Move to Strike (19 page)

‘Too milky?' Chelsea asked.

‘No, it's fine,' managed Sara. ‘Different to what I am used to, but that can't be a bad thing.'

‘Different is good. Mother used to tell us that. “
We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.” '

‘She was right.' Sara smiled. ‘In fact, I think I've heard that quote before.'

‘Anne Frank,' said Chelsea. ‘She spent two years in an attic with her family and four other people. A prisoner in her own home.'

Sara met Chelsea's eye, hoping the girl would go on, but when she didn't elaborate Sara found herself unable to hold her question in any longer.

‘Chelsea, are you okay? I mean, this past week, it must have been so hard on you, on J.T., and . . .' She stopped there, on purpose, hoping Chelsea would note the lack of reference to her father.

‘Not just us. Hardest on someone else too, don't you think?'

‘You mean your . . .'

‘Mother, of course,' she interrupted, as if determined to get it out. ‘Considering . . .'

Sara nodded. ‘My point is that . . .'

But Chelsea interrupted again. ‘I take my SATs in a few weeks' time,' she said.

‘Ah . . .' said Sara with a sigh, sensing that Chelsea needed more time. ‘That's early, isn't it? I mean, your dad says you only just turned sixteen.'

‘I am a year ahead,' she said. ‘I am going to study law, like my mother. I want to do pre-law at Harvard and then transfer to Princeton or Yale or Columbia.'

‘But why transfer?' asked Sara, broaching the obvious question, and in that moment sensing that it was exactly what Chelsea was hoping she would do. ‘I mean, Harvard has one of the best law schools in the world.'

‘I am waiting for J.T. to catch up with me, so we can transfer interstate together. He wants to be an architect and all three universities have excellent post grad schools so . . .'

‘You could leave home together.'

‘
Exactly
,' she said.

And with that, Sara decided it was time for another try.

‘Chelsea, I want you to know that if you need someone to talk to . . . It is just us two right now, and as your brother's attorney, anything you tell me in regards to this case is privileged.

‘What I am trying to say is that sometimes things are not as they seem. Sometimes we feel obliged to take a certain path simply because someone else has forced us to do so. But that doesn't have to be the case, Chelsea – for you, or for J.T.

‘I know you are scared. But in the end you and your brother, you really need to trust us. David was a friend of your mom's,' she said, hoping this might make a difference. ‘They went to college together and he says she was . . .'

The teenage girl stared directly at her, the tears now trailing slowly down her smooth, pale cheeks. And then she shook her head as if what Sara was proposing was impossible, before taking a breath to say, ‘Can you stand up?'

‘
What?
' asked Sara, but she could see the urgency in the young girl's eyes, the silent but desperate plea that Sara do as she asked.

Sara stood, and looked down at the girl, just as Stephanie's killer had done. And in that moment Sara knew she was trying to tell her something – to
show
her exactly what had gone down.

But she could not see it . . . she could not
SEE IT
and Chelsea was unable to tell her – unable or too terrified, and Sara sensed the latter was more likely the case.

‘I can't reach it,' said Chelsea then, still sitting but extending her hand towards Sara's belly. ‘I wanted to feel if your baby was kicking.'

‘Chelsea, I wish . . . I could . . .'

‘No,' said Chelsea, the tears now splattering on the table before her. ‘That's okay. He can hear us though, can't he? Your baby, I mean, even though he isn't really here yet, he can hear what we are saying and when you think of it that way, there are really three of us in this room.'

Sara nodded, the magnitude of it hitting her square in the face.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I understand, Chelsea. Three.'

‘Y
ou are going to have to do something about that,' said child psychologist Barbara Wong-McGregor as she met David at the front door of the Plymouth Juvenile Detention Unit, shaking David's outstretched palm with one hand and shoving a copy of this morning's
Boston Tribune
into his chest with the other.

‘It's nice to meet you,' said David in reply, more than a little taken aback by the woman's direct approach to an introduction. ‘And thanks for meeting me on such short notice.'

Not long after Rigotti had left them, and David had explained to Joe that he was on his way to Plymouth to see J.T. Logan, Joe had made a call to an old friend by the name of Barbara Wong-McGregor. She was a respected child psychologist and, according to Joe, one of the best juvenile shrinks in the business. After a minute of to-ing and fro-ing on his cell – including some talk about Joe owing Wong-McGregor big time – the respected expert agreed to meet David in the detention unit's lobby in a little over an hour so that she might give him an early assessment of his client and some idea of what the hell might be going on in his traumatised head.

‘I read the paper, Ms Wong-McGregor,' said David, guessing the ‘call a spade a spade' expert was talking about this morning's report. ‘And to be
honest, as hard as it is to believe, it is pretty much a fair representation of what went down in court yesterday.'

‘It's Barbara,' she said, shaking her head before turning her back on him to head towards the front security desk behind them. ‘And I am not talking about the main story but the break-out piece on page five, the one that leads with a header stating: “Furious, Fourteen and Armed”. The press is already throwing your kid in the basket with the likes of the Columbine killers, and that is no good for anyone, least of all your client.'

David began to see why Joe spoke so highly of this woman after all.

‘That kind of stuff labels our kid as a loon from the get-go.' David had never heard a child psychologist refer to a ‘patient' as a ‘loon' before, but he guessed there was a first time for everything.

‘And,' Barbara went on, ‘it pollutes our jury pool before we even have a chance to get started.'

Our
. . .
we
. . . the woman was already on board – and despite her rather odd demeanour, David had to admit he was grateful. ‘We don't want him labelled as having serious psychotic tendencies,' said David then.

Barbara nodded. ‘The jury think he's crazy, they'll be sympathetic but they'll convict,' she said, raising her left hand. ‘The jury think he's a victim, they'll be sympathetic but they'll acquit,' she added, now raising the other. ‘You see the difference?'

‘I . . . sure,' said David, realising Wong-McGregor had not only listened to Joe's very brief description of the case, but also read between the lines.

‘Right.' She nodded as she accepted her security pass from the desk personnel as if she did this every morning, which she probably did. ‘Thanks, Walter,' she said to the guard who also handed David his own red-coloured pass before moving around the desk to escort them into the building proper.

‘So, we agree you are going to have to make a concerted effort to control the way the kid is portrayed in the media,' she said, as if needing confirmation.

‘I . . . yes,' said David, sensing that this was a ‘yes' or ‘no' question if ever there was one.

‘Great,' she said, before her previously serious face broke into one of
the biggest smiles David had ever seen. ‘Now that that is sorted, we can go and see our kid.'

Twenty minutes later they were sitting in a too-small, windowless interview room in the juvenile detention unit's maximum-security fifth floor. The only thing to break the monotony of the grey-painted walls was the slightly darker door at the far right-hand corner of the room.

Barbara Wong-McGregor dragged the spare seat to the side, while David sat across from his client who was now wearing a maroon Department of Youth Services detention facility jumpsuit, his hands crossed on the metal table before him, his legs parallel to those of the aluminum table which, like the ones on his chair, had been securely bolted to the floor.

‘When I came home from school I went straight to my room,' said J.T. Logan who, after several anxious enquiries as to the welfare of his sister (‘
Have you seen her?'
,
‘Is she back at home with Father?'
,
‘Is she okay?')
, had settled back quietly.

‘I did like I always did,' he said, focusing on the small recorder Barbara had asked David to allow her to use as part of her initial assessment analysis. ‘Practised my violin until 4.26.39, did my trig homework until 5.01.05, my English until 5.40.29, then biology, history and geography.'

After David had taken Barbara into his confidence regarding their suspicions on the abusive environment of the Logan family home, the child psychologist had warned that, before they even attempt any enquiries relating to J.T.'s home, they must ease him with the security of ‘fact' – or in other words, questions that called for a direct reporting of events rather than expressions of his emotional well-being or neglect.

‘Kids like this live by the motto of “trust no one”
,' she had said. ‘
And direct assumptions or accusations are only going to scare him. Don't forget there is a lot to be learned from J.T.'s responses – and whether we perceive them to be “false” or, more to the point, “coached”
.'

So David had begun at the beginning – asking J.T. to tell them about his day from the moment he woke up last Friday morning to the moment the police arrived at his Beacon Hill home later that night. The boy answered clearly and respectfully, describing his movements in detail, sticking to a strict chronological order without any vacillation or delay.

‘J.T.,' said Barbara, who had remained silent until now, ‘you said you
did violin until 4.26.39, trig until 5.01.05, English until 5.40.29. Just out of interest,' she asked, ‘why not break your study periods into more obvious time brackets – like four-thirty 'til five, or five 'til six?'

J.T., looked at her as if the question was one he had never considered, the space of olive skin between his two brown eyebrows folding in a crease of uncertainty. ‘Because that is how we always did it,' he offered. ‘Me and Chelsea, I mean. The times would be changed regularly – to keep us on our toes.'

‘And would there be checks that you kept to the prearranged time allocations?' asked Barbara, intrigued by this unusual behaviour, but savvy enough to ask the question as if it were the most natural one in the world.

‘No,' said J.T., as though he found the question odd. ‘There was no need. We always kept to them. Why would we not?'

Barbara smiled and sat back in her seat, a signal David took for him to move on.

Moments later J.T., who had explained the children did not normally eat dinner until their father returned home from work, finally reached the moments leading up to the shooting – the period of time in which he allegedly went to his parents' bedroom to retrieve the library cabinet key, proceeded downstairs to unlock said cabinet, went to the garage to get the bullets to load into the rifle, and then returned to the kitchen to shoot a hole in his mother bigger than the size of a baseball.

But the boy just stopped. He remembered finishing his geography assignment at 8.17.56pm, and he remembered going downstairs to the kitchen as he believed he had heard his father's car turn into the drive minutes earlier, but he did not recall getting the key, or the gun, or the bullets . . . J.T.'s version of accounts jumped straight from the geography assignment to the moment where he pointed the rifle at his mother – a time lapse of what must have been a good five minutes. David knew it should have taken him at least that amount of time to collect the key, unlock the cabinet, take out the gun, re-lock the cabinet, return the key to the upstairs drawer, go to the garage, load the gun and then make his way to the kitchen – which also meant he would have had to have left his room at 8.15pm at the latest, breaking his precious ‘down-to-the-second' routine.

‘Okay,' said David, a look from Barbara warning him that he had to stay
on track. ‘So you remember leaving your room and going downstairs to the kitchen.'

‘Yes,' said J.T. without flinching. ‘I left my room, went downstairs, opened the kitchen door and saw mother sitting at the end of the table. She was reading
Vanity Fair
and drinking a glass of wine and when I came in she looked up at me and said, “No”.'

Barbara frowned; she had obviously noted the boy's inclination to ‘regurgitate', rather than ‘tell' the story.

‘She said “No”,' reaffirmed David.

‘Yes,' replied J.T., his voice a monotone. ‘She said “No”.'

‘And then you . . . ?' prompted David.

‘And then I shot her,' he said.

‘And do you know why you did that J.T. ?' asked Barbara, as David took a breath.

‘Because that was my intent,' J.T. said with just the slightest of hesitation.

‘You wanted to shoot her,' stated Barbara.

‘It wasn't about what I wanted.' His eyes flicked to David. ‘It was about what I
intended
.'

‘But she was your mother, J.T. Why would you
intend
to kill her?' asked Barbara, using J.T.'s wording.

‘Because parents are in charge of their children,' he answered.

‘You killed her because she was in charge of you?' offered Barbara.

‘No,' said J.T., the crease in his forehead now back with a vengeance. ‘I killed her because she
wasn't
.'