Читать книгу Murder in the Courthouse - Nancy Grace - Страница 17

CHAPTER SEVEN

Hailey was one of the first people in the courtroom the following morning. At first blush, it appeared she was the very first. She didn’t spot another soul in the cavernous room or milling around outside its giant double doors. But Hailey could tell the prosecutor had been there earlier. The state’s counsel table was already covered with notes, books, binders, and stacks of documents. A flash of memory crossed Hailey’s mind, back to her trial days when she was pitted against one team of defense attorneys after the next, week after week in the pits of the inner city. Typically, they’d be well-heeled. Representing dopers was a very lucrative enterprise.

The dope lawyers wore hand-tailored Italian suits, expensive shoes, and gold or jeweled cuff links, bracelets, rings, and necklaces gleaming at neck, wrists, and fingers. A single briefcase of theirs alone probably would have cost more than Hailey’s old Honda. But as of this morning, nothing was on the defense table. Not yet anyway.

She could guess the explanation. At times, defense lawyers would not prep in the courtroom, but instead remain in the holding cell adjoining the courtroom with their client till the very last minute, trying their best to school them with last-minute instructions on how to walk, talk, and behave in front of the jury. Or better yet, talk them into copping a plea. That was easy money for sure. A defense lawyer could make $50,000 to $100,000 for a plea on a high-level dope case.

The jury in the Adams case had already been selected. From what Hailey could tell from the newspapers, which had already profiled all the jurors exhaustively, the group was made up of jurors bused in from another county southwest of Chatham. In Hailey’s opinion, that had been a grave mistake for the defense.

Demanding a change of venue, changing the location of the trial, was SOP, standard operating procedure, for the defense, whether it was smart or not. But be careful what you ask for, for you will surely get it and in this case . . . they did. The judge granted a jury selected from another county. Problem for the defense was that they didn’t get to select what county.

Adams’s lawyers, by rolling the dice and rejecting Chatham County jurors, got Early County jurors instead. Early County was situated about a hundred miles away, at the far southern and westernmost region of the state, directly on the Georgia-Alabama state line. Reputed to be extremely conservative, they’d recently tried to order the electric chair, aka Old Sparky, for a repeat bank robber whose gun jammed when he pointed it at the bank teller’s nose. It never fired.

The angry jury had to be offered a steak buffet at the local Golden Corral and talked down by the trial judge. When trying to placate the bloodthirsty jurors back in the deliberations room, the judge, wisely, blamed the lack of sentencing options on the U.S. Supreme Court, and then sent them to the all-you-could-eat steak and salad bar.

Georgia’s death row stats backed up the reputation. There were more death row inmates there from Early County than any other county in the state. And the local residents were proud of it.

But reputation alone means practically nothing when striking a jury. Hailey had tried enough cases to know that you could never, ever predict what a jury would do with 100 percent accuracy. There were and would always be wild cards . . . jurors that could hold up a verdict, hijack a jury and cause a mistrial, or, even worse, convince a right-minded jury to do the wrong thing.

Hailey always divided jurors into two simple categories. The first category was the sheep. Sheep could be led along easily without much thinking on their own part, rarely took a stand on anything, eagerly looked forward to lunch and cigarette breaks, and were largely focused on getting home each afternoon. Sheep rarely lost sleep over their part of the picture.

On the other hand, there were the alphas. Alpha jurors were entirely different and had to be selected with the utmost caution. Alphas were those uncommon jurors who not only thought for themselves, but led others to their way of thinking. They came in all shapes, colors, and sizes and could be anything from a single mom of five to a retired vet to the foreman of a shipping dock.

Hailey could spot an alpha a mile away and generally tried her best, depending on their views on the justice system, to put them in the box . . . the jury box. The problem with alphas was that they could trick you during voir dire, or jury selection. Their charisma was obvious, but that charisma could be used for good or evil, and once that alpha was in the box, either side would be hard-pressed to get them thrown off the jury.

Simply put, there were leaders and followers. Both could be good or bad.

The courtroom was hushed, although it was slowly starting to fill up. Hailey noticed sheriffs, grim-faced, crossing the front of the courtroom wearing double black armbands, one on each arm. They silently signaled the death of a fellow officer, Alton Turner. Even if Turner hadn’t been much of a spitfire, never made a collar, and never sat on a barstool recounting stories of a cop’s life on the streets, he was nonetheless a brother. Somebody had to get the glory . . . and somebody had to push the paper.

That somebody was Alton Turner. And he had done so proudly and with dedication, rarely taking a day off and doing whatever had to be done, never believing that any task, no matter how lowly, was beneath him.

Wherever he went, Alton proudly wore baseball hats, Windbreakers, T-shirts, and sometimes all three at once, all emblazoned with the green and gold Chatham County Sheriff’s logo. He was always the first one at Chatham County Sheriff charity events, cookouts, and softball games, although he never swung a bat nor caught a grounder. He was proud to be a lawman . . . even though he rarely left his tiny cream-colored cubicle at the Chatham County Courthouse.

From his beloved cube, Alton directed the transfer of inmates from the county jail to the courthouse, inputting inmate names, cell blocks, and arrest warrants then connecting them to indictment numbers. The right indictment numbers then had to be funneled to the correct courtrooms, making sure that each and every one of the thousands of accused felons made it to the right place bright and early come Monday morning trial and arraignment calendars.

It wasn’t exciting to many, but to Alton it was. As he was a lawman of sorts, the courthouse was Alton’s life.

From what Hailey read just before turning off the bedside light in her hotel room, Alton had never married and remained devoted to his only other surviving relative, the elderly sister of his “beloved mother,” his Aunt René.

Hailey’s first stop this morning was for a cup of hot tea in the courthouse cafeteria. She could easily overhear several sheriffs at the next table talking about Turner. He had worshipped his mother and bragged to her endlessly about every capture, arrest, and trial as if they’d all been his own. Not in a self-aggrandizing way, he was simply proud to be part of the team and wanted her to be proud of her “boy,” although Alton had been pushing forty.

Hailey stared down into her cup of tea. She’d tucked her own tea bag of Irish breakfast into her bra that morning so she’d have it once she got to the courthouse. It was her favorite brand but very hard to find. It was easy to score a bag of English breakfast, but Irish was another matter altogether. It was steaming hot and practically white with skim milk, just how she liked it.

It sounded like Alton Turner wouldn’t hurt a fly. Staring down at her tea bag floating in its cup, Hailey couldn’t help but wonder who could have murdered him in such a brutal way. The pain must have been excruciating.

Hailey caught a glimpse at a plain round clock above the cashier in the cafeteria. Court would start in a little over thirty minutes and she wanted a good seat. Gulping down the rest of her tea and giving a nod to the sheriffs seated next to her, she made her way to the courthouse bank of elevators and up to the Todd Adams murder trial.

And here she sat, soaking it in. State courtrooms almost universally had the same feel to them, the same smell, the same sounds, and the same vibe. Just being here made her miss her days as a felony prosecutor intensely. Homesick for her other life, waves of what might have been washed over her.

What might have been.

Her days fighting drug lords, rapists, child molesters, and killers had left her with an edge . . . quite an edge, as a matter of fact. Ten years in the pit of the Atlanta Fulton County Courthouse, waging war on the bad guys, had forever changed her.

But the reality was she’d never be the fresh-faced girl she was before . . . long before she became a felony prosecutor. Or even a law student for that matter . . . before another killer shattered her dreams. The murder of her fiancé, Will, just before their wedding, had left Hailey Dean broken . . . a shell of what she was and even now . . . a shell of what she could have been. What she should have been.

As one of the top litigators in the South, she developed a reputation as the most ruthless and hard-hearted prosecutor to have ever walked the courthouse halls. And she didn’t mind it a single bit.

But a part of her was sealed off forever. That part of her was her heart.

After nearly twenty minutes of waiting, the swinging doors in the courtroom opened and in walked a fleet of state lawyers, most of them carrying binders, files, and law books. The two men took seats at the state’s counsel table, closest to the jury. The two women, dressed in austere gray and navy blue, sat behind them.

No female lead counsel, Hailey thought. Not unusual. Any further thoughts as to gender bias evaporated into thin air when a side door of the courtroom opened from inside.

Out strode two huge, muscled Chatham County Sheriff’s officers, shoulder to shoulder. Behind them came two white, male attorneys. By the look of them, she assumed they were part of the defense team. The cut of their suits and the shine on their Italian leather loafers indicated a far bigger paycheck than a state prosecutor could ever pull in. The two were followed by a gaggle of underlings—paralegals, an investigator, a jury consultant by the looks of her, and two skinny law student types, apparently “interning” under the tutelage of famed defense attorney Michael P. “Mikey” DelVecchio.

Their hair was slicked back with some sort of gel that glistened in hard spikes under the courtroom lighting. They spoke quietly to each other, their heads slightly turned inward, DelVecchio with a smile on his lips. And then, at the end of the defense procession, with his head up, shoulders thrown back, muscled chest puffed forward, and looking like he was walking onto a football field to run a touchdown, came the defendant. Todd Adams.

His dark hair was smooth and shiny and clearly just trimmed for the big day. His suit was blue and tailored, fit him perfectly, and contrasted subtly against the light blue of a crisp, starched Oxford button-down shirt and crimson red silk tie. Adams flashed a perfectly aligned, bright white smile at his family, who settled in to take over the entire first row behind the defense counsel table.

Hailey watched and absorbed the interaction between Adams and his parents, his mom in particular. The two held a long gaze. Looking at Mrs. Adams, it was clear: She adored him, loved him, and, most important, believed him.

A rush of papers and sudden movement at the front of the courtroom was followed by a half a dozen minions rushing in. Then, in came the judge. Sharp-faced and gray-headed, Luther Alverson insisted on presiding over more jury trials than any other judge in the courthouse.

At eighty-four, he was also the oldest judge in the courthouse. So old in fact, he predated the state regulations on mandatory retirement. In order to prove himself still up to the task, he demanded that any and all Chatham assistant district attorneys and public defenders assigned to his court must go on trial every other week. His calendar was rarely backed up, and when a case went on his trial calendar, there would be no last-minute haggling, no eleventh-hour guilty pleas, no cheap deals.

Everyone stood as the judge seated himself with the simultaneous pounding of his gavel with three loud strikes. “Court’s in session. The Honorable Luther Alverson presiding.”

Like in a church at the end of a hymn, everyone sat back down in their seats in unison. The calendar clerk’s seat was positioned directly beside the judge’s bench. The clerk stood to read directly from the grand jury indictment, calling out the indictment number, a series of letters and numbers that had significance only to court employees, followed by the announcement “State v. Todd Adams.”

As her son’s name was read out loud, Tish Adams burst into tears, drawing every eye in the courtroom off her son and onto herself. Hailey immediately checked Julie Love’s mother, also seated in the front row but on the other side of the courtroom.

The look Dana Love shot at Adams’s mother could have cut stone. It was a look of pure hatred. It was clearly borne of resentment at the long years Adams was coddled by his mom, at the numerous excuses for Adams’s bad behavior she made, culminating in a final act of violence.

Adams’s defense team made a big stir at their table, scrambling among themselves, as it turned out, for a handkerchief the lead defense lawyer dramatically pulled from his lapel and handed back to Tish Adams. Immediately, prosecutors stood, and striding quickly toward the judge’s bench, barked out the word “Sidebar!”

“Counsel, approach the bench! Including you, Mr. DelVecchio.”

Hailey knew enough from all her years prosecuting in court that Alverson was already on to the defense ploy of having the jury focus on the grieving mother of the defendant, not the grieving mother of the victim, Julie Love. Thankfully, the prosecutor was on to it too, but Hailey hoped he could cut off DelVecchio next time before the play was made.

As it was, all twelve jurors were still staring sympathetically at Tish Adams, who was now breathing deeply into a clear plastic breathing mask attached to a portable cylinder of pure oxygen.

Ugh. This was going to be a long trial.

Hailey couldn’t stop staring either, even though she suspected all the sobbing was a preplanned charade, the defense and Tish Adams clearly in cahoots. As Hailey watched the judge’s stern face framed by the suited backs of all the attorneys, they turned and strode back to their counsel table.

To see DelVecchio’s face, smiling and preening toward the jury, you’d think he had just won an argument in the U.S. Supreme Court when, in fact, he’d just gotten his first dressing down from the judge. The whole game was new to the jurors, but Hailey knew that soon enough, most of them would catch on to the game Adams’s defense was playing.

After the reading of the indictment in which the accusations and a partial description of the deaths of Julie Love and baby Lily were laid out, the jurors repeatedly glanced at Todd Adams as if trying to reconcile the two brutal murders with the good-looking, athletic young man sitting behind the defense table. His mother was still overtly crying, but now silently into DelVecchio’s hanky, following the judge’s admonition.

The judge turned toward the jurors and launched into a set of typed, pretrial jury instructions to provide somewhat of a road map as to how the trial would go.

The case commenced. The lead prosecutor stood up, pushing his chair back from counsel table, approaching a podium directly centered before the judge. He laid out a stack of paper on which he had handwritten pretrial motions to the judge. He began in a conversational tone, but as the intensity of the story increased, he picked up the pace and pitch. By the time he showed the jury a photo of Julie Love—the one at Christmas time, decked out in her Christmas-red satin pantsuit, her tummy bulging with baby Lily—all twelve jurors plus the alternates were at the edge of their seats. And this was just for motions, openings hadn’t started!

But just before the prosecutor, Herman Grant, punched the slide projector button to proceed to the next image up on a slide screen on the other side of the courtroom, DelVecchio stood and loudly shouted out.

“Objection! The state is trying to poison us all against Todd Adams, and I won’t have it, Judge! This is so cruel and unfair, to use the life of Julie Love in this manner . . . just to get a conviction!”

Hailey cringed as Grant turned, his face in a rage, and then Julie Love’s mother put her head in her hands, leaning on her husband’s shoulder.

“Send out the jury!” Alverson said it calmly but Hailey could tell the judge was angry. He couldn’t afford to show emotion and jeopardize a death penalty case, but there was no way Alverson was going to let DelVecchio run roughshod over the court with his flamboyant behavior.

“Careful, careful . . .” Hailey muttered to herself. If the judge came down too hard on DelVecchio, it could later be argued that he, the judge, was biased against the defense, even at this early stage of the trial.

The judge’s law clerk, hooked up to an audio flow of the court proceedings in his own office next to the judge’s, came rushing into the courtroom, up to the bench, and began whispering into Alverson’s ear.

The judge visibly controlled himself as the jury headed into the jury room, directly adjoining the courtroom. The judge launched into a reprimand of the defense, but Hailey couldn’t help but notice the pleased look on DelVecchio’s face. Was he happy the judge was reprimanding him? Or happy he had already gotten the jury to view his client, not Julie Love and Lily, as the victim?

Hailey stood up and slipped out of the courtroom. She took the stairs located at the end of the corridor outside swinging doors to the court. Quickly heading down five flights to the courthouse lobby, past the lines waiting at metal detectors, she pushed through the gigantic front doors of the Chatham County Courthouse, and out into the fresh, salty air.

Hailey breathed it in in big gulps. She hadn’t realized the mental images, much less the feelings . . . the raw emotions, being in a criminal court would bring back.

Instead of homing in on exactly what was being said with a razor-sharp focus, her mind had drifted . . . back . . . back to her days in countless felony courtrooms where she had prosecuted the worst of the worst. Fleeting moments of trials, courtroom arguments, crying victims, and blood-spattered crime scenes gave way to other memories.

Memories of Will’s murder . . . the trial at which she was a witness . . . the sound of her boots as she stepped down several steps from the witness stand to leave following her testimony . . . the sad look in the jurors’ eyes as they watched her . . . passing the defense table where she saw Will’s bloody denim shirt lying there. She recognized it and in a blur . . . a numb blur . . . she looked into the face of the defense attorney, seated there beside his client . . . Will’s killer.

They both immediately looked down into their laps. They couldn’t even look her in the face.

Even now . . . years later . . . she wanted to go back to that courtroom. She wanted to grab Will’s denim shirt and run away with it . . . to save it from the defense team . . . to keep them from touching it . . . ever.

Looking out blankly at traffic in front of the courthouse . . . it all came flooding back. Her face was hot. Tears sprang up in her eyes. She clutched the wrought iron handrail flanking the stone steps leading to the courthouse entrance.

Why would I want Will’s bloody shirt? She almost said it out loud. It didn’t make sense. And how was she going to sit through another murder trial if she’d be affected like this?

Just then, Hailey felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned.

It was Fincher.

“I saw you leave the courtroom.”

“Shouldn’t you be up there? They may call you as a witness.”

“Ha. With the show DelVecchio’s putting on, it’ll be days before they call me. Plus, I overheard one of the bailiffs tell the prosecutor that the judge was recessing for the day. He’s so mad at DelVecchio, he thinks it’s best to start opening statements in the morning when things cool down a little. If there is a conviction, and that’s a big if, nobody wants a reversal because of angry words from the bench. So we’re done. For today, anyway.”

The two headed across the street to the lot where the rental car Hailey got at the hotel was parked. “Want a ride? I’m heading over to Alton Turner’s place to check it out.”

“Alton Turner? Are you back on that? Why? Does Billings know?” Finch didn’t sound as if he thought this was such a great idea.

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘back on that,’ but whatever that means, I absolutely am ‘back on it.’ I don’t find a severed body and just forget about it. It doesn’t work that way with me.”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t,” Finch fired back, rolling his eyes.

“I’ve got a gut feeling if something doesn’t give, they’ll chalk it up as an accident. You know, take the path of least resistance. I really think a second look with fresh eyes might help. Know what I mean?”

“Fresh eyes. Oh yeah, I think I do know what that means.” Risking her wrath, he went on, “You do know this is not your jurisdiction and it’s not your case, Hailey.”

Hailey gave him a withering glare in response. He didn’t wither. Instead, he just looked right back at her.