Rabid (76 page)

Dante sat behind Bev, and his damp forehead rested on his wrists crossed on the rail that separated the spectators from the court. Though his position resembled an attitude of prayer, it was a pose of exhaustion. His prior, Roman vanity would have been horrified at the tired smudges under his eyes, the gauntness of his face, and the charcoal and ash streaks that had appeared in his hair the last few months, but he hadn’t noticed any of it in the mirror this morning while shaving and trying not to nick his fatigued skin.

His eyes burned.

Heath Sheldon said, “At the beginning of this trial, I told you that the evidence and the theory of the crime didn’t add up. So why would the prosecution even charge someone in such a case that appears to be an accident or suicide?”

Leila was crowded into the back row near the television crew’s hot lights. She had tied her hair back in a fishwife’s knot, as if reining in her hair would make her invisible. She hadn’t worn sunglasses or a hat. That would make her more conspicuous than she already was, the mistress of the dead man who had been smeared with his blood and had destroyed his reputation by publishing his atrocious experiments.

Danna’s story had worked its way though the gossiping undercurrent of the scientific community. Critical letters were published in
Nature
, stating that the scientific community should repudiate the Conroy’s rabies data because it had been obtained by risking human life and circumventing safety and ethics. Some letters compared the rabies work to the hypothermia and hypoxia studies conducted on prisoners at the Nazi death camps, which are sealed.

Reductio ad nazium.

No one mentioned that Leila’s HIV results were also beyond the letter of the lab’s license but not the practicality of it, because they had a validated glove box and sealed incubators so the lab could have been rated higher, and no one had contracted HIV in the lab and died a horrible, screaming, recent death.

Also, Leila’s data suggested a new drug target for HIV-associated dementia, so it was potentially profitable.

Columbia had called Leila last week to confirm that her quick-promotion fellowship was waiting for her. The whiff of notoriety whetted their interest.

In the center of the courtroom, Heath glanced at the yellow notepad he held at waist height. He cleared his throat and said, “First-degree murder has the most stringent definition for conviction. First-degree murder means that the act was premeditated, that it was committed with malice aforethought, that every action taken was entirely intentional, and that the perpetrator had no remorse and didn’t try to save the victim’s life.

“That’s just not what happened. This incident, from the evidence that we have, doesn’t fit any of these definitions.” Heath tapped his notepad with a fat black pen. “Now, you should ask yourselves why the prosecution did that.

“One possibility is that they think you folks will convict a ham sandwich if they tell you to, even if they have a shoddy case.” Always a good opener to appeal to any mavericks. One contrarian could hang a jury.

“Another possibility is that they didn’t interview their own witnesses properly. They said Beverly Sloan had been beating Conroy Sloan, but it was Leila Faris who defended herself physically from him and testified to leaving the specific bruises they attributed to Mrs. Sloan. They blew it again when Leila Faris told you that Conroy Sloan had threatened suicide that very night and the prosecution objected to their own witness’s testimony.”

Heath shook his palomino head and grinned. “I’ll put that one in my book someday.”

He watched the eight women and four men on the jury, but none of them were telegraphing their decision. “But there are darker possibilities, beyond the prosecution’s pride or stupidity.

“Here’s one: conviction rates for women who are accused of killing their husbands,
even if they didn’t do it,
even husbands who were abusive, even in direct self-defense of themselves or their children, are preternaturally high. There is still,
still
a sentiment in society that women are the property of their husbands, and
property
shouldn’t fight back.

“When a dog bites its master, even if the guy was beating it at the time, the dog is put down at the vet’s or with a rifle.

“When a woman is accused of killing her husband, whether evidence exists or not, the
taint
of the accusation is enough for this same subtle undercurrent to drag her under because women should be
meek
, they should
submit
, they should
obey
.”

Two of the women in the jury box, the gray-haired woman, Rinpoche, and the Italian Catholic, Salerio, crossed their legs and their eyebrows twitched downward, a microexpression of unease.

Good.

“On the other hand, men accused of killing their wives enjoy some of the lowest conviction rates and the lightest sentences in the judicial system. I’m sure we can all think of a famous example or two. And again, that’s because women are
still
treated as
property
and a man can dispose of his
property
however he wants to.”

In the jury box, Karida Kung wished the trial was over. She worked in a hardware store, and she hadn’t had a decent paycheck in weeks because she was stuck here, doing her civic duty. Her husband was pissed that she hadn’t pled financial hardship and escaped this stupid jury duty, like he only cared about her paycheck, like she was an ox that he hired out to work every day and collected its wages.

Heath crossed the courtroom in front of the jury box, stroking his jaw philosophically.

“And that leads us to another problem for the prosecution: a
man
of high standing in the community is dead, and even if it was an accident or self-inflicted or an act of God, someone
here
needs to pay because the world is logical and orderly and things happen for a reason.

“That’s the way we like it: cause and effect, action and reaction.

“A psychopath was abused as a child and kills people who look like their abusive parent.

“Terrorists plot a conspiracy, and police or G-men thwart them with a cunning plan.

“A serial killer has a predictable pattern to his crimes and is apprehended by a genius detective who solves the puzzle.

“A man dies an untimely death, and
someone is convicted
of killing him.”

Heath set his yellow legal pad on the table in front of Bev, who studied her hands sorting the Rosary beads.

He turned back to the jury. “The prosecution is counting on your need to understand the world as an orderly, rational place. But the world isn’t an orderly, rational place. Good drivers have traffic accidents. Pedestrians slip and fall on perfectly dry sidewalks. Asteroids fall out of the sky and smash people. Heart attacks smite people who have low cholesterol.

“Sometimes, in a struggle over a steak knife, someone gets cut.

“There’s one more reason why the prosecution gave you a charge of first-degree murder that they knew they couldn’t support: they don’t
really
want you to convict Beverly Sloan.”

Heath drew a deep breath. The prosecution would refute this in its own closing statement, so he had to tread carefully to make their refutation support his argument.

“Political pressure can make prosecuting attorneys do strange things. The prosecution may have known that Conroy Sloan either killed himself or died by accident, but they couldn’t admit that with,” and his long, suit-clad arm swept toward the cameras and supernova lights at the rear of the courtroom that cast triangle shadows from everyone’s nose over their faces, “such unusual media exposure. So they gave you a charge that you couldn’t convict on.”

That could take care of any prosecution sympathizers.

“Now,” Heath said, “let’s go through the evidence and discuss why this all adds up to not only reasonable doubt for Beverly Sloan but to trumped-up charges.”

In the jury box, seated on office chairs with permanent butt indents, twelve men and women listened to Heath Sheldon list the evidence against the defendant Beverly Sloan and systematically destroy it like so many sheets of paper blown out an open window and falling into a trash bin fire.

Heath Sheldon recapped the medical examiner’s testimony, highlighting that the placement of the knife in the deceased’s chest was more indicative of a self-inflicted stab from the side with an assumedly tiny, non-lethal steak knife than from a murderous slash with intent to kill and kill some more. This was corroborated by the fact that Bev’s badly broken left arm, the one that had left the smudged-over fingerprints, should not have had the strength to perform even such a weak blow.

Gabriela Rossetti listened to the evidence with her hand pressing down her horrified heart that threatened to chomp its way out of her chest. She could feel its rhythmic chewing in there, writhing over this poor, poor woman who the prosecutors had almost consigned to prison on such flimsy evidence because she had been in the room when Conroy Sloan stabbed himself. She hadn’t stuck the blow in anger, and Gabriela was so relieved that she hadn’t. It didn’t seem natural, a woman killing a man with one blow. As the blonde attorney said, the prosecution had trumped-up the charges.

Heath smiled at the jury, especially the man in the front row who fidgeted and grimaced the whole time. He seemed to have a back problem. “And with the pain from the broken, no,
crushed
bones in her arm, she couldn’t have driven the knife through cartilage and past bone, nicked his ribs, and slashed his heart. It isn’t possible.”

Blake Kellen shifted his weight to ease the spike of pain lancing from his buttock to his knee and leaned toward acquittal. Her stabbing a guy when her arm bones were ground to fine pepper was like him kicking someone to death.

Hara Carson added a little hmmph to her sigh when that awful Kellen man flopped around in his seat again. She needed to watch the attorney and that Beverly Sloan to see if they were telling the truth or merely spinning a could-have-happened tale. Hara prided herself on being able to tell if people were lying. That Kellen man lied about his leg pain to cover up his fidgeting. He was just a fidgeter, she could tell. He probably sped when he drove. She liked to block in speeders to keep them under the speed limit. It was good for them. It built character.

Each of the jurors had already decided Bev Sloan was innocent.

They pretended to debate for a few days so they didn’t look like one of those idiotic juries with its communal head up its collective ass, but they had already acquitted her.

Bev Sloan would walk away a free woman.

Heath smiled sadly at the jury as he finished his closing arguments. “I’m not sure why the prosecution is dead-set on a first-degree murder charge because it doesn’t fit any of the possible scenarios for that night. Beverly Sloan didn’t
murder
anybody.”

~~~~~

Murder
.

That word scrambled Bev’s mind even more than
prison
.

She would be labeled a
murderer
.

Murderess
, that quaint word, embodied too many ladylike connotations of old-world femininity to define what had happened that night when she had been holding the knife and it had fallen toward Conroy’s chest.

The news media didn’t change its vocabulary if a suicide bomber was female, to
suicidess
or
bomberette
.

Murderer.

~~~~~

Dante shook his head that rested on his forearms. His lower back ached, stretched between the hard bench and his arms. His tailbone groaned as if it was slowly being extended on an Inquisition’s rack.