Act of God (17 page)

“Have you noticed any sort of change in Corey since he and Elise got married? Or since he came back from his last cruise?”

Zach considered for a moment. “He seemed a little more tense, maybe, but that could be related to things that have no connection
to his marriage.”

“How did he handle the abortion?”

“He was furious, and he was very hurt. But then he told me he had started going to church a lot, and the minister there got
him into some group that was helping him work through it.”

“Is he quick to anger?” Jessup asked. “Does he have a short fuse?”

“Not that I ever noticed.”

“Do you see Corey as the kind of person who would blow up a building full of people?”

“Never,” the lieutenant declared. “Whatever effect the marriage has had on him, his basic personality hasn’t changed. And
like I said, he’s all about defending and protecting, not attacking.”

“Even if he thought he was avenging his unborn child?”

Zach sighed. “Only if the guy snapped,” he said reluctantly. “I sure didn’t see any signs of it, and I don’t know anyone who
did, but if you push me to the wall, I’d have to say that would be the only way—if he snapped.”

“It sounds like the best friend is in his corner,” Louise observed. “Even if he did equivocate there at the end.”

“No one seems to want to point a finger at the kid,” Jessup said. “But no one wants to come up looking like a fool, either.”

“Corey Latham is a fine human being,” Tom Sheridan declared in his resonating pulpit voice. “In fact, I’d have to say, they
don’t come any finer.”

Jessup had found the minister in his rectory office, a heavily beamed, Tudor style adjunct to his church, and Sheridan was
quick to make his guest feel welcome, first by enveloping the investigator’s hand in both of his huge paws, and then by holding
a chair for him.

“He’s a member of our Thursday supper club, you know.”

“No, I didn’t,” the investigator said. “What is that?”

“A number of churches here in Seattle have gotten together to provide hot meals to some of our homeless people. Puget Sound
Methodist is responsible for Thursdays. Let me see now, Corey joined our church just about a year ago, I think
it was, and to the best of my recollection, except when he was out in his submarine, of course, he never missed a Thursday.”

“That’s good to know,” Jessup murmured, filing that tidbit of information away for the time being. “Now, can you tell me something
about the support group you got him into?”

“Oh yes, of course,” Sheridan said. “It’s not officially a church group, you understand, but it was organized by one of our
parishioners. It’s for people who have lost a child.”

“To abortion?”

“To anything,” was the reply. “Death is death, and loss is loss, any way you look at it. And the loss of a child, well, that
always seems to be the hardest for people to come to terms with.”

“Was Corey doing well in the group?”

“I’m told he turned out to be as much of an inspiration to the rest of the members as they were to him,” the minister said
with a little smile. “Corey’s like that, you see. And it also might interest you to know that those are the folks who are
raising most of the funds for his defense.”

“You sound like you’d make an excellent character witness,” Jessup said.

“Whenever and wherever I’m needed,” Sheridan said without hesitation. “This is a travesty, you know, what they’re doing to
that boy. He reveres life and he abhors violence.”

“You’d testify to that, in court, under oath?”

“In a heartbeat. I’d do whatever I could to convince a jury that Corey Latham couldn’t possibly have committed such a mindless
act of destruction. Should it come to that, of course.”

Jessup stood up. “I’m not the attorney,” he said, “but I think you can pretty much count on it coming to that.”

“At long last, an unqualified endorsement,” Louise observed. “Unfortunately it’s coming from someone who’s known the boy barely
a year.”

“Maybe so,” he said with a shrug. “But at this point, I don’t think we can afford to look a gift horse in the mouth.’

There were about a dozen people in the rustic room, warmed in the cool spring evening by a crackling blaze in a rough stone
fireplace that took up most of one wall.

According to their host, they met on a weekly basis, but were available to one another more often if any of them signaled
the need. The common bond was that they had all lost a child, in one way or another, and were either trying to come to terms
with the grief themselves, or trying to help someone else do so.

“It helps to know you’re not alone,” Damon Feary told Jessup when the investigator knocked at the door of his Woodinville
home on a Tuesday evening. “We all have to deal with the pain, and there is comfort in knowing that there are others in the
same place you are.”

“Corey Latham was grieving the loss of his child?”

“Certainly,” Feary said. The man was tall and lean, with wild red hair, and he lived in a rough log home that he had helped
to build and that his wife had decorated with lace curtains and crocheted doilies. “You don’t always have to have known the
child to feel the pain.”

Jessup glanced over the group. “How many of these people have lost a child to abortion?”

Feary sighed. “Three,” he replied. “The two men over there on the sofa who, like Corey, didn’t know until it was too late,
and the woman by the window who allowed herself to be talked into an abortion, only to regret it later.”

“Tell me about Corey Latham,” the investigator prompted those gathered, blending easily into the fabric of the room, the mix
of people.

“He’s so young,” one woman said with a sigh. “In many ways, practically a baby himself.”

“He has a very caring heart,” said another. “In the midst of his own grief, he wanted to help others.”

“None of us has much money of our own,” a man said. “We’re just ordinary working people. But whatever we do have, and whatever
more we can raise, will go to help defend him.”

“We’ve already organized an all-you-can-eat spaghetti supper, two yard sales, and a car wash, and we’re working on a talent
night,” a woman said. “Anything, no matter how small, helps.”

They almost made Jessup feel like he should dig into his own pocket for a contribution. “Do any of you think he was capable
of bombing Hill House?” he asked.

“Never,” three people said together.

“Then why do you think he’s been arrested?”

“It’s a frame,” Damon Feary said, and several others nodded. “They needed to blame it on someone, and given all the pressure
the police were under, they had to come up with someone pretty fast. Somehow he just got in the way.”

Jessup nodded thoughtfully. “Do you think the police fabricated evidence?”

Feary shrugged. “I’m not saying they did that,” he replied. “On the other hand, if they did, we all know it wouldn’t be the
first time.”

“There may have been a couple of coincidences that started them looking in his direction to begin with,” one of the other
men said. “After that, the police just shut their minds and ran with it.”

“I understand Corey was coming to these meetings pretty regularly,” Jessup said. “How would you say he was coping with the
abortion of his child?”

“I can only speak for the meetings he came to up until February,” Feary replied. “Then I was out of town for a while. But
I know the group got together while I was gone, so some of the others might know.”

There was a pause then, as the people in the room turned to look at one another, searching for the right words. Finally, the
young woman who regretted having had an abortion replied.

“As with all of us,” she said softly, “God was helping him to see the way.”

“I must be developing a suspicious mind,” Louise said. “They sound like very nice people, but they hardly know the boy. Why
would they go to such lengths to help pay for his attorney?”

Jessup nodded. “And such an expensive one, at that,” he murmured, “when there are so many other competent ones who could have
been hired for less. I wonder if they’re doing it because they really believe he’s innocent, or because they’re afraid he
might be guilty.”

“After all the fine things they said to you about him,” Louise scoffed, “how could they believe he was guilty?”

“Well, what have you got?” Dana asked.

“So far,” Jessup reported, “a fairly consistent picture of a thoughtful, caring, nonviolent young man, who would no sooner
blow up a bunch of people at a clinic than he would step on a sleeping cockroach. Unless, of course, he snapped. And to this
point, we have no evidence of that.”

“Pretty much my conclusion,” Dana concurred. “So, what are we missing?”

Jessup scratched his right ear. “I’m not sure. There’s something about this whole thing that bothers me. The first night I
came home with this case, I thought Louise was going to leave me on the spot. She was that upset that I would even think of
working in behalf of the—what did she call him?—the animal who bombed Hill House. But now that she’s in it as deep as I am,
well, she may not be entirely sure he’s innocent, but she’s
come a long way from assuming he’s guilty. And that bothers me.”

“Why?” Dana asked, not getting it.

“Look, here I am, barely into my investigation,” he explained. “And there’s Louise, already thinking this case hasn’t got
any legs. This is Hill House, for God’s sake. She knew a lot of the people who died there. Some of them were good friends.
At the very least, I’d expect her to be at the head of the lynch mob. But she’s not. Instead, she’s starting to convince me
they got the wrong guy. What’s wrong with this picture?”

Dana shrugged. “I don’t know, but I must admit, I’m with Louise on this.”

“Well, at the risk of ruining my reputation,” Jessup admitted, “that makes three of us.”

“Good,” Dana declared. “Now all we need to do is find twelve like-thinking people to put on the jury.”

“Well, it’s obvious the prosecutor’s office isn’t about to let that happen,” Jessup observed. “The minute the indictments
were handed down, the floodgates opened, and out went the spin doctors to trumpet their position. A regular colony of marching
pissants.”

In cases like this, despite the terrible tragedy and lingering consequences, Dana knew the tendency for most people would
be eventually to drift back to their normal lives. It was already three months since the bombing, and the trial was not scheduled
to start until September. She understood why Brian Ayres wanted to keep everyone’s emotions fresh and churning until then.
It was what she would have done had she still been a prosecutor.

“Translation,” she said, “they’re taking dead aim at the jury pool.”

“But why?” Jessup wondered. “If their case is so good, why resort to cheap tactics?”

“Good question,” she replied.

“Will you ask for a delay?”

Dana shook her head. “Corey doesn’t want one. He wants to get out of there as soon as possible. He’s asked for a speedy trial.”

“You could advise him.”

“I’m not sure another six months would make that much difference.”

“Are you going for a gag order then?”

“No,” she told him.

“Why not?”

“Because I’d get it, and it would look like we had something to hide,” she replied. “This way, the evidence is the evidence.
It won’t get any stronger by them hanging it all out there. And it won’t get any weaker by my trying to refute it.”

“So you’re going to do nothing?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Dana confirmed. “I want to walk into the courtroom and be able to say to the jury, here he is, take
a good long look at him. Where’s the monster the prosecution has been telling you about all these months?”

Prudence Chaffey sat on a peach velvet sofa in her gracious Houston living room on a muggy afternoon in May and served tea
to the board of directors of AIM, which stood for something she believed in wholeheartedly: Abortion Is Murder.

“The Hill House trial is set to begin in four months,” she said, pouring from an elegant sterling silver service, and passing
the cups with plates of frosted teacakes. “For the future of this country, we must do everything in our power to make sure
there is an acquittal. While I abhor the loss of life associated with the bombing, I firmly believe that Corey Latham is to
be championed, not chastised for his courage.”

The only daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, she had married into a prominent Texas oil family when she was seventeen.
By the age of fifty-three, she had buried two babies for
whom she still grieved, raised four others into adulthood, and was enjoying nine grandchildren, with the promise of more on
the way.

It didn’t take her long to realize she had married too young, and with too many romantic notions in her head. By the time
she had celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary, she knew that her husband, Harold, was a regular visitor to other women’s
beds.

She went to her father. But instead of being outraged, he only shrugged.

“Boys will be boys,” he said, and then suggested that she find an outside interest to occupy her time. There was no question
of a divorce.

Prudence tried a variety of local charities, all of which were delighted to have the young society matron’s name on their
rosters, but none of them really appealed to her. Then
Roe v. Wade
became law, and as her father railed against it from his pulpit, she knew she had found the true cause she was looking for.
What better purpose could one have in life than to help protect the rights of the preborn? True to her daddy’s teachings,
the sweet, round, strawberry blonde believed abortion to be an act against God.

“The timing of this incident couldn’t have been more perfect,” one of AIM’s board members suggested. “What with the national
elections coming up, and the party’s strong stand on the issue. Demands for a Constitutional amendment against abortion have
been pouring into our offices.”

“Yes,” Prudence murmured. “One would almost think the young man had divine inspiration.”