Act of God (10 page)

“And when you got back?”

His gaze wavered, and for an instant, Dana saw real pain in his eyes. “Elise told me she’d been right about being pregnant,
but that she’d had a miscarriage.”

“A miscarriage?”

He nodded. “I felt awful,” he confided. “Awful for Elise that she had to go through that alone, and awful for us that we weren’t
going to have a baby, after all.”

She looked at him a bit skeptically. “How awful is awful?” she asked.

“I love kids,” he told her. “I have two sisters back home in Iowa. Between them, they have four boys and three girls, all
of them terrific. I can’t wait to be a daddy.” Suddenly, the light went out of his eyes, and his face darkened.

In spite of herself, Dana took the bait. “What?” she prompted.

“A week later, I found out that Elise hadn’t really had a miscarriage, after all. She’d had an abortion.”

“Your wife lied to you?”

Corey nodded. “She said she was afraid to tell me the truth because she knew how I felt about kids, and she didn’t know how
to tell me she didn’t feel the same way. But I don’t think that was it. I think, you know, she was just plain scared about
having a baby so soon into the marriage, especially with me being away so much of the time.”

“You mean, she wasn’t thrilled about being a single parent half the year?”

“I guess not,” Corey replied. “You see, Elise may be a couple of years older than I am, but she’s pretty immature in a lot
of ways. And I wasn’t there, and she had no way of contacting me, and she had to make the decision by herself. So the decision
she made was that she wasn’t ready to start a family.”

“Were you okay with the abortion?”

Unexpectedly, tears filled his eyes, and without thinking, Dana reached out and put her hands over his, perhaps to comfort
him, perhaps to give him strength, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she had never done that with a client before.

“No, I wasn’t,” he admitted. “First I was hurt when I found out about it, and then I was furious. Didn’t I have a right to
be? That was my baby she got rid of, a piece of me, a piece of both of us, a wonderful expression of what our love for each
other was supposed to be all about.”

A sudden twinge of nausea rumbled through Dana’s stomach and threatened to rise. She hastily withdrew her hands. “Okay, you
had a right to be angry at your wife,” she conceded.

“I couldn’t understand how she could do such a thing. It goes against who I am, against everything I believe in.”

“Did she know how you felt about abortion?”

“I thought she did,” he replied.

“What happened then?”

“Well, finally, I guess I calmed down, and we went and got some counseling, and we talked and talked about it, and I tried
to see things from her perspective. I joined a group through my church that helped, too. After a while, I sort of started
to understand where she was coming from.”

“And you forgave her?”

Corey looked at Dana with an expression that was so raw
and exposed that she could actually feel his anguish. “I love my wife,” he said.

The attorney nodded. “I understand.”

“Do you?” he asked, and she wasn’t sure whether he was questioning her reply or simply seeking affirmation. “There’s so much
peer pressure put on women, you know. Do this. Do that. You have to have this baby. You don’t have to have this baby. Stand
up for this right. Stand up for that. People pulling you in half who don’t even know you, and who don’t really give a damn
about you. People who all they care about is their own agenda.”

“And when she decided to have the abortion,” Dana asked, as gently as she could, because of course she already knew the answer,
“Elise went to Hill House, didn’t she?”

He nodded.

“And the police knew that?”

“I don’t know, I guess they must have,” he said. “They were at me for hours, wanting to know just how angry I was, and how
far I would go to vent that anger. I tried to tell them, no matter how I might have felt, I don’t believe that two wrongs
make a right. My baby was already dead. How would killing all those innocent people change that?”

“But they weren’t buying it.”

Corey shrugged. “Like I said, I’m not saying I didn’t have a good reason to do it. I’m just saying I didn’t do it.”

Dana nodded slowly. “Well, that’s all we need to get into for the moment,” she said as she stuffed her pad and pen back into
her briefcase. “Look, I have to leave for a little while now. But try not to worry. I’ll be back at two o’clock, and we’ll
go downstairs for the arraignment. That’s when you’ll be formally charged, and you’ll enter your plea. I’ll tell you exactly
what to say, and when to say it. Other than that, I don’t want you to talk about the case. No police, no reporters, no one
here at the jail. Not even your friends and your family. Not a word to anyone. It’s very important for you to remember that.”

With that, she snapped her briefcase shut and stood up, giving him what she hoped was an encouraging smile.

“Please,” he said, as she stepped past him on her way to the door, “if you’re going to be my lawyer, you’re got to believe
me… I didn’t kill those people. Oh God, somebody’s got to believe me.”

“Is that the delivery man you told me about?” Big Dug asked, thrusting a newspaper he had found at the ferry terminal under
Joshua’s nose. Taking up almost half the front page, a picture of Corey Latham stared back at the retarded man.

“I don’t know,” Joshua said. “It was pretty dark, and I didn’t get to see him very good.”

“But does it look like him?”

Joshua shrugged. “Naw, the guy I saw had a cap on his head.”

“What kind of cap?”

“The soft kind, that comes down around the ears.”

Big Dug fished a stub of pencil out of his pocket and proceeded to draw a knit cap over the man’s hair in the photograph.
“Now what do you think?”

“Yeah, it could be,” Joshua said. “That looks lots more like him. Why?”

“’Cause that’s the guy they say set the bomb at Hill House.”

“Really?” Joshua peered at the photograph with more interest, then shook his head. “I couldn’t say for sure,” he said.

Big Dug tossed the paper aside. “Come on,” he said.

“Where?” Joshua asked.

“We’re going to go find us a television set.”

They found one in their favorite bar on First Avenue. Between them, they scraped together enough money to buy a glass of beer,
and the bartender let them sit at the end of the counter while they shared it. The television was tuned in to the fourth quarter
of a Sonics basketball game, and the two men sipped the
beer as slowly as they could, and waited for the game to be over and the news to come on. Sure enough, the top story was about
the young naval lieutenant who had been arrested for the bombing of Hill House.

“Well?” Big Dug asked, as they showed a tape of the suspect being escorted into the King County Jail. “Now what d’you think?”

“Don’t say it so loud,” Joshua hissed, darting a look at the other patrons. “No one else’s supposed to know, remember?”

“What do you think?” Big Dug persisted, in a somewhat lower voice.

Joshua stared at the television screen, squinting up his eyes to get a better look. “I don’t know,” he replied. “It looked
more like him in the newspaper with the cap on. And he was wearing a dark jacket, too.”

“Then try to see him dressed that way.”

Joshua sighed. “Maybe it was him,” he said. “If the police say it was him, I guess it was him. It coulda been him. It kinda
looks like him. But like I said, I couldn’t say for sure. It was too dark. It coulda been anybody.”

Priscilla Wales sat in her San Francisco office, decorated over the years in what she only half jokingly referred to as Salvation
Army eclectic, and contemplated her options. It didn’t matter that it was after midnight. One time of day was just like any
other time of day as far as she was concerned.

It hadn’t always been that way. There was a time when she had rushed home to her son every evening to fix his dinner or to
help him with his schoolwork or simply to be near him and watch as he grew into an excellent young man. And after he was grown,
when he was away in college and then at law school, there were the nightly telephone calls when they would talk for hours
about anything and everything, like best friends.

But all that ended abruptly two months ago, when a drunken driver had taken her son’s life at the age of twenty-four.

What was left was her work. FOCUS—Freedom of Choice in the United States—kept her going now. And after more than two decades
of dedicated effort, Priscilla believed the organization finally had the break it had been waiting for. A suspect in the Hill
House bombing had been charged with the crime, and if indicted, faced a trial that was certain to provide the broadest possible
media coverage.

It was becoming clear that this year’s presidential election would feature two candidates who could not have been further
apart on the issue of abortion. Since one of them was running on the unwritten but nonetheless clear “let’s-get-women-backunder-our-control”
platform, it was all-important that the other one win the White House.

What better kickoff could the campaign have, Priscilla reasoned, than a conviction in this case? It would be an unequivocal
statement that dominance over women would no longer be tolerated in this country, and that violence toward them would be dealt
with swiftly and severely.

The fifty-one-year-old civil rights attorney sat back in her chair, pondering exactly what she and her organization might
do to further that effort.

Priscilla had just turned fourteen when a boy who lived down the street cornered her in his garage and raped her. Too ashamed
to tell her parents she was pregnant, she got a name from a friend of a friend and made her way to a dilapidated building
in the seediest section of San Francisco. She barely survived the procedure.

Lying in the hospital, while doctors fought to stop the bleeding and control the infection, Priscilla made a pact with God.
If He let her live, she would become a crusader for the rights of women in America. It was years before the Supreme Court
would rule on
Roe v. Wade.

God let her live, and she kept her promise. She graduated
summa cum laude
from law school and promptly hung out her shingle. By the time she got there, however, things had changed. Abortion had become
the law of the land, but constant efforts to undermine it needed to be deflected. After twenty-five years, she was still waging
the battle.

The tall, gaunt brunette knew this was the line in the sand. This was where the hard right had to be stopped, or women’s rights
would be set back a hundred years. Her lip curled up at one corner. That was exactly where the ultrarightists of the nation,
like Roger Roark of the Coalition for Conservative Causes, were heading, she thought. Repeal a woman’s right to choose, and
could the vote be far behind? She made a note to schedule a meeting with her board of directors in the morning, to formulate
a plan that would aid in the conviction of Corey Latham.

“Oh God, somebody’s got to believe me.’

Dana jerked awake at the sound of the voice in her head, and glanced at the clock on the nightstand. The green digital display
read three-twenty-three, exactly nineteen minutes since she had last looked at it. Sam was snoring softly beside her in the
big four-poster bed. His low rumble was usually a comforting sound to her but tonight she found it irritating.

“Somebody’s got to believe me.”

That’s what Latham had said, and she couldn’t seem to get the words out of her head. They had followed her out of the jail,
back to Smith Tower, and throughout the rest of the day. Now they were replaying in perfect rhythm with Sam’s breathing.

Dana punched up her pillow and leaned against it. Who was Corey Latham? she wondered.

In the dark, she went back over everything he had said and done. Part of being a good attorney was the ability to evaluate
people and situations quickly and accurately. His recitation had been simple and straightforward, without the slightest hint
of fanaticism,
and without any indication that it was rehearsed. She had listened carefully for that. His gestures and expressions had been
totally consistent with someone who was confused about the circumstances in which he found himself. She could find no misstep.

Dana sighed. If Corey Latham were in fact the cold-blooded terrorist who had committed this crime, he was certainly hiding
it well. She recalled the panic in his eyes and voice, on the way down for the arraignment, when she told him that he would
enter his plea, but there would be no bail.

“You mean I have to stay in this place?” he cried. “I can’t go home until the trial? I can’t go back to my boat?”

“This is a capital case,” she explained, experiencing a sudden rush of sympathy for him that made her actually regret having
to say the words. “There is no bail.’

At that, his knees seemed to buckle, and one of the escorts had to prop him up to keep him from falling. When the elevator
doors opened, both guards bolstered him between them and, as though heading for the gallows, marched him toward the courtroom.
Only when they were about to enter did he regain his composure, and she heard him mutter under his breath, “Suck it up, sailor.”

Like a turtle exposed to danger, Corey seemed to retreat into himself, withdrawing his emotions, protecting himself from the
judge and the proceedings going on around him, doing and saying only what he was told to do and say, nothing more. Dana watched
the shutdown with a mixture of fascination and compassion. When she left him to go back to his cell, he barely acknowledged
her.

That image of him bothered her for hours afterward, and still tugged at her. But it was her own feelings that bothered her
even more. It was almost as though she had in some way followed him into his shell, and taken on his pain. She had never before
connected with a client on anything other than a professional
level, and she did not want to do so with Corey Latham. Certainly not about this, anyway. Because, whichever way it played
out, it was clearly going to be a no-win situation.