Act of God (20 page)

“Now I’m going to start looking for all the holes I can find in the state’s case. Because I have reasonable doubt.”

“I went to the jail the first time, feeling exactly the way you did,” Dana told her. “I wanted him to be guilty, so of course,
in my mind, he
was
guilty. I didn’t want this case. I wanted a good reason not to take it. But here I am.”

Joan shrugged. “Two crazy women,” she said.

It suddenly occurred to Dana to wonder whether that might not have been why Paul Cotter had been so willing to put Joan on
the case. The client now had two women who might just be crazy enough to believe in him.

“The anonymous tip came by mail,” Al Roberts told Craig Jessup. “It was typewritten and had a Seattle postmark. It said there
was an officer at Bangor whose wife had recently had an
abortion at Hill House, and was pretty steamed up about it, and saying some wild things.”

“That’s all?” Jessup asked.

“That’s all,” Roberts confirmed.

I
n the prosecution of Corey Latham, we want to send a very strong message,” a spokesperson for the King County Prosecutor’s
Office told Stone Phillips on
Dateline.
“What kind of message?” Phillips asked.

“One that says we will not tolerate terrorists in this country, whether they come from the Middle East or the Midwest.”

“Do you think a conviction here will send that message?”

“If not the conviction, then surely the execution.”

“But doesn’t terrorism succeed, for the most part, because terrorists are committed to their causes,” Phillips pressed, “and
are apparently ready and willing to die for their acts?”

The spokesperson shrugged. “Well, I’m a lawyer, not a psychologist. But it seems to me that one dead terrorist means one less
terrorist.”

For three months, the Reverend Jonathan Heal had kept Corey Latham in his public prayers. Without ever once having met the
young man, the televangelist nevertheless took every
opportunity, during his nightly Prayer Hour, to extol his numerous virtues and the unjustness of his circumstances.

It had more than paid off. Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, a stream of money had found its way into the
good Reverend’s Kansas City post office box—coins, bills, checks—from every corner of the country, all with little messages
of encouragement and support for the young naval lieutenant. The sheer volume of it had overwhelmed the ministry’s two bookkeepers.

“We’ve had to double our trips to the post office, just to clean out the box to make room for more,” one of them said.

“What do we do with it?” the other one asked.

“How much?” Heal inquired.

“Almost four million dollars, and it’s still coming in.”

The Reverend threw back his head and laughed. “The power of prayer,” he cried.

“We aren’t going to keep it all, are we?” the first bookkeeper inquired.

“Certainly not,” Heal asserted. “You make out a check for, say, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and send it along
to Seattle. Put the rest into the general fund.”

“Only two hundred and fifty thousand?” the second bookkeeper whispered to the first. “Is that all he’s going to get?”

The first bookkeeper shrugged. “Who’ll ever know?” she replied. “The lieutenant will be thrilled with his quarter million,
and come Christmas, you and I will get an extra big bonus for being such good employees.”

The presidential campaign was in full swing. By the middle of June, the state primaries had all but guaranteed the nominations
of the two leading candidates. The Republican convention in July and the Democratic convention in August would do little more
than rubber-stamp the already decided.

There would be no surprises, no controversy, no lastminute
political maneuverings at either convention; just foregone conclusions. Reporters assigned to the two candidates scrambled
to find anything of interest to report.

Pollsters across the country determined that there was little to choose from between the two. They both favored a strong military,
better education, improved health care, and less government spending. There was really only one issue on which they totally
disagreed: abortion.

“We are supposed to be a civilized country,” Prudence Chaffey declared on CNN’s
Larry King Live.
“What kind of civilization condones murdering innocent infants in the womb, and then condemns murdering their murderers?”

“But it wasn’t just people performing abortions who were murdered at Hill House,” King observed.

“That’s true, and that’s tragic,” the AIM executive conceded. “And we should do whatever is necessary to prevent such a thing
from ever happening again, which is why I support the Republican candidate for president. He has promised us a Constitutional
amendment that will guarantee every American the right to be born. And he has pledged to work with Congress toward the criminalization
of all abortion.”

“How exactly would you expect him to accomplish that?”

“With relative ease, actually,” the Houston matron replied. “As we know, the overwhelming majority of the people in this country
are opposed to abortion. All they have to do, come November, is vote for those candidates who believe, as they do, that feticide
is wrong and must be stopped. As soon as that happens, abortion will be history.”

“The Democratic candidate for president is hardly the irresponsible liberal his opponent would like the American people to
think he
is
,” Priscilla Wales told Larry King several days later. “He simply doesn’t happen to believe that government was
ever intended to deprive us of our rights as individuals. Which is why I support him. If we’re capable of stepping into an
election booth, and casting a vote for the candidate of our choice, why shouldn’t we be capable of making every other important
decision, as well?”

“There are some who seem to think that the bombing of Hill House was inevitable,” King suggested, “and that continued support
of
Roe v. Wade
will simply escalate the violence.”

The head of FOCUS shrugged. “Three quarters of the people in this country favor abortion,” she said. “Now, what are we supposed
to do? Honor the majority, as we always have? Or bow to the minority because if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll
go out and make a bomb?”

“How is it that ’three quarters’ of the population support abortion in this country, while the ’overwhelming majority’ opposes
it?” Dan Rather asked his television audience on the CBS
Evening News.
“Well, the answer is simple, really. It’s all about polls—who’s doing them, and how the results are interpreted. Since polls
are frequently something less than scientific, results can be controlled by the specific population samples that are surveyed,
and by the language of the questions that are asked. In this case, the two sides of the abortion issue are sampling different
populations and slanting their questions to elicit those responses that best support their particular assertions. So the reality
of polls is that you can pretty much get them to reflect whatever you want them to.”

The weekly lunch at Al Boccolino had been somewhat less regular since the grand jury indictments against Corey Latham had
been handed down, Dana often finding it necessary to work right through lunch.

“It’s not a problem, and I understand,” Judith said one Wednesday in late June when Dana forced herself to break away
from the office to keep their appointment. “I only wish I were that busy.”

“Well, it’s a mixed blessing, I assure you,” the attorney responded.

In the rush of the case, Dana had not had much time to work on the details of her plan for setting Judith up in an art gallery.
It was little more than a week ago that she had finally gotten it thought out enough to sit down with Sam and discuss it.
To her delight, he seemed quite receptive to the idea, and even offered to talk to their accountant. She opened her mouth
to say something, wanting to share at least the concept with her friend, then closed it again. It wouldn’t be right to raise
Judith’s hopes if nothing came of it.

“How are you doing?” she asked instead.

“Just fine,” Judith replied with a toss of her dark hair. “I’ve gotten a couple of small commissions that I’m working on,
and I’ve been talking to a gallery in Bellevue about a show.”

“That’s terrific,” Dana said.

“Well, I don’t know about terrific,” Judith responded. “It’s very iffy at the moment, but it might pay the bills for a couple
of months, anyway.” Not for the world would she tell her friend that her mother was no longer able to help her out financially,
or that she was juggling credit cards, or that she and her son, Alex, were living on macaroni and cheese.

“I know this hand-to-mouth business isn’t exactly what you’d hoped for,” Dana said. “But I really do have the feeling that
things are going to change for the better for you, and soon, too.”

“Well, soon would be good,” the artist allowed. “In the meantime, don’t worry about me, I’m getting by. So, how’s the big
case going?”

The attorney shrugged. “Let’s just say,” she said, without going into details, “that I haven’t been getting a whole lot of
sleep lately.”

“Are you going to get him off?”

“There’s always a chance.”

“Do you want to get him off?”

“If he didn’t do it, sure.”

“Didn’t he do it?” Judith asked in surprise.

Dana frowned, clearly uncomfortable about discussing an ongoing case. “If the state can’t prove he did it,” she said, “then
he deserves to be acquitted.”

Judith contemplated her friend of thirty years. “Then no wonder you’re not sleeping,” she suggested softly.

Across the restaurant, out of earshot and unnoticed by the two women, a man with a thickening middle, sandy hair, and a five
o’clock shadow, wearing khakis and a Seattle Mariners T-shirt, sat eating a bowl of pasta. Tom Kirby had been in Seattle for
almost a month, and he had just figured out why he had come.

On arriving, the first thing he did was rent a small apartment in a residence hotel at the foot of Queen Anne, and stock the
kitchenette with orange juice and frozen dinners.
Probe
was paying him a healthy per diem that would more than cover a room and three meals a day in a good hotel, but he did not
intend to spend any more of it than he absolutely had to. Let his counterparts live high off the hog, if they wished. Lengthy
unemployment had taught him to economize.

After settling in, he did some shopping, picking up the T-shirt and a few other items of clothing that would help him blend
into the fabric of the city. The last thing he wanted was to be identified as an outsider—a tourist, or even worse, a member
of the media.

Then he rented a pickup truck and went exploring, familiarizing himself with the neighborhood surrounding his residence, wandering
through the financial, shopping, and international districts, and then poking around the university. He went to a baseball
game and cheered for the home team, he learned the bus routes, and he took a ferry back and forth across Puget Sound. Only
when he felt reasonably comfortable in his new environment did he turn his attention to the matter that had brought him here.

The Hill House bombing trial was still more than two months off, which gave him plenty of time to look for his angle.

“How will you know where to look?” his publisher asked, a little vague about his reporter’s quest.

“Instinct, I guess,” Kirby replied.

He went to the offices of the
Seattle Times
and the
Post-Intelligencer
, and spent days poring over the issues that covered the bombing, requesting more and more until there was a mountain of newsprint
on the table in front of him.

In truth, there were dozens of stories in those issues, just waiting to be told, about survivors, about victims, about the
families of the victims, about the impact that the loss of the clinic had on the community, but he passed them all over.

“If you could tell me what you’re looking for,” a patient clerk suggested after a week, “maybe I could be of more help.”

“The problem is, I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he confessed. “But I will when I find it.”

He kept looking. He talked to the people he encountered on the streets, the homeless who had depended on Hill House for so
much.

“They were good folks up there,” one man told him. “They understood us, and they cared about us, when no one else in the city
did. Now that they’re gone, the churches have stepped in. They don’t really understand, and they don’t really care, but they
bring food. The difference is, Hill House did it without making a big fuss. The churches make sure everyone knows.”

There was a good story there, he thought, and not one that the media hotshots who were beginning to fill the city would be
likely to go after. But it wasn’t the right one.

He turned to the alleged perpetrator. He wondered why such an apparently upstanding young man would go off the deep end like
that. It fit his criterion for a Pulitzer. Kirby wanted an interview, but he was told the kid’s attorney wasn’t letting anyone
near him. So instead, the reporter spent a couple of days at Annapolis, and a few more days in Cedar Falls, but didn’t come
up with very much.