Life Penalty (39 page)

Gail hugged her daughter tightly. “Of course you can. Of course you can.”

Jennifer pulled herself up and threw her arms around Jack before rejoining her father at the door.

“Lila,” Gail’s father called, “you’re holding up the works.”

“We’ll be back soon,” her mother advised.

“Do you want me to go too?” Jack asked after the others had left.

Gail reached over and grabbed his hand. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t want you to go.”

Gail spent over an hour studying the photographs of the man on the front pages of the newspapers. The face of average America, she thought, realizing that it was a phrase she would have once used to describe herself. She might have passed him dozens of times on the street.

There was nothing very distinctive about him. He was neither good-looking nor bad. His eyes were neither overly large nor noticeably small. They were an ordinary distance apart, and in one picture they almost sparkled, if not with intelligence, then at least with a certain vitality. His nose was crooked but not unpleasant. It had apparently been broken several times in various fights through the years, and he had never bothered having it fixed. His mouth was thin and curled into a knowing half smile that stopped just short of a smirk. His hair was straight and light brown, a little longer than the current trend. Gail found him not nearly as threatening in appearance as the
youth with the crew cut whose room she had searched. His shoulders were rounded, his back slumped forward as he walked between the two policemen in the pictures. His hips were narrow. Gail ran her fingers through her hair. He was so
ordinary.

Gail’s eyes moved from photograph to photograph, her eyes skimming the text beneath. This was the man who had raped and strangled her six-year-old child, this man who had himself been raped by his own father when he was barely five, this man with an IQ of just under one hundred—low normal. Normal, Gail repeated to herself.
Normal.

For a minute she tried to imagine what life had been like for this man, born into a hostile home through an accident of birth. He had not asked to be born. He had been created and then left to the deranged whims of his so-called family. He had never stood much of a chance, she realized, trying to feel some sympathy for him, and stopping when she realized that she couldn’t.

Somewhere, she knew, there were better people than herself, people who could survive this kind of brutality and still manage some compassion for those responsible. She was simply not one of those people. It was easier to be understanding when the horror was happening to somebody else. Magnanimity was simple as long as it was abstract. It was not so easy when events struck closer to home, when the home itself was almost destroyed. No, Gail thought, folding up the newspapers and pushing them aside, she did not feel compassion for this man. She did not want to feel it. It was too late to help him, just as it was too late to help her dead child.

She wondered if it was too late for the rest of them.

I
n the end, it took six months for the case to come to trial.

July was very hot, the summer having arrived late, then settling in with a vengeance. April had been cold and wet, its last afternoon passing in a downpour of vicious rain. If only it had rained like this a year ago, Gail had thought, and then tried to find some comfort in the fact that at least Cindy’s killer had been apprehended.

May had continued cool and unpleasant, the unseasonably cold temperatures carrying over into June. And then suddenly the weather had turned around; the sun had come out and stayed out; the temperature had begun its steady climb. The July 4 weekend had been the hottest in recent memory.

Gail and her family went to the courthouse on Livingston Avenue every day as the trial unfolded. After a lengthy, heated debate, a change of venue had been denied. The case was being heard in Livingston. The pre-trial publicity had been determined not to be too prejudicial; the defendant’s chances of a fair trial were ruled to be as good in Essex County as anywhere.

The defendant’s confession had been ruled inadmissible. There was some evidence to suggest coercion, the judge decided, disallowing the signed confession.

The state remained confident. They had a witness who would testify that the accused had confided in him all the details of the killing, and while they would concede that Bill Pickering was not one of New Jersey’s more outstanding citizens, and that he had, in fact, been granted “consideration” for his testimony, his alibi had proved sound for the afternoon of the murder, and he was, himself, above suspicion for the grisly crime.

The accused had no alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the murder; he was known as a loner; no one at the house where he roomed could ever remember having seen him with a woman. Worse still, the police had uncovered a stack of kiddie-porn magazines hidden deep inside his closet.

The circumstantial evidence was indisputable. Majors’ footprints matched those found at the scene; his clothing matched the descriptions provided by the boys who saw him fleeing the area; most damning of all, the forensic evidence provided an undeniable link between man and child.

The first day of the trial, the Walton family arrived early and watched outside as the curious trickled in; gradually, people overflowed onto the street. Scores were turned away at the courthouse door as Gail and those closest to her were escorted inside. Reporters snapped their cameras within inches of her face, blinding her temporarily, mounting and framing her confusion for their front pages. Their microphones appeared like lollipops in front of her mouth. Did she think Dean Majors was guilty? Was she hoping for the death penalty? Gail had stopped at the courtroom door and faced them squarely as, all around her, cameras clicked and lights popped. Yes, she answered simply to the first question, she was convinced Majors was guilty. Was she hoping for the death penalty? She shook her head—she no longer hoped for anything, she told them.

After that the reporters were silent. The lights stopped flashing. Everyone left her alone. Gail went inside and took her seat in the front row of the crowded courtroom.

The extended family sat huddled in close proximity throughout the proceedings: Gail and Jack, with Carol and her parents beside them; Mark Gallagher sitting beside Jack’s mother in the row directly behind, his wife, Julie, now hugely pregnant, remaining at home; Laura and Mike—all within arm’s reach. After the first day, Gail had been able to persuade Jennifer to keep Julie company. She didn’t want Jennifer to be part of the agony of the trial.

So much had happened, Gail thought, looking them all over, reviewing the last fifteen months, silently calculating everything that had changed. They were no longer the same people they once were—they would spend the rest of their lives paying for what this man had done.

Gail looked over at her husband, his face directed at the floor, his hands entwined with hers. He had finally persuaded her to attend the meetings of the victims-of-violence organization, and after her initial claustrophobia had subsided, she found that these people
did
help her.

“We all want vengeance,” Lloyd Michener had assured her, the group nodding in silent understanding when she had finally allowed the pent-up rage of the past year to burst forth.

The release of her hatred had carried her through the next six months, though Gail was aware that something was still missing. She had come to terms with her fury, given voice to her bitterness and frustrations, recognized that her mother had been right—life did go on no matter how one tried to stop it, no matter what one tried to do. And while it wasn’t true that time was the great healer everyone claimed it to be, eventually life did return to a semblance of normalcy, however different it was now from what it had been before.

And yet there was still something missing, something intangible, that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Sometime in the last six months Gail and Jack had miraculously started making love again, drifting into it naturally one night as they lay in each other’s arms. The feelings of disgust and shame she had thought would never leave her had somehow dissipated. And although both recognized that their lovemaking would never be performed with the same carefree abandon it had once been, Gail was astonished to find how much comfort could be drawn from the sexual act.

She remembered the early gropings of her teenage years, the first discoveries of what her body was capable of feeling, the initial thrills of being touched by another, the deep satisfactions inherent in giving herself to someone else. Cindy had been denied that knowledge. She would never know the tenderness that was possible in such an act.

The coroner testified that Cindy had been unconscious at the time of the sexual attack. She had been spared the more obvious physical pain. Gail sighed audibly when she heard this, was aware of tears dropping into her lap.

She found herself staring at the jury. After three days of intense haggling on the part of the two attorneys, eight men and four women had finally been selected. Though collectively they appeared as indistinguishable as the accused, individually they had been selected with great care. The defense had fought hard—and successfully—to keep mothers off the jury. Their one concession had been a woman whose children, both boys, were well into their teens.

The other three women consisted of a young divorcee and two who had never married, one a dental technician the same age as the defendant.

The men had been similarly inspected, and wherever possible, fathers of young daughters had been immediately
weeded out. The only exception was the young father of an infant girl. The defense had looked for work-oriented individuals whose time at home was limited.

Gail’s eyes drifted across the twelve serious faces. They looked more nervous than the accused, Gail thought at one point early in the trial. When the judge was forced to explain a point of law, they fidgeted noticeably and appeared anxious, afraid that something might slip past them, that they would fail to understand a key point. They looked alternately bored or horrified with certain of the technical details. One woman cried as pictures of the dead child were passed among them. Gail studied each face as each face studied the accused. She tried to crawl inside their minds, to feel what they were thinking, but she was unable to project herself beyond their somewhat bland exteriors. She had no way of knowing, she thought, just as she understood that
they
had no way of knowing the depth of the tragedy with which they were dealing.

Gail listened intently as each prosecution witness took the stand. She forced herself to hear each gruesome detail, refusing to block out what she did not wish to relive, forcing herself to dissect each sentence as if she were in grammar school. She listened to the police descriptions of the murder scene, to the boys’ vague recollections of the man they saw fleeing the scene, to the indisputable weight of the forensic evidence. She heard Lieutenant Cole’s steady, strong description of the discoveries they had made in Dean Majors’ bedroom. She recognized that the prosecution was putting forward an airtight case.

She paid particular attention to Bill Pickering, the informer, looking from his unkind face to the faces of the jury. They didn’t like him, she could see at a glance. Nor did she. He was arrogant and disreputable-looking,
though he had made an awkward attempt at propriety by wearing a suit. He sweated and twisted uncomfortably in his imposed civility.

The defense made much of the fact that he was an ex-con and a snitch, protecting his own skin. He had told the police about Majors only after it could do him some good. Was it not possible, the defense postulated, that Pickering had planted the incriminating evidence in Majors’ room? A reasonable doubt, the lawyer continually repeated during the course of Pickering’s testimony, harping on the point that Pickering was not a man to be trusted, that there was more than a reasonable doubt to discount everything he said, conveniently neglecting to mention the certitude of the forensic disclosures.

Dean Majors sat beside his lawyer without moving or speaking, as he had done every day since the start of the trial. Gail had wondered how she would feel the first time she saw him. He was a strange figure, pale, obviously uncomfortable, his nails chewed to the quick, his head moving restlessly from side to side, but nevertheless defiant.

Gail hated him on sight. Could he feel her loathing? she wondered. Turn around, she commanded silently. Look at me. But he stopped just short, turning back to face the front just when it looked as if he might confront her.

The defense called no witnesses. Dean Majors did not take the stand. His attorney made a final, eloquent plea on behalf of the reasonable doubt, but the simple fact was that there were no doubts. The jury deliberated for less than an hour before returning with its verdict of guilty.

Gail fell into Jack’s arms and cried as all around her she heard words of congratulations. She looked up just as Majors was leaving his seat, his eyes inadvertently stumbling across hers, returning her gaze as if caught in a trap and unable to do otherwise. The intensity of her feelings held him immobile.

The rest of the crowd in the courtroom seemed to disappear. There were only the two of them, confronting each other directly, leaving no room between them for anything but the truth.

It was only a matter of seconds but it felt like a lifetime before his eyes admitted to hers what his tongue would not, that he had raped and murdered her child, that he had dragged the little girl behind the clump of bushes and rendered her unconscious with his hands, that he had ripped her clothing from her child’s body and brutally forced his way inside her before returning his fingers to her small, delicate throat.

I’m the man you’ve been looking for, he told her wordlessly—the man in the bookstore, in the pawn-shop, down the hall. The man on the highway; the man on the street. It’s my face in your nightmare, the nightmare that began at precisely seventeen minutes past the hour of four on the last afternoon of an especially warm, sunny day in April. A nightmare that had a beginning but no end.