Tell No Lies (23 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE BARNARD EVENT—and the media had truly turned it into an event—began every morning exactly as Jack expected, with a mob on the courthouse steps to greet him. He'd known when he first agreed to take the case, back in early August, that it would be like this. And yet every morning he still had to brace himself as he turned the last corner on his short walk from the parking garage.

He was accustomed to such scenes. He'd tried many cases in which he'd been forced to push through a crowd of spectators just to get to the front doors of the courthouse. But he'd never had to make the journey as a candidate for office who was prosecuting the most emotionally charged case to hit the city in years. And on this final day of the trial, before the jury retired to deliberate, walking the gauntlet had been particularly unsettling.
 

Once inside the courthouse, though, once he took his seat at the prosecution table, he forgot about the crowd outside. He even forgot about the crowd inside. He knew everyone was there, of course—not only the spectators but the reporters and family members of the victim and the defendant, too—but for Jack, entering the courtroom always felt like coming home. Whereas some attorneys saw the courtroom as a dangerous, foreign country to be conquered, Jack felt like a native son who spoke the language fluently and was able to translate it effortlessly for the people who mattered most—the jurors.
 

Earl had always claimed that "jurors simply love Jack Hilliard," and if the current trial was any indication, his claim held true. Jack had developed a rapport with the jury during the long voir dire—two and a half days long because of the pretrial publicity that had saturated the city—and none of the defense efforts so far had been able to break that. Once he began to put his witnesses on the stand, the trial progressed quickly. He'd built his case methodically, as a carpenter builds a house, laying a strong foundation and then carefully framing each component until the structure couldn't be knocked down. He'd begun by letting the cops tell the story of their discovery of Cassia in the woods, and then he'd questioned each investigator, each lab technician, each eyewitness, each piece of the puzzle that had led them first to Cassia and then to Hutchins. And then, when the skeleton had been laid, he'd brought it to life with the testimony of those closest to Cassia: her mother and father, her brother, even a teacher and her best friend. After a week, he'd rested his case and passed it to Hutchins's attorney, Millie Rubin. It was now Thursday morning, and Millie was ready to call her last witness. With any luck, they would present their closing arguments after lunch, and then the waiting would begin.

But first he had to get through the last witness.

"Your Honor, I'd like to call the defendant, Clyde Hutchins, to the stand." Millie's voice was strong over the loud whispering that swelled from the gallery.

Jack hadn't expected Hutchins to take the stand; murder defendants rarely did unless they had an alibi or pleaded self-defense. But the day before, after Judge Baxter had adjourned for the day, Millie had pulled Jack aside and given him the news: against her advice, Hutchins insisted on testifying. Jack had seen from the honest worry in Millie's eyes that she hadn't been sandbagging him. He almost felt bad for her, because the defendant's testifying in such a case—in which the crime was brutal and the evidence overwhelming—was akin to sealing the prosecution's case with a kiss and putting a pretty bow on top for good measure. So, although the news had come as a surprise, it hadn't really concerned him.  He'd merely nodded sympathetically and returned to his office to plan the next day's cross-examination.
 

But as night fell, as the background noises of computer keyboards and ringing phones became less frequent but more noticeable, and the soft bell of the elevator down the hall signaled another person leaving for the day, Jack grew inexplicably nervous about Hutchins taking the stand. He found himself unable to sit still in his chair, even though his notes for the cross-examination hadn't made it past the first page of a clean legal pad. He made a trip to the bathroom; he made a trip to the vending machines. He called Claire and asked to speak to the kids to say good night. He even stood in the doorway to Earl's dark office, gazing at his unusually organized desk, and began to miss him already.
 

The reason for his discomfort became apparent, finally, after he accidentally startled Gwen, the night cleaning lady, who'd been humming to herself as she made her way from office to office, emptying trash cans and dusting the few exposed surfaces on the lawyers' desks.
 

"Oh! Excuse me, Mr. Jack!" she said, addressing him in the semiformal way she'd adopted after he'd asked her, years ago, to call him Jack. The words came out slowly and muffled, as if she had a mouthful of marshmallows. This was not unusual or surprising—all her words came out this way: she suffered from mild mental retardation.

Jack stared at her in a daze. Only when her face scrunched up in confusion at his failure to respond did he issue an emphatic apology and insist that he'd been entirely at fault.

On the way back to his office, he suddenly realized the source of his agitation: Gwen's voice. Despite the fact that he'd heard it many times over the years, and despite the fact that its owner was a well-adjusted middle-aged woman who held a full-time government job, Gwen's voice always evoked just the slightest hint of pity.
 

And it was that same, reflexive pity Jack feared the jury would feel when Clyde Hutchins took the stand.

Jack trusted the jury to understand that Hutchins's slightly diminished mental capacity didn't have any bearing on guilt or innocence; an insanity defense wasn't at issue. But he knew that logic and emotion seldom agreed, and he feared the effect on his case, however subtle, if the human evidence of that diminished mental capacity was paraded right in front of them.

So he studied the jurors' faces as Hutchins trudged to the witness box. His intent was twofold: he wanted to gauge their reactions to the defendant, and he also wanted to maintain the connection he'd developed with them throughout the trial. When the clerk administered the oath, Jack felt only minor relief by his inability to identify any speech impairment from the defendant's one-word response. He knew it might still manifest itself under the pressure of questioning.

His confidence began to build again, though, as Millie carefully walked her client through the events leading up to the abduction and murder. The defendant's speech
was
slow, but he enunciated clearly, so the slowness could as easily have been part of his style as it could have been related to his mental disability.  Overall, it didn't seem to have any effect on the jury, other than causing a few of them to glance at the clock.
 

What assured Jack the most wasn't the lack of a noticeable speech impairment.  Rather, he had no idea what Hutchins intended to achieve with his testimony, and he could tell from Millie's demeanor that she didn't know either. As far as Jack was concerned, the defendant was giving the State a gift that surpassed even the written confession he'd signed just after his arrest.  He kept expecting Hutchins to start making excuses for what he'd done, or even somehow to attempt to pin the blame on Cassia Barnard—an unbelievable tactic, to be sure, in this particular case—but none of Jack's conjectures came to pass.
 

Perhaps Jack's ignorance should have caused him some uneasiness.  At the very least, it should have caused him to decline to question Hutchins when Millie finished her direct and passed the witness without any hint of damage to the State's case. But Jack didn't like the idea of ending the testimony with a murderer having the last word. He wanted to drive home the point that the guy understood exactly what he'd done, both before and during the execution of the crime.  With the written confession as backup, he couldn't imagine any scenario in which he'd be caught unaware.

He rose from his chair when the judge looked at him, and he ignored the whispered "What are you doing, Jack?" from Frank, who sat at the prosecution table with him as second chair. He walked to a spot just near the back corner of the jury box, where he felt a part of it without actually stepping inside. After a brief nod to its occupants, he turned and faced the defendant.

"Mr. Hutchins." He stared at the small, skinny man, waited until he looked him in the eye. He wanted so badly just to ask the guy,
Why are you testifying against yourself? What could you possibly hope to achieve?
But Jack was more than familiar with the age-old rule that every trial lawyer knew and ignored at his peril: don't ask the witness a question unless you already know the answer.
 

So instead, he began simply. "You've just described to us what happened on the day of Cassia's abduction and murder, is that right?"

A simple yes and a cold glare was all Jack received. He'd expected no more and no less; it was the beauty of cross-examination. He thought back to the written confession, to things Hutchins had told the police but Millie had conveniently skipped. Jack had covered them with other witnesses during the State's case, of course, and the document had already been admitted into evidence, but to elicit the same information from the defendant on the stand would be the
coup de grâce
.
 

"Mr. Hutchins, isn't it true that you picked Cassia out as your intended victim?"

The defendant tilted his head.  "What do you mean?"

Jack reminded himself of the reason why Earl had declined to make this a capital case, and he started over.

"You worked as a custodian at Cedar Hill Middle School, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"And you first saw Cassia Barnard at that school?"

"Yes."

"She was a student there?"

"Yes."

Hutchins was bald but he had a dark moustache, and Jack noticed he kept rubbing at it, smoothing it down with his thumb and forefinger.

"And you
chose
her, didn't you, from all the other students?"
 

"Yes."

"And you followed her for several weeks before you actually abducted her, isn't that correct?"

"Sure."
Sure?
His voice held no remorse.
 

"You knew where she lived?"

Hutchins nodded, and Jack said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Hutchins, but you have to speak your answer for the court reporter."

The defendant's eyes narrowed and he reached for his moustache again.  "
Yes
."
 

"You knew where her bus picked her up and dropped her off?"

"Yes."

"You even knew the exact times of day the bus came, didn't you?"

"Sure."

Every time he said "sure," it sounded to Jack like the guy was proud of himself for knowing the information.

"And you knew, in the afternoons, Cassia was the only child to get off the bus?"

"Yes."

"She had a good half mile to walk home, didn't she?" Before Hutchins answered, Jack added, "Alone."

"Yes." His one-word answers had shifted from a blithe monotone to apparent impatience.

"And on the seventeenth of January this year, you waited for her to get off her bus, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"You didn't even hide, did you?  Isn't it true that you sat on a bench at the entrance to her neighborhood, and even waved to the bus driver as you greeted Cassia, as if you were a relative or family friend who'd come to meet her and take her home?"

Jack knew this fact was one of the most painful for Cassia's parents.  It was that one moment in the whole horrific scenario—and every case had such a moment—that forced all the parties involved, whether it was family, police, investigators, or prosecutors, to think,
If only
. "If only" the bus driver had confirmed Hutchins's identity as a waiting parent. "If only" Cassia had hesitated, thus perhaps tipping off the bus driver that not only did she not expect this person, she didn't even know him.  "If only" it hadn't been thirteen degrees with a light snow, and Hutchins's face had not been obscured by the large parka hood of his jacket, thus enabling him to be identified before the trail to Cassia, slowly freezing in the deep woods, had gone cold.
 

Hutchins didn't answer immediately, and Jack worried again that his compound question should have been worded more simply. He was about to rephrase it when the man leaned forward in his seat and said, "She
wanted
to go with me." He spoke the sentence with the slightest glimmer of a sardonic grin, almost as if he was bragging about the fact.
 

Another low buzz grew in the gallery. Jack felt his face grow hotter at Hutchins's smug answers. He looked over at Frank and met his eye, and the anticipation on Frank's face made it clear that he now fully supported Jack's strategy, however ill conceived he believed it to be minutes before.

Jack glanced at the faces in the jury box, and then, barely hiding the contempt in his voice, said to Hutchins, "Why don't you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury
why
twelve-year-old Cassia Barnard wanted to go with you?"
 

Jack knew the answer to the question, of course, and he wanted the jury to hear it.  He wanted them to realize, in the same way he had so despairingly realized upon first reading the confession, that all of a parent's rules, and warnings, and threats, and scare tactics, all of them are so easily forgotten by a child in that "if only" moment.

But, fueled by the intensity of his desire, he'd disregarded the corollary to the first rule: never ask an open-ended question on cross, or you risk losing control of the witness altogether.
 

Jack's question had been wide open.

Hutchins sat up straighter, obviously enjoying the chance to share his clever plan with the rapt audience. "I told her I found a puppy freezing in the snow, and I asked her to help me find its owner." Jack knew that Hutchins didn't even understand the irony in his scheme; he hoped the jury did. Hutchins tittered a bit, setting of a new reaction from the crowd. Jack could hear appalled commentary and uncomfortable repositioning. Judge Baxter gave one knock of his gavel to settle them.