Invasion of Privacy (21 page)

Nina steeled herself against the nerves she felt quivering beneath her skin. She was remembering Terry on her studio floor. Yes, the camera had been close, trained on her. Her yellow eyes, and her head lying so peacefully on the bloody pillow ... It had taken time for her to die.

In the same dispassionate tone Collier had adopted, Paul asked, "Was there sound?"

"That’s what I wanted to mention," said Collier. "There’s a soundtrack. But the bullet damaged her vocal cords."

"You mean she doesn’t say anything about Kurt?"

"I mean, she tries to speak."

The words hung heavily in the stuffy air. They were using the present tense, she noticed with shock. Terry lived on in her video.

"What I’m asking is, you want me to keep the sound off while I run the tape this time? You can play it another time, when you get your copy."

Paul said, "Nina?"

She ought to receive the full impact, the way a jury would. After she had seen and heard it a thousand times, it would be just another piece of physical evidence.

And Collier wouldn’t talk to a male defense attorney this way, would he? Trying to spare his feelings? "Let’s hear it," she said.

"Up to you," Collier said. "She raises her head and tries to talk, but she can’t. So she forms words. We got help from a mostly retired guy who used to work for the county health department, Willie Evans. He’s deaf, and considered an expert lip-reader. He’s helped us before. He gave us a transcript of what she’s trying to say." He handed Nina and Paul separate copies of a one-page typewritten document. "You can follow her on the video. She’s trying hard to communicate."

"How long is it?" Nina asked. "The tape?" She remembered staring at the clock above the teacher’s head in school. Sometimes it helped to know.

"She gives up after eleven minutes or so." He motioned toward his office door. "Shall we?"

In the dark of a conference room, blinds down, Nina and Collier sat on one side of the long table, Paul on the other. A sheriff’s deputy struggled with a rolling cart, plugged in some wires, punched some controls, nodded to Collier, and departed the room, softly pulling the door shut behind him.

From a speaker in the corner, silence preceded a loud hiss, which abruptly cut out as the picture came in.

The autofocus mechanism on the camera seemed unable to decide what to focus on. It shifted out to the patterned floor, threads of clothing, a hand, a foot.

Sounds like a potato sack being dragged across a floor and bumping into things accompanied the abstract visuals, which slowly resolved themselves into one horrible shot.

Terry London, her long, wavy reddish hair matted with blood, stared into the camera’s eye. Propped along the cabinets that lined her studio, her legs extending beyond the camera, she looked straight at Nina. And blinked.

Her legs, spread-eagled in front of her to accommodate the camera, took up the bottom part of the frame. Her body, heaving in breaths with mighty effort, made up the midsection. Her head absorbed the top third of the frame, defiled by a bold red necklace of blood. Looking down toward the camera on the floor, she opened her mouth.

A woman’s scream, loud and harrowing, choking and wretched, tore through the room. Collier leaped up, stepping around Nina. "Let me just get the volume ..." he murmured, scrambling for the controller on the table near the machine. He pushed a button, lowering the level slightly, blocking Nina’s path to the screen for a moment, jolting her away from its searing image. "Sorry about that," he said, his voice apologetic as he made his way back to his chair, controller firmly in hand.

Rhythm, a mechanical wheezing, started up as Terry continued to look directly into the camera. Sucking and wet, the sounds pulsed from the speaker. For a moment Nina thought there was something else wrong, and glanced behind to Collier to see if he needed to fix anything. His eyes were glued to the screen. She realized there would be no further reprieve and turned back to Terry.

Terry opened her mouth with a pop, to break the bubble of blood that formed when she separated her lips. She closed and opened it once again, her mouth twisting and horrible, as she attempted something she had always done before and would never do again.

Drowning in her own blood, she looked down at the red that increasingly filled the middle of the screen, that had grown and spread as blood from the wound in her neck flowed out of her, pooling on the floor below.

"This is where the transcript starts," Collier said quietly in the Boschian darkness.

"It doesn’t hurt." Paul read the words from the transcript laid out on the table, a small penlight illuminating them. The sounds Terry made, carefully mouthed, were unintelligible.

"I’m dying," she said next, and her lips trembled with the enormity of understanding that must have flooded her then. The words, read by Paul with no more emphasis than "Good morning," or "Hello," spoke so neutrally of her ending. Nina felt her feet pushing her chair back, as if reacting to acceleration, braking, trying to slow things down, keep her alive.

Terry’s face rose toward the camera. Blood streamed out of her neck, obscuring the bullet hole. No one could help her now, her face said. Help.

Then:

"It’s your fault, Kurt."

Gasping and rattling.

"Oh, oh. I’m dying."

Paul’s voice followed Terry out loud, like a singer lip-synching a song.

Mouthing each syllable while the rest of her face twisted with pained grimaces, she wove her head slightly back and forth, as if she were rocking to soothe herself, like a child rocking itself to sleep, long past the time for a cradle.

The red of her blood, the blue of her clothing, and the checks on the floor combined with lamplight from a gooseneck lamp on the counter above to give the scene a fantastic, lurid artfulness. Staged, aesthetically sensational, Nina thought. Video lacked the distance of film, the framing, the soft faraway beauty of it. She could be lying right here in this conference room, in real time, breathing. Dying.

Terry hiccuped blood. Her head fell. For a long spell, maybe minutes, all they could see was her head, the neat parting of her hair along the top of her skull. But they could still hear the breathing. Nina looked away for a moment toward Paul, who sat across the table from her. He leaned an elbow on his knee. His chin rested on his fist. She couldn’t see his face. From the back, he had the uncomfortably restive air of a man watching the strike count rise on a pro baseball game, or an action movie seconds before the bomb blast he knew was coming.

Nina turned back. Terry struggled to raise her face higher.

"You ... pulled the trigger."

She nodded several times. How could her body produce those tears at such a time?

She seemed to shake her wobbly head. She strained to turn her face, now mottled with blood, to one side, toward the doorway Nina knew was there, as if she saw a ghost there, outside the camera range. Turning back, she showed her teeth in a caricature of a smile.

"What a ... surprise ... the Angel of Death."

Then ...

"I’ll see you in hell...."

Her mouth closed. An indescribable, strangled cough took up a long breath. Tears mixed with blood on her face. She shaped her lips, her head still straining to the side, her eyes staring. "Oh," she said. "Oh, oh ..."

Her head fell, as if in surrender. Her body stilled. The screen blinked off.

"That’s all," said Collier. "She’s dead at this point."

"Poor woman," Nina said. She was thinking about Collier’s wife, wondering how Collier privately felt when he watched the video. "She really seemed to see the Angel of Death coming toward her."

"Maybe that’s why she turned off the film at the end, with a kind of modesty," Collier said.

Paul said, "Some say you can see the soul come out from between the eyebrows at the precise moment. I’ve never seen it. Now, that would be the ultimate invasion of privacy."

"I need some fresh air," Nina said. They all got up quickly and left the dark room, where Terry could still move and speak, back from that lonely place to the throngs of the living.

20

"DYING DECLARATIONS," NINA SAID, THUMBING through the evidence code. "Exception to the hearsay rule. Here it is, section 1242:

" ’Evidence of a statement made by a dying person respecting the cause and circumstances of his death is not made inadmissible by the hearsay rule if the statement was made upon his personal knowledge and under a sense of immediately impending death.’ "

Two file boxes of discovery materials cluttered up Nina’s desk.

"So the video of her dying is admissible as evidence," Paul said. "I guess you could argue that they doctored it somehow."

"Chain of custody is pretty tight in this case. Collier’s very careful, and keeps a close eye on his troops."

"Collier? Getting a bit cozy with the deputy D.A., are we?"

Sandy harrumphed from the other side of Nina’s door. Paul opened it, and she sailed in bearing burritos from the Mexican restaurant across the street and two cans of soda. Taking in the atmosphere, she said simply, "Lunch."

"Mmm," Paul said, picking up a plastic spoon. "Chile Colorado."

"You’d eat through a nuclear bomb."

"If you put a touch of pepper on it, I’ll take care of that for you too," said Paul.

"A nuclear bomb?"

"I think he’s talking about this." Sandy held out a gooey quesadilla on a plate.

Paul unwrapped foil paper from his burrito. The aroma of cumin and beans instantly permeated the room. "I see something like that video, and my reaction is, well, thank the Lord, I’m still among the living. And I become very hungry. It’s an instinctive thing. It started when I was working homicide in San Francisco. We all went out at night and ate these huge meals." He took a big bite.

Sandy sat down in a chair by the door and ate daintily from a paper plate. She was wearing muddy rubber boots and a flowered jumper, her short black hair damp from the rain and her bracelets clinking on her wrists. Another afternoon thunderstorm had come up and thick drops pounded on the windowpanes from a dark May sky.

"Give me one of those, Paul," Nina said.

"Keep the paper wrapped on the bottom so you don’t drip all over yourself."

"I know how to eat a burrito!"

"Life may be short, and it may be brutish, but we’re still here. It’s always the other guy until your time’s up. Then, who cares? Not you. Or so I used to tell myself." He ate quickly, standing up, as she was.

"What a dreadful way to die."

"Shot, and left like that?"

"I don’t mean that. I mean telling lies when there’s no longer a point, when it’s so incredible to believe she’d lie that the Evidence Code will let the lie in as evidence."

"Have a taco," Paul said. "It’ll settle you down. But sit, okay? I’m just waiting for you to dump it."

Nina’s hands shook. Her mind had been objective, but her body had reacted to the video.

"She lied, Paul. Kurt didn’t kill her." She popped the cap on her soda and picked a taco from the bag. "You didn’t believe her, did you? She hated him. He’d rejected her for the last time. Even lying there on the floor dying, she thought of nothing more than hurting him."

"The jury ain’t gonna like it." Paul wiped his mouth on a napkin, burped, excused himself, and pulled a small notebook from his pocket, sitting on a chair across from her desk.

Sandy had finished eating. She bagged up some trash and went back to her own desk, leaving the door open just a crack behind her.

"You need an expert witness," Paul went on, "a lip-reader who can do better than Willie. That’s your only chance. I used to know a guy from the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley who might be able to help. I’ll give him a call."

"Yes! The lip-reader! Terry didn’t really say those things! You’ve got a great idea there, Paul." But she didn’t like the way he distanced himself, saying it was her only chance, not theirs.

"I hate to spout conventional cynical cop-ese."

"But?"

"Don’t expect miracles. Also, you need a napkin. You’re dripping, gringa. Didn’t your mama teach you how to eat Mexican food?" He leaned over to hand her a stack of napkins, too late for her beige linen pants.

"You believe he killed her."

"She’s bleeding rivers of blood onto the floor. She’s not going to lie at this point. Sorry. And you’re forgetting the really important thing."

"What might that be, O cynical ex-cop?"

"You’re angry," Paul said. "It’s a big blow to you personally, not just to any defense you had in mind. I understand."

"What am I forgetting?"

Paul balled up several wrappers and lobbed them deftly into the wastebasket across the room. "Somebody killed her. It’s almost impossible to accept that she’d let her killer go free. You’ve told me yourself, she hung on to some unfinished romantic business for a dozen years. Someone like that’s going to feel some little resentment toward the one who downed her for good."

"Maybe she—she blamed Kurt somehow for her getting killed. You know, indirectly. She thought everything bad that happened to her was Kurt’s fault."

"Uh-oh. I’m getting lost somewhere in the highways and byways of the female mind. All I can say is, I’m lying on the floor, I’m gonna tell you who shot me. I’m not going to be planning my next moves beyond that. Look, I ought to get started if you refuse to call Hallowell right now begging for a plea bargain. How about we get into these boxes and plot where we go next. Okay, boss?"

"Don’t call me that. Please. I’ve had the chance already to review the materials." And find herself perturbed every time she looked at the list of items recovered from the crime scene. The very long list included items from outside the studio and in Terry’s house. Something was on that list that shouldn’t be— something she had seen at Terry’s studio that day, but no amount of looking through the list helped. "I’ll get you copies of anything you need."

Paul opened the first box and scanned a list. "Crime scene, Terry London. Contents: Inventory of items removed from scene. Photographs. Lab Reports. Fingerprints. Medical examiner reports. Autopsy. Witness statements. A letter from Kurt Scott to Terry. A police statement about what Kurt Scott said when they arrested him. A video of that momentous event. The usual police reports. Looks pretty complete."

"The second box has Riesner’s files. Skimpy, I’d say. And a transcript of the preliminary hearing," said Nina. "There are videotapes, here, too, that we should watch together. How’s Saturday night looking for you?"

"I’ll bring the popcorn." Paul rooted through the second box and pulled out a slim file folder. "There must be more than this from Riesner," he said. "Even if the prelim was a formality, he must have had notes, motions, research, investigative reports.’’

"He didn’t feel much like cooperating under the circumstances. The prelim was brief Maybe he had a dozen pretrial motions ready. I’ll never know, because he hadn’t filed them at the point I took over."

"If I were Scott, I’d demand all my money back."

"Another problem. Riesner’s sitting on most of Kurt’s retainer.’’

"Whew. What a friend Kurt’s got in Nina."

"What are you saying?"

"You’re financing this case, aren’t you? You’re risking your reputation, your security, your kid’s happiness, your own.... He’s got you good."

"You sound ... jealous."

"Sure I am. But mostly I’m concerned. He can take you and Bob down with him. I find myself wanting to bully some sense into you before it’s too late."

"Go ahead. See where it gets you." She felt her chin rising in the air, and embarrassed to find it there, moved it back where it belonged. "Anyway, it’s already too late, Paul. I’m committed." She buzzed Sandy and asked her to call her son, Wish, to see if he could come to the office.

Within fifteen minutes Wish arrived. According to Sandy, Wish would be attending community college in the fall, majoring in police science. He had been after her for months to get himself involved at her office in something a little more challenging than janitorial work. Wish pushed open Nina’s door. About eighteen years old, he was as tall and gaunt as his mother was short and wide. Dressed in mechanic’s clothes, oil outlining his fingernails, he hesitated before entering the office. Sandy followed him in.

"Sit down," Nina said. Paul had one client chair. Sandy took another, and Wish sat on the couch, his eyes wide and unblinking.

Nina surveyed her defense team: two smart, well-intentioned but inexperienced helpers; Paul, the slick dick with a talking bear hidden up his sleeve; and herself, competence to be determined.

They would get by.

She said, "The four of us will be putting together a defense for Kurt Scott. He’s charged with premeditated murder. We’re going to farm out some cases, close some others, and try to do right by the ones we keep."

"Trial date’s... when?" asked Sandy.

"July fifteenth. It’s too soon," said Nina, "but I’m worried about Kurt. He hasn’t adjusted to being in jail." How could she tell them that underneath the words he spoke, she sensed desperation? How she feared he would crack up in there? "He wants us to go forward as soon as possible.

"Sandy, take these boxes out to your desk and make indexed files. Start juggling my appointments so that I have some long chunks of time every day that aren’t booked. Make sure you calendar all the pretrial court appearances."

"Done. Almost."

"Wish? I understand you can work flexibly, on call?"

He nodded.

"You’re to work with Paul. Do whatever he tells you to do. Don’t do anything you’re not specifically told to do. Understand?"

"He does," Sandy said for him. Wish straightened up, nodding emphatically.

"Okay, Paul. You’re in charge of the investigation. Let’s talk about how to proceed."

"Other than the lip-reader, shouldn’t you line up some expert witnesses soon?" Paul asked.

"That’s on the list."

"I still need copies of all the witness statements and the evidence list. And the autopsy report," Paul added.

Sandy wrote.

"We’ll meet twice a week from now until trial," said Nina. Wish wore a grin that showed great big perfect teeth. "What is it, Wish?"

"He’s happy he gets to work on the case," his mother said, tucking her notebook into a capacious pocket on her skirt.

Wish nodded again. With his ears poking out of long, shining black hair, totally out of place in this world of ink and paper, he looked like an eager young psychotic about to do something rash.

"Okay, I’ve had a chance to review the reports. Let me fill you in on what we know so far. As I see it, the prosecution’s case rests on five pieces of evidence. The first and probably most difficult problem we have is Jerry Kettrick’s eyewitness account of that night. He says he heard two shots in close succession, then saw Kurt run out. We’ve got to nail down the timing of those shots he says he heard, and get anything we can that’ll cast doubt on his recall of the incident.

"Second, the Remington rifle that killed Terry London was registered to Kurt and his fingerprints were found on the barrel. Kurt says Terry’s had the rifle ever since he left her. Anything we can get to show that that rifle remained in Terry’s possession will help. If Terry had the gun in her possession, anyone could have used it on her.

"Third, what the D.A.’s office is now referring to as the ’death video.’ In that, Terry seems to be implicating Kurt in her murder. She’s either lying, or the transcript of the lip-reader is flawed."

"Our fourth problem. Kurt made some statements when he was arrested in his car the morning after that don’t sound good. The arresting officer had a car that was equipped with a video camera. He taped the arrest. Paul and I will take a look at that video in the next day or two, and evaluate just how harmful Kurt’s statements might be."

"What is he supposed to have said?" Paul asked.

"According to, uh—" she leafed through some papers—"Jason Joyce, the arresting officer, he had blood all over him when he was pulled over, which by the way turned out to be only his own blood. He said there had been a shooting. ’She’s been shot.’ "

"Not ’I shot her’?" asked Wish.

"No, but ’she’s been shot’ is bad enough. It puts him there."

"They fixed fast and hard on Scott. But what do they think was the motive?" Paul asked. "He’s never made a statement about any of this except what you just mentioned. I realize they know by now that Scott was married to Terry, but he hasn’t had any contact with her for years."

"True. That’s the fifth problem. They have a note he wrote her that contains a threat. It’s not dated. It could be very old. I haven’t asked Kurt about it yet."

"What’s it say?" asked Wish.

She picked up a photocopy and read it. " ’Terry, for the last time, get out of my life. If you continue to harass me, write to me, or attempt to communicate in any way, I will come after you and make you sorry you ever met me.’ I assume it’s authentic."

"Did she keep bugging him?" Wish persisted.

"She didn’t find him after the last move. That was four years ago. The note was found among her effects."

"Why did she bother with him for all that time? I mean, usually you get dumped, you get over it," said Wish.

"Some people don’t," Nina said.

"She hated him," Sandy said. "She did what she could to hurt him."

"Oh, yes," Nina said. Paul was shaking his head sorrowfully. She knew he was thinking about what Terry had done to her baby. "Still, from our point of view, the police have very limited motive evidence, since they can’t talk to Kurt."

"Exactly," Paul said. "I know proving motive isn’t essential to getting a conviction. But like I said, juries don’t like convicting unless they feel they understand the why of the crime. And they’re going to want to know why he would come back after all this time and kill her. Hallowell doesn’t seem to have made the connection that I found Scott and told him where you were, which made him catch the next flight to warn you about Terry. If he ever does ..."

"Riesner said I might be called as a witness," Nina said. "It would be a mess trying to sort out which of Kurt’s statements to me were protected by the attorney-client privilege." Kurt’s note to her, asking her to meet him at Pope Beach, for instance, certainly wasn’t privileged. She looked out the window at the mountains, wondering if she would be subpoenaed. How could she defend Kurt when she might also be a major witness against him?