Crack-Up (45 page)

I smiled.
 
“Mystery solved.”
 
The detectives crashed into the room.
 
Fellows spread-eagled and searched Jeremy up against the window.
 
Strecker applied handcuffs behind the back.
 
Jeremy turned crimson-faced in the places where the fake blood hadn’t done the job already.
 
All the while, he didn’t utter a word.

“Jeremy Crane,” Strecker said, turning him toward the door, nudging him forward, “you are now under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder in the death of John Helms.”

Chapter 44

You know what happened next.
 
Jeremy Crane got exactly what he’d wanted, though not at all in the way he’d wanted it.

With his arraignment on murder conspiracy charges, his sensational assassination plot resulted in a sensational media blitz, followed by sensational public outrage—directed at Wall Street, at American Intelligence, at data mining, at John Helms too.
 
Televised hearings on Capitol Hill soon followed.
 
All the data mining projects—private sector and public—were shut down and new laws and regulations written on the collection, dissemination and disclosure of personal data.

My old boss, Nathan Pitt, stepped down as Secret Service Director and settled into retirement on the
Eastern Maryland
shore.
 
Others weren’t so lucky.
 
Heads rolled in the corridors of all the various US Intelligence branches.

Not a single head rolled on Wall Street, however, and the consortium issued only a dry apology emphasizing the legality of its morally empty behavior.
 
But I take pleasure in knowing that it'll take decades for their legions of Gucci-soled lobbyists to chip away at all the new government regulations.

As for me, I was still on the hook for the murder of John Helms—thanks to the District Attorney, Millard T.—for
Tenacious
—Barnes.
 
It was explained to me by my lawyers—I eventually had a whole, star-studded team of them, which was only possible because lawyers work cheap with cameras present—that I was taking a big risk by pleading not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
 
In real life—as opposed to TV or the movies—the insanity defense is rarely tried, because it rarely works.

In the
District of Columbia
, as in most states across
America
, the legal definition of insanity is still based on the old M'Naughten rule from English law.
 
M'Naughten was a paranoid schizophrenic who, in 1843, murdered the British prime minister's secretary during a failed attempt to murder the prime minister himself.
 
M'Naughten’s celebrated case—at Queen
Victoria
's insistence—resulted in the world's first legal test of mental competence: if the defendant cannot tell the difference between right and wrong, then—and only then—the defendant is legally insane.
 
In
Great Britain
, the test has evolved over the last one hundred and sixty years to reflect what psychology and psychiatry have learned about the human mind.
 
But not so here in
America
.

Here, if you know it's wrong to kill another human being, but, due to mental disease, can't control yourself—or believe, however implausibly, that you're acting in self defense, or in defense of another, or that you're slaying Hitler's clone—then you are guilty of murder under the law.

To be found not guilty by reason of insanity has become an even more unlikely outcome since the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which Congress passed into law in the wake of public outrage over the John Hinckley verdict.
 
It shifted the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defense, which must now prove with
clear and convincing evidence
that the defendant was legally insane at the time of the crime.
 
The reform act even limits the
scope of expert psychiatric testimony to be allowed at trial.
 
It's no wonder that, in my own case,
there was a mistrial, when the jury deadlocked on a verdict.

In the meantime, Jeremy Crane was tried, found legally sane, and subsequently convicted of murder conspiracy.
 
Rightly or wrongly, he’ll be spending the next ten to twenty-five years inside Lorton State Prison in suburban
Virginia
.

Around the same time, my wife, Sarah, initiated divorce proceedings.
 
At first she’d stuck by my side, appearing in court every day during my mistrial.
 
But she finds herself unable—especially after delivering our son, Dexter, she says—to forget that I’m a killer.
 
A taker of the most precious gift of all.

Maybe that’s all there is to it with her.
 
But just maybe the stress of the trial and all the public attention eventually got to Sarah, or the realization of what it really means to be married to a paranoid schizophrenic.
 
I don't know.
 
I do know that I'd always believed—always, always—that my wife would stand by me, whatever hell might come.
 
So chalk that one up as another of my sane delusions, right?

Getting back to me, I was tried for murder a second time and, following days and days of jury deliberation, found legally sane during the time of the murder and subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

That was a tough day, as you might imagine, and there was no Sarah in the courtroom either—though my brother, Chuck, was there for support, and Keisha Fallon, of course, and Hideo Mori, and Detectives Mona Strecker and Gary Fellows, and even Nathan Pitt.

As you may know by now, I spent less than three months behind bars.
 
It’s traditional for a sitting
US
president who is about to leave office to grant criminal pardons, a virtually unlimited power explicitly set forth in the US Constitution.
 
And so as the term of President Eliot Ames wound down, he granted me a pardon for the killing of John Helms.
 
He cited as his reasons the “extraordinary psychological and physiological coercion” that I’d undergone, “service to country in exposing a vast, insidious menace,” as well as my “past gallantry in the line of duty while protecting the life of former President Wallace Cooper,” who’d personally requested my pardon.

So I’m a free man now.
 
Yet there’s no escaping the fact that I killed an innocent human being, that my hands are stained red forevermore, and that however much I’d like to believe I took the life of John Helms under highly unusual circumstances, from the perspective of a diseased mind, at least, the circumstances weren’t unusual at all.

THE END

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