Premeditated Murder (7 page)

Right after he'd graduated from law school, he had taken a job in the Norfolk County prosecutor's office, not so much because he wanted to practice criminal law, but because he needed a job, and he didn't have particularly high grades. He worked hard, though, and developed a reputation as a solid, if uninspiring, litigator.

Then, about a week after her sixtieth birthday, his mother was raped and murdered in her apartment by some monster. Richard Cottonwood had never recovered.

From that moment, his life became a crusade against crime. He was no longer a solid litigator, he was a manic one. He surrendered completely to his feelings of vengeance, channeling them through his work as an assistant district attorney. For five years running, he got more convictions and longer sentences than anyone in his office. The next year, he was appointed to the bench, where his one-man war on crime continued.

“Okay. I'll handle the pretrial motions for you on the case,” Baumgartner now said, “so you can wrap up whatever you've got going now. I think this one's going to take an awful lot of time, once it gets started.”

Judge Cottonwood doubted it.

FIVE

THE COURT:
In order for the Commonwealth to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty of murder in the first degree, it must prove each of the following three elements:

     
First, that the defendant committed a killing that was unlawful. That is, a killing that was not justified or excusable. A killing is justified, and therefore not murder, if authorized by law, for example, when committed during a battle of war, or by a police officer when using reasonable force to effect a lawful arrest, or when committed in self-defense …

     
Second, that the killing was committed with deliberate premeditation. That is, that the defendant thought before he acted. That he formed the plan or resolution, no matter how simple, to commit the act which killed the victim, after deliberation …

     
And third, that the killing was committed with malice aforethought. That is, that the defendant specifically intended to kill the victim …

(Trial Volume III, Pages 61, 63–64, 66, 71)

February 12—Northampton, Massachusetts

ZACK REACHED DOWN AND PULLED ANOTHER file folder out of the box of material that the court had ordered the Commonwealth to turn over in advance of the trial. Normally he thought of this as the fact-finding portion of his pretrial preparation. Right now it felt like little more than sitting in his office and reading over and over about a cold-blooded multiple murder performed by a calculating butcher.

Terry had come over to help, but had apparently become tired of it. He had gotten up from the table where he'd been working and was now standing at the window, fidgeting with his PDA, and occasionally looking out at the street.

“How's the reading going?” Zack asked.

“Yeah, fine,” Terry replied absently. Then he turned to Zack. “You know, you never told me why you didn't introduce me to Patty Stallworth after you guys broke up senior year.”

Great. Patty the gymnast. An endless source of fascination for Terry. “That was what, fifteen years ago, Elvis,” Zack said, turning back to the files on his desk. “I think you're probably going to need to let that go.”

“I still bear the scars of that disappointment. And don't call me Elvis. You know I was right.”

A few years ago, Terry and Zack had gotten into an argument about whether Elvis would be named as one of the fifty all-time movie legends. Terry had been wrong, and occasionally needed to be reminded. “I don't think so.”

“Fine,” Terry said, returning to his table. “But we will be returning to the topic of Ms. Stallworth one of these days, Counselor.” After a moment passed, he said, “Did I tell you I spoke to the doctor? She said that Cal should be well enough for us to go see him again later this week.”

Zack looked up. “They ever find out what happened to him?”

“She just said it was a combination of a bad infection in his leg and some other complications from the wound in his arm.”

Cal Thompkins had ended their last meeting early because he'd started to feel ill. By late that night, his temperature had climbed to over 104 degrees. He'd spent the next five days in intensive care and the next fifteen too weak to visit with anyone.

“I even got a chance to talk to Cal for a second about an insanity defense,” Terry continued.

Talk about long shots. Juries were incredibly skeptical about insanity as a defense, especially to murder. But it was rapidly looking like it was the only strategy they could use. What sane person would gun down six strangers?

“Oh, yeah?” Zack asked, glancing up at a drawing taped to the wall that Justin had given him yesterday. It was either a house or a potato with a chimney. “What'd he say?”

“He said he'd go through an evaluation, but don't get your hopes up. He says he knew exactly what he was doing, he wasn't insane, and he doesn't want to say he was insane. He just wants to tell his story to the jury and let them decide. Course, that pretty much proves he's nuts, as far as I'm concerned,” Terry said. “Or dumb as dirt. Maybe M.I.T.'s slipping.”

Zack shook his head. “Boy. If he doesn't plead insanity, I don't know how we're going to argue this thing.”

“Well, we can't very well say that he didn't fuck the duck, because let's face it—he fucked it good. So if he won't let us say he was crazy, I guess that leaves us with ‘But I can explain.'”

“Great.”

On the list of things juries loved to hear defendants say, “I was insane” was only slightly below “But I can explain.” Zack had heard some dandies.

“I had to shoot him. He wouldn't give me his money.”

“I didn't think anybody would be home.”

“My brother told me it would be easy. We were gonna be in and out of there in two seconds. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”

“So I shot him. Big deal. I been shot before. Twice.”

“I was so drunk I had no idea how hard I hit him.”

“What was I supposed to do? He called my girl a slut.”

What could possibly explain the machine-gun shooting of six college students? Zack looked back at the file. There had to be something else. “What about the gun that guy used to shoot Thompkins? Was it registered?”

Terry shuffled through some papers until he found what looked like one of the police reports. “Let's see. It was a nine-millimeter handgun, completely legal. He got off one shot, which hit Cal in the leg.” Terry flipped through some other reports. “Meanwhile, Mr. M.I.T. fired off somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred twenty rounds, using an illegally modified AK-47, which was found five feet from him in the hallway. Good thing we have gun control,” he muttered, continuing to scan the report.

Zack inhaled sharply. “He fired a hundred and twenty bullets?”

“Go big or stay home.”

Zack pulled out a few photos from a box at his feet and studied them. “No wonder the place looks like somebody went at it with a chain saw.”

“Have you seen the video yet?”

“What video?” Zack asked.

“It's in the box with the other thing,” Terry responded helpfully, rummaging around in a carton Zack hadn't gotten to yet. “I peeked at it a little last night,” he said, handing a tape to Zack. “I don't recommend popcorn.”

Zack brought the tape over to the VCR he had set up in his office and started it. Then he turned the TV on and watched with Terry as the screen flashed to life.

Like most of the police videos Zack had seen, the camera operator wasn't trying to do anything but slowly sweep over everything, stopping on important details. The idea was to try to give the viewer a sense of the whole scene, something that even the best still photos often failed to do.

This whole scene looked like the set of a silent horror movie. Lifeless, bloody bodies, mutilated by multiple wounds, were strewn across the floor and furniture like garbage.

“The one on his back near the kitchen is Marc Nathenson,” Terry said, as an image came into view of a skinny guy in a yellow T-shirt with his legs awkwardly bent. Marc Nathenson was wearing old-fashioned white Converse All-Stars. “He was a grad student in chemistry. Helped out in freshman chem, I guess.” The camera continued to crawl around the room, stopping and zooming in on the body of a young woman sprawled facedown, one arm trapped beneath her. There was an incredible amount of blood around her. Zack was having trouble focusing. Terry seemed to be reading from some file. “The two women were both seniors. Marianne Duhamel was majoring in French, and the other one …” Terry kept on speaking, but the humming in Zack's ears drowned him out. He needed to concentrate. This was evidence that needed to be analyzed. He needed to do more than gape at carnage, like a motorist who slows down to watch the paramedics attend to a driver in a head-on collision.

One of the victims was wearing a silver bracelet and had apparently been drinking a Diet Pepsi.

Another had a chipped tooth.

Terry said something about a biology teaching assistant.

A third had been wearing glasses with thick black frames when he was killed. He looked a little like Elvis Costello with a tan. Slumped over the arm of a couch.

With a hole in his neck.

Zack began to sweat. He wasn't sure how much more he could take.

The screen flickered, and other images began to appear. But even when the camera turned away from the bodies, it revealed an astonishing level of violence.

The shooter's rampage was most evident in the damage to the living room. The stream of bullets had broken all of the windows, torn down curtains and shades, cut through a table, smashed a mirror and several lamps, sliced open and scattered upholstery and stuffing which was all over the place, and blasted dozens of holes in the walls and floor. There were even a few in the ceiling. In the kitchen, broken glass and dishes were on the counters and floor. What was left of the entry door was hanging by one hinge at a crazy angle. The rest had been reduced to kindling.

And blood was splattered everywhere.

Then the screen flickered again and returned to the living room. This time, the camera operator seemed to be concentrating on details that he might have missed the first time around.

A single blue-and-white running shoe, lying on its side near the door to the kitchen next to the Nathenson brother, who had a blood-soaked baseball cap clutched in his left hand.

The bookshelf in the corner had miraculously dodged the fusillade, on which sat a college course catalog, a few dog-eared paperbacks—
Franny and Zooey, L'Etranger, The Crying of Lot 49
—and a small, passport-size photo of a dark-haired young man with a charming smile housed in a tacky frame that said “World's Greatest Uncle.”

The thin white cardboard pizza box spilling slices of pepper-and-onion pizza onto the ugly green carpet, leaning against the remains of a shattered coffee table. “You've Tried All the Rest—Now Try the Best. University Pizza.”

Zack turned the TV off. His hand was shaking.

“Is that it?” asked Terry.

“That's it for now,” answered Zack.

Why was he transfixed by the horror? Every criminal case had victims, or destruction, or both. Anyone who practiced this kind of law had to be able to detach himself from his personal feelings of revulsion from the crime in order to do his job. But this time, Zack wasn't feeling detached. He was feeling sick.

He stood up. “I'm starting to wonder if I should have taken this one.”

“Why? Just because he's guilty?”

Zack shook his head. “I don't know. I'm not sure if it's because I've got Justin now, or because I've been away from this kind of felony for so long, but—I just don't know.”

“What? The guy flipped out and blew away a room full of people.”

“Flipped out?” Zack retorted. “This guy didn't flip out. He waited for hours for these people. And then he shot them over and over with a hundred and twenty bullets.” He paused for a moment. “Wait a minute. I'm wrong. He didn't wait for hours. He waited for
days
. He rented the place across the way so he could sit around and watch them come and go before he did it. This guy didn't just kill these people. He
executed
them. A couple of English majors, a postgrad chemistry student, a biology teaching assistant. Somebody's favorite uncle.” He closed his eyes, and for some reason, the image of that single running shoe came into his mind. “Jesus Christ.”

Terry shrugged. “It doesn't change the fact that he's entitled to a defense.”

“I know that,” Zack said. “I'm just not sure I'm going to be able …” His voice trailed off.

“Well, why don't we wait to hear the rest of his story?” Terry suggested. “Maybe something will come up.”