Act of God (15 page)

The three of them sat down awkwardly in one of the cubicles. Corey picked up the telephone on his side, and motioned to his
parents to do the same.

“How is it going, son?” Dean asked, putting the receiver to his ear.

“Okay, I guess,” Corey replied. “It’s good to see you. How’s everybody at home?”

“They’re all just fine, and send their love. The nieces and nephews made cards for you. We gave them to your lawyer; she said
she’d see that you got them. I guess just about everyone in town stopped by to wish you well. They want you to know that Cedar
Falls is behind you.”

“I didn’t do it,” Corey blurted suddenly, his eyes full of
pain. “I couldn’t have. I couldn’t have killed all those innocent people.”

“You don’t need to tell us that,” Dean said. “We raised you. We know who you are.”

“It’s just a mistake,” Barbara said, taking the receiver from her husband. “And pretty soon, the police and everyone will
realize that, and then everything will get sorted out.”

“Do you really think so?” Corey responded wistfully. “I don’t know. In here, after a while, you get to feel like you’ve fallen
through the cracks. It’s like I’m in the
Jackson
at the bottom of the sea, the radar’s gone dead and I’m running out of air, and nobody’s going to get to me in time. Nobody’s
listening to me. No one believes me.”

“Mrs. McAuliffe seems to be listening.”

Corey nodded. “Yes, she is,” he conceded. “But that’s her job. She’s getting paid to listen, isn’t she? It’s not like it’s
someone objective—it’s not like a member of the jury.”

Dana liked the Lathams. They were good people, warm, sensible, and supportive. It was obvious that they loved their son, but
they did not appear to be unduly blinded by that love.

After their visit with Corey on Saturday, she had whisked them over to the Hunt Club, where the food enjoyed a reputation
for excellence, and the staff was used to shielding its patrons.

They talked all the way through dinner, about Corey, about themselves, about their values. They spoke of their hopes for their
children, and their pride in their son and his accomplishments was obvious.

Dana came away from the evening convinced of their sincerity. There was so much in the news these days about parents abdicating
their responsibilities, and about kids going berserk. If Corey Latham had gone berserk, it wasn’t because his parents had
not been paying attention.

She had begun this case presuming innocence, but to be honest, assuming guilt. Less than a week later, she wasn’t so sure.
She remembered her bold assurances to Paul Cotter that the prosecution’s case was circumstantial, and therefore, weak at best.
Now she found herself feeling the first flutter of apprehension as she faced the possibility that she might be all that was
standing between an innocent man and the gallows.

B
rian Ayres was a senior deputy prosecuting attorney, criminal division, for King County, Washington, a job he had held for
seven years. A slender man of slightly more than average height, possessed of an easy smile and an irrepressible enthusiasm
for life in general and the law specifically, he reflected an ageless attractiveness that most people found difficult to resist.

At forty, there were gray streaks in his black hair and deep creases around his brown eyes. He blamed the streaks on the rigors
of raising five children, and the creases on having to squint his way through mountains of indecipherable defense motions.
However, neither seemed to lessen his appeal, or his considerable effectiveness in a courtroom.

Fourteen years earlier, he had been an ambitious young lawyer, fresh out of the University of Chicago, sharing a cramped office
on the fifth floor of the King County courthouse with an equally ambitious Stanford graduate named Dana Reid.

“Hi, Punk,” he greeted her now as she poked her head in his office.

“Hi, Dink,” she replied.

They had given each other those nicknames years ago, after she had once observed that, without shoes, they were exactly the
same height.

Once friendly associates, they were now friendly adversaries. Brian was already married with two children when they met. He
sometimes thought things might have been different between them had he been single. Dana was the kind of woman one occasionally
came across in the professional world, a woman who didn’t know how beautiful she was, and probably wouldn’t have cared if
she did know. Her work was what mattered to her, and all she wanted to be admired for was her mind.

A couple of times a year, schedules permitting, they did lunch. It was their way of networking, of checking out life on the
other side, of keeping in touch.

“Never would have thought this was your Kind of case,” he said. He had to admit, if only to himself, that he had been hoping
for an easy ride on the Hill House bombing. And it had tweaked him more than a little to hear that the Latham kid had been
able to bring in a firm with the track record of Cotter Boland and Grace.

“Neither would I,” she admitted.

“How did you get suckered in?”

She shrugged. “My number came up, I guess.”

He wagged his head. During the two years that they worked together, they had talked long and often about defense attorneys
who walked with the devil. “You should have stayed on the side of the angels,” he told her.

“So we used to say,” she replied softly, reflectively. “Except that this time, I think maybe I am.”

Brian chuckled. “Always the optimist,” he observed. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

“Just happened to be in the building,” Dana said, which was true. Her stop at the fifth floor had been on impulse. “To be
honest, though, I’m trying to figure out why you would risk your reputation on the prosecution of Corey Latham.”

“Good tactic,” he said with an approving grin. “Is this the moment for me to start quaking in my boots?”

“No,” she replied. “But I’d have thought you, of all people, would want to be pretty positive of a conviction before you exposed
yourself in open court. I know you. I know how you hate to lose.”

“You think maybe I don’t know what I’m doing?”

“No. I think maybe you’ve let yourself be pushed into action a little too soon.”

“Ah, rush to judgment!” He raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “Am I hearing the first hint of a defense strategy here?”

Dana chuckled. “You never know,” she said, the first salvo having been neatly fired.

“Then let the battle be joined,” he suggested with mock gallantry.

She blew him a kiss and departed. The door had barely closed behind her when Brian grabbed for the telephone.

“I want to know that all our ducks are in order on the Latham case,” he barked into the receiver. “I won’t have it coming
back on us. Bring me everything, and I mean everything. I want to know, step by step, exactly how we got to this guy.”

It
was
a good tactic, he conceded as he hung up, her trying to put him that quarter-inch off-balance just days before he was due
to present to the grand jury, and he couldn’t deny she had succeeded.

Dana Reid McAuliffe was a very sharp lawyer, and Brian knew she was not above bending every rule and pulling out every stop
in defense of a client. But he also knew, whatever else she might do, she wasn’t one to bluff.

The senior deputy prosecuting attorney went back and pored over the files. The case was far from being a slam-dunk,
he knew, but he didn’t feel it would make him look ridiculous, and it would at least get the brass off his back. He didn’t
know whether Latham was guilty or innocent, and truth be told, he didn’t much care. The evidence pointed at guilt, and his
boss was champing at the bit to get to trial and to get the mayor and the governor and the media out of his office and off
his telephone, and that was enough for Brian.

“I don’t know what McAuliffe thinks she knows,” he told his assistant finally. “But I’m okay going with what we’ve got.” He
didn’t bother to add that he had been a lot more okay about it before he learned that he would have Dana McAuliffe sitting
across the aisle.

“It may not be the strongest case we’ve ever taken in,” Mark Hoffman agreed. “But it’s not the weakest, either. We’ve got
the ID on the vehicle. We’ve got the fibers and the trace materials. We’ve got the neighbors. We’ve got the doctor. I’ve seen
a lot worse.”

One week later, a grand jury did indeed find probable cause to indict Corey Latham on, among a laundry list of other things,
one hundred and seventy-six counts of murder in the first degree.

“We’re scheduled for trial in September,” he told the King County prosecutor.

“Good,” the prosecutor said. “Now maybe everyone will get off my back.”

“Don’t be discouraged,” Dana told her client. “All this means is that the grand jury found enough evidence to move forward
to trial.”

“But how could they?” Corey demanded, his voice rising until it bounced off the purple wall of the interview room. “How could
they find enough evidence to believe I killed all those people when I didn’t?”

“It’s because they only heard the state’s side of the case,”
she explained. “Just remember that we’ll have a side to present, too, and there’s a mighty big gap here between probable cause
and reasonable doubt. I promise you, this isn’t going to be any rollover for the prosecution.”

Craig Jessup was a nondescript man of medium height and weight, average looks, and indeterminate age. An exceptional mind
for details, a chameleonic ability to blend into any circumstance, and a true gift for gaining the trust and confidence of
others were what made him unique, and gave him a distinct advantage over many in his line of work.

For twenty years, he had been one of Seattle’s finest, advancing steadily, if not meteorically, up the ladder from foot patrolman
to homicide detective to sergeant. It was known around that he was in line to make lieutenant. Then his partner was killed,
supposedly caught in the crossfire between police and a black man. When it was quietly covered up that the black man had no
weapon, Jessup retired.

Taking the best of what he had learned, he established himself as a private investigator, offering his services to attorneys
who could afford to pay high fees for top-quality work. His biggest marketable asset was his skill at second-guessing the
police with whom he had worked for so long. In less than a year, he was fully employed. For the last five years, his steadiest
account had been the law firm of Cotter Boland and Grace.

“Let’s go on the assumption that Latham didn’t do it,” Dana told him the day after the indictments had been handed down.

“Is that for real?” Jessup questioned. He knew a little about the evidence, considered it sufficient, and believed himself
to be pretty good at sizing up odds. “When I heard you’d taken the case, I figured you’d go for something like diminished
capacity, and try to plead him out.”

“Not at this point,” Dana said, not bothering to add that the client was opposed to any kind of a plea.

“You really think the badges got it wrong?” the investigator asked, doubt written all over his face.

“I don’t know,” Dana told him. “That’s for you to find out. For now, as always, I’m assuming innocence. If I’m wrong, I’m
wrong. But if I’m right, then there’s something out there that your friends down at headquarters missed. So, take a look-see,
will you?”

“Okay,” he said.

She handed him a copy of the case file, which she had relentlessly flagged and redlined, and a sheaf of notes highlighting
her own interviews and impressions. “Take all the time you need,” she said dryly. “You’ve got until September.”

“What if you don’t like what I find?”

“As always,” she said with a shrug, “I’ll have to live with it, won’t I?”

There were many in Jessup’s line of work who, for the right fee, would break the rules without thinking twice, on behalf of
lawyers who both expected and encouraged it. But Dana knew he was not one of them. She knew he would bend the rules, if he
could, and stretch an interpretation as far as it would go, as she herself would, but that was where it would end. He was,
perhaps because of his background, perhaps in spite of it, incorruptible. Whatever way an investigation went was how he would
present it. He could not be turned. It made him a formidable opponent, and an invaluable ally.

Jessup worked out of his Capitol Hill home, a compact brick house tucked between two huge gingerbread Victorians and unfettered
by the trappings of children. He had taken the second bedroom as an office, overnight visitors being rare, in a move that
turned out to be far more comfortable and economical than renting separate space had proven to be.

His wife saw to his bookkeeping, tracking his hours and expenses, preparing the monthly billings, and keeping a careful
watch over the receipts and disbursements. It was part-time work for her, amounting to at most twenty hours a month, and she
had no problem fitting it around her job as an administrative assistant at Providence Hospital.