Lies of the Heart (41 page)

—Let’s start a family, she had whispered, needing to keep him close, knowing how easily he could retreat again.

—I don’t know.

—It will be a boy, and he’ll look just like you.

Katie listened to his rapid breathing, the doubt with every inhale and exhale. Said the words he needed to hear:—You’ll be an amazing father. He’ll make you proud.

Her own breaths matching his then.

—When? Nick finally said, and Katie pulled his hand onto her stomach.

—Now.

Now, she had said to him, and heard Nick draw in his breath as she pressed his hand into her flesh.

She can almost feel Nick’s body against hers right now, the hope speeding through him, dreaming of his son. And then Katie sees Dana’s arms thrown wide to include Katie’s entire life—this moment with Nick, and the years before she met him, the months since he’d left, and everything in between. Wanting Katie to talk to a professional, to tell a complete stranger
all of it.

“How?” she says, and buries her head inside her hands. Jack hops up onto the bed, pushes his nose into her.

When,
Nick had said that night, finally coming back to her all the way.
Now.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she says helplessly to the dog, enough for him to lean his body into hers with a nervous whine. She hugs him into her lap, stares into his black eyes. “What else could I give him?”

O
n Monday morning Jerry’s current social worker, Amanda, is on the witness stand first, immediately floundering under Richard’s pounding questions. The young woman’s eyes protrude a little, which adds to the dazed look on her face; she blinks at Richard and around the room, struggling to keep her composure.

“So if someone filed an incident report at the Warwick Center about the defendant’s violent behavior, your office would be notified and a copy of it would be sent for your files as well?”

“Yes, but Jerry hadn’t been violent in such a long time—”

“But the reports should be in the files regardless of time, right?”

“They should be,” Amanda says.

“But they aren’t, so how have you tried to account for that?”

“I haven’t . . . I can’t, actually. I thought we sent you the complete files when you subpoenaed them.”

Richard raises his eyebrows at the jurors. “As his current social worker, are you aware that the defendant went through a period of time when he was aggressive and disruptive? Or didn’t you even read the reports?”

“No—I mean, yes, I knew and I read them, but it was my understanding—”

“That they weren’t important anymore?”

“No, not that, it’s—”

“And how long ago did you read them?”

“When I was assigned his case, about eight months ago.”

“And now they’re just”—Richard snaps his fingers—“missing.”

“That’s what I heard—but I when I sent them, I think they were in—”

“Your client is on trial for murder, and you didn’t check to see if potentially damaging information was included in his files?”

“I don’t—I think—”

“Is it normal procedure at DCYF for records to just disappear like that?”

Throughout this exchange, Donna’s objections are overruled, one after the other, and she flags at the defense table, shaking her head. Jerry stares down at his yellow pad, the pencil off to one side. His eyes are unfocused, bleary, and there are puffy bags underneath them. He is a statue, solid and unmoving, and when Donna turns to consult with one of her assistants and accidentally bumps his shoulder—a gesture that makes Katie flinch on her bench—he doesn’t react.

Last week, just
days
ago, Katie would have sat forward, her eyes hard and unforgiving at this assault, but she recognizes this girl’s confusion, her desire to understand. And then her failure, her frustration, as she checks the defense table for help yet again and sees Donna still consulting with a woman in the front row.

“Well, I suppose this is just a matter of record keeping, then?” Richard says to Amanda. “That now you can call the Warwick Center administration and have them make copies from their own files?”

No one in the courtroom could possibly believe it’s this easy, that the missing incident reports would be mentioned at all if they still existed, but Amanda is glad to be let off the hook.

“Yes,” she says.

Katie watches Amanda’s body go limp with relief, wishing hers would do the same.

One by one, Richard calls DCYF administrators and Jerry’s past social workers to the stand and begins his assault all over again. Katie finds a rhythm inside her head, a way to shut out the words that come at her, along with Richard’s scathing looks and gestures; she catches herself counting her fingers, slowing her breathing, the way Nick taught Carly when she couldn’t calm herself after her mother’s death. It works for a while, long enough for Katie to understand that what looks like simple badgering (Richard repeating the same questions to each witness) is actually practiced and has a purpose. Richard shakes his head, sighs, raises his eyebrows in doubt. As always, it works: when he stands before the jurors and gives them a look—
Can you believe this?
—all twelve sets of eyes mirror his frustration.

There is only one interruption in the rest of the morning session, though not from Donna, who doesn’t object any longer. Katie watches Donna with envy, because she has become as quiet, as unmoving, as Jerry, which makes the scene even more dramatic: as the last social worker trudges out of the courtroom, Jerry’s body spasms once, torso twisting, then a second time. And then he is suddenly falling out of his chair sideways, landing on the courtroom floor with a loud whimper of pain. As the noise of confused voices intensifies inside the room, Katie has only one clear thought: she’s just glad she wasn’t the one to fall down.

“Can I get you anything?” Richard asks at the lunch break. He bangs his briefcase and laptop onto his desk, sits. “Something to eat?” he asks without glancing at her.

She can’t pinpoint it, but something has changed between them. She’s sure of it. First there was the unsettling way he treated her this morning when she asked about today’s witnesses—his short, overly formal answers, his scarcely hidden irritation with her, as if she were a meddling reporter with too many questions. And now, as she watches him, this: he opens his laptop, hits a key, begins typing. Like Katie isn’t in the room at all—or she’s
in
the room, but completely irrelevant now.

“I’m fine,” she says.

“Please,” he says, jerking open a drawer and rifling through it, “have a seat.”

“I’ll stand,” Katie blurts, too loud, and Richard looks up.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

“Fine,” Katie says, louder.

Richard turns his eyes briefly to where Katie’s hands clench the chair in front of her. His eyebrows rise, and he looks back at Katie. “You said you have some questions? About the tape, I assume?”

“Actually, no. I just want to know if your strategy has changed.”

Richard becomes absorbed in another drawer for a moment.

“Please,” Katie says.

He pulls out a legal brief, flips it open. “Last week was a little crazy, for a bunch of different reasons,” he says. “For one, the footage of Jerry’s violence was brand new to me, and I had to make some adjustments.”

“I’m sorry—” she begins, but he stops her with an indifferent shake of his head and scribbles something onto his pad.

“Treadmont might have known about it before me, but in fact she’s playing right into my plan. Even with the footage that made it onto the final copy.” His voice is defensive, like Katie is challenging his competency.

“So the strategy
has
changed.”

“No. We’ve always needed to show deliberate and premeditated behavior. Still do.”

“But you keep talking about his anger, and then you let the witnesses talk about Jerry’s compliance, how he wasn’t an angry guy.”

“I keep pushing them to repeat this for a reason.” He lines up his pen with the cardboard binder of the pad. “I want the jurors to believe that Jerry
wasn’t
angry and out of control.”

“But why the footage then, why—”

“The more I push to show he could become violent, the more the defense pushes back. In the end it will be exactly what I need.”

“Which is?”

“He smiled right before he shot your husband, Katie. He didn’t strike out, he wasn’t aggressive at all.”

“But earlier that day, he had the group session with Nick.” Katie lowers her eyes for an instant. “About sex and marriage. The defense is going to say it was fear, that he was set off by his history with his mother and how she abused him while she talked about sex and recited Scripture.”

“And what happened years ago, when Jerry was ‘set off ’?”

“You know. He freaked out.”

“Exactly,” Richard says, leaning forward. “But this time he didn’t. He learned to control his rage. He was upset by whatever he heard in that session, and whatever he and Nick talked about later at lunch, and then he acted on it. He seemed preoccupied, but not angry. He was upset with Nick, but not out of control. In his supervisor’s own words, he was ‘pensive’ and ‘diligent.’
Planning.
” Richard sits back in his chair, folds his arms. “Controlled. Deliberate. Premeditated.”

“And when they say he tried to save Nick? That he was confused and tried to help him?”

“I recall Rodriguez’s statement. ‘Bad men belong in hell.’ Jerry thought it was okay to shoot a bad man, because God wanted it.”

“But I don’t think it’s that easy. Jerry
did
love Nick.”

Richard shrugs. “Jerry may have loved your husband and still tried to kill him for reasons we’ll never understand. Maybe he thought Nick was ‘bad,’ or he got pissed off at what he heard that day, or maybe he really thought shooting him was a good thing—who knows? The facts are still the same. He stole the gun, hid it in his jacket, then walked into the gym to murder Nick. He smiled and said, ‘Time to go.’
Why
he did it barely matters anymore.”

“But the tape,” Katie says. “They’ll see the other side—”

“It doesn’t matter how many sugary moments made it on there. Those jurors will still see what this man is capable of, how he hurt Nick in the past.”

“But during those struggles, when he was upset by thunder or something, he wasn’t purposely trying to hurt Nick.”

“Well, they can make that decision for themselves, can’t they?” he asks tersely.

“The point is,” he continues, “they’ll see a man who became enraged when his past caught up with him, someone who would strike out, but only when Nick was around. Even if Jerry learned to contain himself and deal with his past, the images of this rage will affect them. And then, when we put them side by side with his complete restraint on the day of the murder,” Richard says, “even when the jurors see the innocuous images of Jerry juxtaposed with the blowouts on the tape . . . well, we’ve got exactly what we want. A violent man who might have appeared harmless at times but who also became vicious within seconds. A man who eventually found a way to focus this rage in a controlled manner, who was completely aware that shooting Nick from three feet away would kill him. A man who was still able to recite the Bible thirty-some years after he heard it. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ right?”

The self-satisfied smile on Richard’s face is too much. Katie looks away, mumbles her thanks.

“Anything else?” he asks in a dismissive tone.

“Are you—have I done something wrong?”

“No. Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know, you just seem upset with me.”

“Not at all,” he says with a stiff smile.