Innocent

CHAPTER 33

Tommy, June 23, 2009

Marta wanted a recess to set up Rusty's computer for the next witness, and Yee did not look pleased. In the last couple of days, it had become clear that the judge's patience was wearing out. He was living out of a suitcase several hundred miles from home and was still trying to manage his docket of pending cases back in Ware by phone. It would take him months to clear up the backlog once he returned. Rather than consume an hour to remove the shrink-wrap and seals now, Yee instructed the lawyers to have the computer ready in the morning. He would send the jury home and spend the balance of the day on the phone with his chambers, trying to deal with two emergency motions downstate.

That was just as well. Tommy and his team needed a break. Brand and Marta reached an agreement that the PA's techs would remove the shrink-wrap, and the experts from both sides would cut off the last of the evidence tape and set up the machine before court tomorrow morning. With that, the prosecution team and their trial cart rattled back across the street to the office. Once they were by themselves in the elevator in the County Building, Rory Gissling started apologizing.

"I should have fucking known," she said.

"Bullshit," Tommy told her.

"I should have smelled it out," said Rory, "asked around. When the bank got all those documents together in a nanosecond, I should have guessed they'd already done it for somebody else."

"You're a detective," said Tommy, "not a mind reader."

It wasn't bad in and of itself, what the Sterns had proved, the fact that Barbara had known her husband was planning to leave her-not to mention screwing around, which the jury was never going to hear squat about. It was all so-what, really. So she knew. That opened the door to a million possibilities that worked for the prosecution. Rusty and Barbara fought like minks, and he ended up cooling her. She threatened to go to the kid. Or the Trib. God knows what. It was a trial; they'd find a theory to fit the facts if they noodled for a day or two.

But the defense had proved something far more consequential: The prosecution didn't know everything. Those nice men across the room were ignorant about a major piece of evidence in a circumstantial case. It was as if the PAs had drawn a map of the world and missed most of North America. The prosecutors said Rusty killed Barbara, and the defense came back and said, See, these guys don't have the entire picture. Barbara got some sad news, and that's why she quietly ended her life.

The four of them, Brand and Tommy and Rory and Ruta, sat in Tommy's office with the door closed. Tommy looked through the message slips on his desk, just to pretend he wasn't that upset, but all he really wanted to do was think about the case and try to figure out how bad the damage was.

Brand went out to get a pop and came back.

"How can soda from that fucking machine be eighty-five cents?" he asked. "Can't we talk to Central Services? Jody gets it at Safeway for twenty cents a can. People in business, really. They're just fucking thieves."

Tommy reached in his pocket and handed Brand a quarter. "Tell Jody I want a Diet Coke, extra ice, and keep the change."

"He makes that call, Tommy," said Rory, "and you'll finish trying this case yourself."

Jody had been a deputy PA when Brand met her and had her picture in the dictionary next to the phrase "Tough cookie."

"I can't get Central Services to paint the walls or fix the heat," Tommy said when the four of them had passed through the momentary laugh.

The group reverted to silence.

"So Harnason is a coincidence?" Brand finally asked. He was trying to figure out what Sandy was going to argue to the jury in closing.

"They covered that," said Rory. "Barbara knew about that case."

"Right," said Tommy. "They covered that. Harnason's case is what gave her the idea she could kill herself with a drug that would look like natural causes and wouldn't show up on a tox screen. So she could slip off to the great beyond without shaking up the kid even worse. That's what he's going to be saying up there, Nat? How protective his mom was. He's going to back up this whole story."

It was bad, Tommy was realizing. The suicide thing was going to take Rusty out.

"What are his fingerprints doing on the phenelzine?" asked Brand.

"Well, now he's got one bad fact to explain instead of six. Everything else fits. They're going to have her on his computer. You know that, right? That's what they want to set it up for. They're going to show she could have gotten into his e-mail. You're basically going to ask this jury for a guilty when our own expert admits she could have handled the bottle without leaving prints, and Rusty was always picking up her meds."

Brand sat there looking at the wall. Tommy had never quite finished furnishing in here. He was the acting PA, and it seemed presumptuous to fill the walls with his own plaques and pictures. He had hung up a few nice shots of Dominga and Tomaso and an old photo of his mom and dad with him at law school graduation. But there were several chalky spots where hunks of paint and plaster had been pulled off when Muriel Wynn vacated four years ago that Central Services, despite regular calls, had never come around to fix. Brand seemed to be focusing on one of them.

"We're not going to lose this fucking case," he said suddenly.

"It was rough sledding from the start," Tommy told him.

"It's gone in beautifully. We are not going to lose."

"Come on, Jimmy. Let's take a night off. Think it over."

"There's a flaw," said Brand, referring to the new theory of defense.

"Probably more than one, if you really want to know," the PA answered.

"Why does she wipe his computer?" Brand asked. "Okay, she reads what's on there. But why ax the messages?"

"Right," said Tommy. They would think of a lot of questions like that over the next day. They needed time to adjust. And, being honest, to catch up. Because Sandy and Marta had been thinking of those questions and making up answers for months now. Wanting to feel better, Jim pressed now.

"If she's planning to kill herself quietly," said Brand, "no note, et cetera, why does she leave tracks behind by deleting his e-mails?"

It was Rory who first realized what the defense was going to say.

"So Rusty will know," she said. "The messages he'd kept, he'd kept for a reason. Maybe he liked to reread his love notes from his little girlfriend. But whatever it was, when he goes back, he'll see that all of those messages are gone. He'll know that Barbara shredded them one by one. And that's how he'll know the missus found out about everything and snuffed herself. That's maybe why she searched around about phenelzine on his computer, so he'll realize just how she did it. But he'll be the only one. The kid, the rest of the world, they'll think she died of her bumpy heartbeat. But Rusty will rot with guilt."

Brand was staring, just staring, at Rory, his mouth parted slightly in that oh-fuckme way.

"Shit," he said then, and threw his empty soda can at the wall. He was not the first ever to do that. There was a triangle of damaged plaster Tommy and his deputies had been creating for years now when they acted out, mashing fists and paper balls there and tossing objects. But Brand's aim was better. The can hit right in the center and dropped into the trash can positioned below to catch what was flung from time to time.

They all watched in silence. In the morning, Tommy told himself, he would take a look to see if there was something else down there in the garbage can. What he would be looking for was their case.