs stood guard on it to keep the reporters at bay. Alex was grateful for that. The last thing she wanted right now was some news vulture clamoring in her face. Judge Phillip Carson had barred camera crews from inside the courthouse, but there were still plenty of reporters clogging the corridors.

Alex took a seat. She wished she could be inside the courtroom to hear the opening statements and everything else that was going on. Waiting was hard for her, and there was no telling how long it would be before she was called to testify. It might be today, Rutherford had told her, but more than likely it would be tomorrow or the next day. It all depended on how long jury selection took and how Clayton Cochrum presented Navarre’s case. It was possible that Cochrum wouldn’t put any witnesses on the stand except his own client, but Alex and her officers might be called as hostile witnesses, Rutherford had warned her.

She looked along the line of chairs. J. P. Delgado and Clint Barrigan were here, as were the EMTs who had responded to the call from the McNamara home. Was Cochrum going to try to get their testimony on record before the defense had a chance to do so?

Alex didn’t know. All she could do was wait, and wish the events that had spawned this travesty of justice had never taken place.

Dave Rutherford surprised her during the lunch break by telling her that jury selection was complete and that opening statements would take place as soon as court was back in session.

“Then testimony will get underway, I suppose,” Rutherford said with a worried frown. “I can’t help but think that Cochrum has some sort of trick waiting for us, though.”

“You’re probably right,” Alex said. “A weasel like him is bound to have something up his sleeve.”

Just looking at the smug, self-assured lawyer made her skin crawl. Navarre was just a thug who had never had any morals and never would. Cochrum, on the other hand, somewhere along the way had sold out whatever humanity he had in exchange for money. Although no one had been able to prove it, Alex was sure Cochrum was actually working for the Rey del Sol drug cartel or their enforcement arm, a gang that had originated in American prisons and now had members scattered throughout the border states and beyond. Some were illegals from Mexico, but many were native-born Hispanic Americans who had been lured into joining by easy money or misguided sentiments. Like all law enforcement personnel in this part of the country, Alex received frequent warnings about cartel activities.

About three o’clock that afternoon, Clint Barrigan, as the first officer to respond to the shooting call, was summoned into the courtroom to testify. That meant Cochrum was going the hostile witness route. That was the only course open to him, really, other than having his client testify and then resting his case.

When Clint came back out into the hall a half hour later, his rugged face was grim. He looked at Alex and gave a little shake of his head, but that was all. They had all been cautioned by Dave Rutherford about discussing the case.

Delgado was next, and then one by one, the EMTs. It looked like Cochrum was saving her for last, Alex thought. But the time was close to five o’clock now, so it appeared her testimony wouldn’t take place until the next morning. The case was already a lot farther along by now than she had realistically expected it to be.

Sure enough, a few minutes after the last of the ambulance guys emerged from the courtroom, the doors opened and the spectators and reporters began to stream out. An excited hubbub filled the corridor. When the lawyers appeared, the commotion got even worse. The attorneys for the defense drew a crowd, but Clayton Cochrum drew an even bigger one and obviously reveled in it. Alex didn’t see Navarre; she supposed Cochrum’s bimbo assistant had probably slipped him out of the courthouse some other way.

Cochrum spewed a lot of high-toned crap about being certain that justice would prevail for his client, and the reporters ate it up. Alex found a harried-looking Dave Rutherford and asked, “What’s going on in there?

Rutherford shook his head. “I don’t really know. Cochrum doesn’t seem to really care about the testimony. He just uses it as an excuse to work in some speeches about the evils of guns and what racist rednecks we all are. Somebody from our side always objects, of course, and the judge sustains the objections, but that doesn’t matter. Cochrum’s already hammered that into the heads of the jury. Carson ought to shut him down as soon as he starts up with that claptrap, but he won’t.”

“Why not?”

Rutherford grimaced. “Carson used to be a federal judge. He retired from that and ran for election as a state judge. But he got his marching orders from Washington for a long time, and you know what that means.”

Unfortunately, Alex did. Not much had come out of Washington in the past decade that most folks in this part of the country agreed with.

“Anyway, I think you’ll be first up in the morning,” Rutherford went on. “Are you ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Alex said.

But she had to wonder what was waiting for her. She had an uneasy feeling that it might be something none of them expected.