Murder in the Courthouse (8 page)

Billings flew through the door right behind her. “What happened?” His voice was deep, loud, and harsh. Hailey turned just quickly enough to see barely controlled anger etched on his face.

All the guys looked straight at Trimble.

“I just wanted to see how it was tampered with . . . so I got the guys to loosen a few screws and plugs and . . .” his voice trailed off.

“Don't anyone touch another thing. Evidence is not to be tampered with in any way. Another mistake like this could cost us a guilty verdict. Trimble, go to the station right now and complete the paperwork. Myers, oversee the rest of the photographs and work this scene.”

“Yes, sir.” A man dressed in light blue jeans with a navy blue CPD crime tech shirt tucked in stepped forward. He was clearly in charge of the techs on the scene.

Without a word, Trimble turned on his heel and stomped across Alton's lawn to his patrol car. In dramatic fashion, he cranked up, reversed, and scratched off.

Not another word was spoken among the rank and file there on the scene as several of the techs moved toward to the garage door lying on the driveway. Hailey spotted two of them pulling out plastic gloves.

The garage door. This would have to be handled very delicately . . . and not just the door. Not a word of Trimble's snafu could be openly discussed, as that type of conversation, much less anything put in writing, would absolutely be discoverable at trial by the defense.

They'd have a field day with it and end up making the entire investigation look like Keystone cops . . . Barney Fifes. The whole investigation could be tainted, and when the bad guy was caught, whoever he was, he and his defense team could make a joke of the investigation right in front of the jury.

They all knew it, and the air hung heavy with the thought of it as the crew tried to regroup. Billings started directing the techs in heaving up the door and loading it onto a lean, pristine white sheet of plastic laid squarely onto the floor of a huge evidence transport truck.

Hailey and Fincher turned and headed toward their car, walking across Alton Turner's neatly mowed lawn. Out of respect, Hailey stepped off the grass and onto the white concrete drive.

“Hey, guys, wait up!” Billings called out after them when he spotted them heading toward the Fulton County Crown Vic at the edge of Alton Turner's front lawn. He caught up with them in just a few long strides.

“Where you headed?”

“I'm heading to my hotel and Fincher, where are you staying?” Hailey slowed and asked Finch.

Finch grinned. “I'm not the TV star; the county's putting me up at the Best Western.”

“Hey, it's not so bad, close to downtown and there's an IHOP next to it.” Billings painted a rosy picture.

“There's nothing like IHOP . . . unless you count the Waffle House. We're going to get a pizza first, aren't we? Do we still have time?” Hailey glanced at the watch on Fincher's wrist.

“Sure. Let's go. We don't have to be at the courthouse until 8
AM
. Let's go crazy.”

“OK. Let's go.”

“OK you guys, see you there in the morning.” Billings smiled again.

“You'll be at the trial?” Hailey asked, surprised.

“Sure. Nearly every guy on homicide had a part in the Julie Love Adams investigation. That Todd Adams is a piece of work. What an SOB.”

“That's what we hear,” Fincher agreed.

“And thanks for the backup.”

“Anytime,” Fincher answered back. The two headed to the car, leaving footprints as they crossed over Turner's manicured lawn.

“Wonder who did it?” Hailey said it first.

“Todd Adams did it, of course.” Fincher answered quickly, surprised she had doubts about the Julie Love case.

“
I don't mean Julie Love, I mean . . . who killed Alton Turner?
”

CHAPTER SEVEN

H
ailey was one of the first people in the courtroom the following morning. At first blush, it appeared she was the very first. She didn't spot another soul in the cavernous room or milling around outside its giant double doors. But Hailey could tell the prosecutor had been there earlier. The state's counsel table was already covered with notes, books, binders, and stacks of documents. A flash of memory crossed Hailey's mind, back to her trial days when she was pitted against one team of defense attorneys after the next, week after week in the pits of the inner city. Typically, they'd be well-heeled. Representing dopers was a very lucrative enterprise.

The dope lawyers wore hand-tailored Italian suits, expensive shoes, and gold or jeweled cuff links, bracelets, rings, and necklaces gleaming at neck, wrists, and fingers. A single briefcase of theirs alone probably would have cost more than Hailey's old Honda. But as of this morning, nothing was on the defense table. Not yet anyway.

She could guess the explanation. At times, defense lawyers would not prep in the courtroom, but instead remain in the holding cell adjoining the courtroom with their client till the very last minute, trying their best to school them with last-minute instructions on how to walk, talk, and behave in front of the jury. Or better yet, talk them into copping a plea. That was easy money for sure. A defense lawyer could make $50,000 to $100,000 for a plea on a high-level dope case.

The jury in the Adams case had already been selected. From what Hailey could tell from the newspapers, which had already profiled all the jurors exhaustively, the group was made up of jurors bused in from another county southwest of Chatham. In Hailey's opinion, that had been a grave mistake for the defense.

Demanding a change of venue, changing the location of the trial, was SOP, standard operating procedure, for the defense, whether it was smart or not. But be careful what you ask for, for you will surely get it and in this case . . . they did. The judge granted a jury selected from another county. Problem for the defense was that they didn't get to select
what
county.

Adams's lawyers, by rolling the dice and rejecting Chatham County jurors, got Early County jurors instead. Early County was situated about a hundred miles away, at the far southern and westernmost region of the state, directly on the Georgia-Alabama state line. Reputed to be extremely conservative, they'd recently tried to order the electric chair, aka Old Sparky, for a repeat bank robber whose gun jammed when he pointed it at the bank teller's nose. It never fired.

The angry jury had to be offered a steak buffet at the local Golden Corral and talked down by the trial judge. When trying to placate the bloodthirsty jurors back in the deliberations room, the judge, wisely, blamed the lack of sentencing options on the U.S. Supreme Court, and then sent them to the all-you-could-eat steak and salad bar.

Georgia's death row stats backed up the reputation. There were more death row inmates there from Early County than any other county in the state. And the local residents were proud of it.

But reputation alone means practically nothing when striking a jury. Hailey had tried enough cases to know that you could never, ever predict what a jury would do with 100 percent accuracy. There were and would always be wild cards . . . jurors that could hold up a verdict, hijack a jury and cause a mistrial, or, even worse, convince a right-minded jury to do the wrong thing.

Hailey always divided jurors into two simple categories. The first category was the sheep. Sheep could be led along easily without much thinking on their own part, rarely took a stand on anything, eagerly looked forward to lunch and cigarette breaks, and were largely focused on getting home each afternoon. Sheep rarely lost sleep over their part of the picture.

On the other hand, there were the alphas. Alpha jurors were entirely different and had to be selected with the utmost caution. Alphas were those uncommon jurors who not only thought for themselves, but led others to their way of thinking. They came in all shapes, colors, and sizes and could be anything from a single mom of five to a retired vet to the foreman of a shipping dock.

Hailey could spot an alpha a mile away and generally tried her best, depending on their views on the justice system, to put them in the box . . . the jury box. The problem with alphas was that they could trick you during voir dire, or jury selection. Their charisma was obvious, but that charisma could be used for good
or
evil, and once that alpha was in the box, either side would be hard-pressed to get them thrown off the jury.

Simply put, there were leaders and followers. Both could be good or bad.

The courtroom was hushed, although it was slowly starting to fill up. Hailey noticed sheriffs, grim-faced, crossing the front of the courtroom wearing double black armbands, one on each arm. They silently signaled the death of a fellow officer, Alton Turner. Even if Turner hadn't been much of a spitfire, never made a collar, and never sat on a barstool recounting stories of a cop's life on the streets, he was nonetheless a brother. Somebody had to get the glory . . . and somebody had to push the paper.

That somebody was Alton Turner. And he had done so proudly and with dedication, rarely taking a day off and doing whatever had to be done, never believing that any task, no matter how lowly, was beneath him.

Wherever he went, Alton proudly wore baseball hats, Windbreakers, T-shirts, and sometimes all three at once, all emblazoned with the green and gold Chatham County Sheriff's logo. He was always the first one at Chatham County Sheriff charity events, cookouts, and softball games, although he never swung a bat nor caught a grounder. He was proud to be a lawman . . . even though he rarely left his tiny cream-colored cubicle at the Chatham County Courthouse.

From his beloved cube, Alton directed the transfer of inmates from the county jail to the courthouse, inputting inmate names, cell blocks, and arrest warrants then connecting them to indictment numbers. The right indictment numbers then had to be funneled to the correct courtrooms, making sure that each and every one of the thousands of accused felons made it to the right place bright and early come Monday morning trial and arraignment calendars.

It wasn't exciting to many, but to Alton it was. As he was a lawman of sorts, the courthouse was Alton's life.

From what Hailey read just before turning off the bedside light in her hotel room, Alton had never married and remained devoted to his only other surviving relative, the elderly sister of his “beloved mother,” his Aunt René.

Hailey's first stop this morning was for a cup of hot tea in the courthouse cafeteria. She could easily overhear several sheriffs at the next table talking about Turner. He had worshipped his mother and bragged to her endlessly about every capture, arrest, and trial as if they'd all been his own. Not in a self-aggrandizing way, he was simply proud to be part of the team and wanted her to be proud of her “boy,” although Alton had been pushing forty.

Hailey stared down into her cup of tea. She'd tucked her own tea bag of Irish breakfast into her bra that morning so she'd have it once she got to the courthouse. It was her favorite brand but very hard to find. It was easy to score a bag of English breakfast, but Irish was another matter altogether. It was steaming hot and practically white with skim milk, just how she liked it.

It sounded like Alton Turner wouldn't hurt a fly. Staring down at her tea bag floating in its cup, Hailey couldn't help but wonder who could have murdered him in such a brutal way. The pain must have been excruciating.

Hailey caught a glimpse at a plain round clock above the cashier in the cafeteria. Court would start in a little over thirty minutes and she wanted a good seat. Gulping down the rest of her tea and giving a nod to the sheriffs seated next to her, she made her way to the courthouse bank of elevators and up to the Todd Adams murder trial.

And here she sat, soaking it in. State courtrooms almost universally had the same feel to them, the same smell, the same sounds, and the same vibe. Just being here made her miss her days as a felony prosecutor intensely. Homesick for her other life, waves of what might have been washed over her.

What might have been
.

Her days fighting drug lords, rapists, child molesters, and killers had left her with an edge . . . quite an edge, as a matter of fact. Ten years in the pit of the Atlanta Fulton County Courthouse, waging war on the bad guys, had forever changed her.

But the reality was she'd never be the fresh-faced girl she was before . . . long before she became a felony prosecutor. Or even a law student for that matter . . . before another killer shattered her dreams. The murder of her fiancé, Will, just before their wedding, had left Hailey Dean broken . . . a shell of what she was and even now . . . a shell of what she could have been.
What she should have been
.

As one of the top litigators in the South, she developed a reputation as the most ruthless and hard-hearted prosecutor to have ever walked the courthouse halls. And she didn't mind it a single bit.

But a part of her was sealed off forever. That part of her was her heart.

After nearly twenty minutes of waiting, the swinging doors in the courtroom opened and in walked a fleet of state lawyers, most of them carrying binders, files, and law books. The two men took seats at the state's counsel table, closest to the jury. The two women, dressed in austere gray and navy blue, sat behind them.

No female lead counsel, Hailey thought. Not unusual. Any further thoughts as to gender bias evaporated into thin air when a side door of the courtroom opened from inside.

Out strode two huge, muscled Chatham County Sheriff's officers, shoulder to shoulder. Behind them came two white, male attorneys. By the look of them, she assumed they were part of the defense team. The cut of their suits and the shine on their Italian leather loafers indicated a far bigger paycheck than a state prosecutor could ever pull in. The two were followed by a gaggle of underlings—paralegals,
an investigator, a jury consultant by the looks of her, and two skinny law student types, apparently “interning” under the tutelage of famed defense attorney Michael P. “Mikey” DelVecchio.