Authors: Allison Leotta
“All rise and come to order,” the clerk called. “This court is now in session.”
Anna and Desiree came to their feet in sync. Jody was slower; she groaned softly as she rose. Her stomach had gotten so large, it looked like it was going to pop right out of her striped poplin shirt.
“When last we adjourned,” the judge said, “we dealt with an issue concerning a witness. Now that that issue has been resolved, does the defense intend to call any more witnesses, or does it rest?”
“Neither,” Anna said, rising to her feet. “I am moving for you to recuse yourself from this case, declare a mistrial, and dismiss all charges against Jody Curtis.”
The audience murmured.
“Ms. Curtis, we have been through this, months ago. I have already ruled on your recusal motion, quite clearly. You have your record, and when—if—Ms. Curtis is convicted, you may appeal. I’m certainly not declaring a mistrial. If you have another witness, I will call in the jury. If you do not have one, I will consider the defense to have rested.”
“The defense does not rest,” Anna said. “I want that clear for the record.”
The stenographer nodded at Anna as her fingers flew over the machine.
“I am filing my Motion for Dismissal and my second Motion for the Honorable Lawrence Upperthwaite to Recuse Himself.” Anna walked up to the law clerk and handed him four copies of the papers to time-stamp and file. She set one on the prosecutor’s table.
“Ms. Curtis, your conduct is close to contumacious.” Judge Upperthwaite’s voice dropped to a low growl that would have scared Anna back when she was a rookie lawyer. “I have made my ruling and told you to move on. Now
move on
.”
She heard movement in the audience and turned to see what it was. Cooper sat in the front row, passing out copies of her motion
to the press. It was exactly what she needed done. Technically, the journalists had a right to the motion, but she wasn’t confident that Judge Upperthwaite would allow them access to it. Cooper smiled at her, and she smiled back.
Her motion described the FirstDown company and the relationship between the judge’s wife and the coach. It also listed the criminal cases Upperthwaite had dismissed as DA and judge. She’d attached the paperwork Rob gave her yesterday and sent a copy to the Fraud and Public Corruption Unit at the Department of Justice. And, God bless him, Cooper was making sure the press had it.
She turned back to the court, feeling stronger now that she knew Cooper was behind her. “My first Motion for Recusal was based on the fact that your wife was a business partner with Coach Fowler in a company called FirstDown. Further research has shown that you are the person who declined to bring all the cases against the coach. You did this in your capacity as a DA, and when you were elected to the bench, you continued to do it by declining arrest warrants. You were also the person who placed all these cases under seal.”
“Ms. Curtis, I’m warning you.”
“The coach needed someone to cover up all his abuse over the years. He might have paid some families directly. Some girls might not have made complaints. But the ones who went to the police—now, that was a problem for him. But you were the Holly Grove DA for fifteen years. And judge for the last five.”
“Ms. Curtis! You are in contempt!”
“Was FirstDown a front? Is that how Coach Fowler paid you?” Anna’s questions were not for the judge. They were for the reporters.
“Guards!” The judge’s voice shook with fury. “Step her back.”
A CSO pulled her arms behind her back and handcuffed them. She didn’t resist.
“Sorry, Ms. Curtis,” the guard mumbled.
Anna met Cooper’s eyes. He looked extremely unhappy. This was exactly what he feared.
She looked back at the courtroom as she was being led out.
The last thing she saw was journalists looking through the papers Cooper had handed out. Someone took a cell-phone picture of her being led away. And then the door swung shut. She was in a foul-smelling back room. The guard put her in a cinder block holding cell, shut the door, and locked her in.
55
B
etter bring your toothbrush” was a joke that Anna and her prosecutor friends made when a lawyer really messed up. The idea was that a judge would hold them in contempt and lock them up for the night. Of course, that rarely happened in real life; before this, Anna had only ever seen one lawyer “stepped back.” But now, Anna really wished she had a toothbrush. It was going to be a long night.
The holding cell behind the courtroom was bare except for a bench and a small seatless toilet. It stank of urine and bleach. Still, when the CSO came to get her a few hours later, Anna didn’t want to leave. Because she knew the place they would take her next would be worse.
She was taken to the garage and loaded into a cold van with a bunch of other inmates. A guard chained her handcuffs to the van wall. The back of the van was freezing cold, and Anna shivered for the whole ride. At the central cell block, she was fingerprinted and photographed, then put in a holding pen.
It was a larger, smellier version of the courtroom holding cell, only with company. There were nine other women, ranging from homeless meth heads to carjacking bank robbers. Anna was the only one wearing a suit. She sat on the bench in a corner and tried to make herself invisible. The wall radiated coldness and sucked all the warmth from her body. She shivered and hugged her knees.
A big woman came over and stood in front of Anna. She wore a hooded sweatshirt over a Bud Light T-shirt. She had huge calloused hands and pockmarked cheeks. “Hey,” she said. “You that lawyer says Coach Fowler was a rapist?”
“That’s me.” Anna stood. She had to tilt her head up to meet the woman’s eyes. The inmate had at least five inches and sixty pounds on her. Anna tried to remember some moves from her self-defense course. Most of them involved kicking the assailant in the groin, which wouldn’t be so effective here in the female holding cell.
“Good on ya,” the woman said. “He did it to my cousin too. She was never the same after. Hope that man rots in hell. Hey, you’re shivering. You cold?”
The woman pulled off her sweatshirt and held it out. Anna took it with wonder.
“Thank you. I hope your cousin is okay.”
“Eh.
We all got scars. Some’s just harder to see.”
Anna pulled on the sweatshirt and curled up on the bench. She lay awake, wishing she knew more about Michigan contempt rules. She only knew that contempt of court had no statutory limit. In theory, a person could be held in jail on a contempt charge forever. But the press had seen the whole thing. DOJ had received her motion. At the very least, Jack would raise a ruckus. She hoped she would be free when her niece was born. Jody, too.
She lay on the bench, wishing sleep would come.
At 4:00
A.M.
, Anna was handcuffed and led to an underheated transport van. The guards wouldn’t tell her where she was going or why. There were no windows in the back of the van. She had no idea where she was.
When the van stopped, the back doors swung open. Anna was led out into a dimly lit parking garage. After a moment of discombobulation, she recognized the place. It was the subterranean garage of the courthouse. She was led into a service elevator and to the holding cell behind Judge Upperthwaite’s courtroom. The CSO locked her in, and the van driver left.
“Why am I here?” she asked the CSO.
“Your sister refused the new lawyer the judge appointed her. Said she already had a lawyer, and it was you. Guess the judge had to let you come back, because of her right to counsel. If he didn’t,
it’d be a mistrial, or something. The judge wants her to be convicted fair and square. So you get to make your closing argument now.”
At 8:55
A.M.
, Anna was uncuffed and taken back into the courtroom. The contrast between the cold cinder block cell and the warm rococo courtroom was startling. Desiree sat at the prosecutor’s table; Jody sat at the defense. The audience section was packed, with Cooper sitting in the front row directly behind Jody. Anna became aware that she was still wearing the stained old sweatshirt. She took it off. Underneath was the same smelly suit she’d worn in court the night before, but at least she looked like a lawyer, albeit a wrinkled one.
Jody jumped up and hugged her. Her belly got in the way, but her arms squeezed her tight. “You okay?”
“Yeah, you?”
Jody nodded, held her stomach, and grimaced.
“Don’t go having that baby while I’m locked up, okay?”
“I’ll try. This kid already has a mind of her own.”
Cooper leaned over the rail and wrapped his arms around her. “Thank God,” he said. He felt so warm after the cold holding cells.
“Did you hear the news?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve been on a bit of an Internet vacation.” He took out his phone and pulled up the
Detroit News
website. The first headline said: “Anonymous Hacks Judge, Claims to Find Evidence of Bribery.”
“After your little speech yesterday,” Cooper said, “Anonymous hacked into FirstDown’s bank records. It turns out, only the coach paid in. Only the judge’s wife took money out. And the deposits were made on dates that correspond to cases the judge nolle’d for the coach. To the tune of almost a million dollars.”
Anna’s eyes were drawn to a chart that the
News
had compiled, in which they compared the evidence in her motion to the financial information that Anonymous hacked. It showed a pattern of the coach depositing, and the judge’s wife withdrawing, six-figure sums in the weeks after each case against the coach that the judge
dismissed. The coach had been bribing the judge for years, to cover up his abuse.
At precisely 9:00
A.M.
, the side door opened and Judge Upperthwaite walked out. The look on his face reminded Anna of a cornered animal.
56
P
lan all you want, it is a very different thing to actually kill a person than to fantasize about it. In your fantasy, you have superhuman strength. Or your action takes no strength at all. You just do it, your arms gliding effortlessly through the weightlessness of your dream world. In reality, you have to plunge a knife or pull a trigger. You have to look into the eyes of an actual person. You see their humanity. You have to push past the respect for life that has been drilled into you since before you could talk.
I’m not saying it’s impossible. It happens every day. But for normal people who have lived their whole lives as law-abiding citizens, trying to be polite and well-mannered, respectful of their elders and kind to animals, good listeners and good employees; for people who use their turn signals, and hurry to get to work on time, leave tips for their letter carrier, and put dollars in the Salvation Army’s red bucket, hoping to make the world a little better—killing another human being is not an easy thing.
We had a good plan. The problem was in the execution.
We sat, three women stumped, on the bench seat. Owen Fowler faced us in the wheelchair, his teeth chattering despite the warm summer night. He was soaked from Wendy’s earlier waterboarding. Maybe he was cold, despite the layers of sweatshirts, or maybe he was terrified.
Our plan had been to drown him. Let him know why we were doing it, let him feel the full weight of our justice, then waterboard him to death, cut off the duct tape, and throw him into the lake. His body would be unscathed except for lake water in his lungs. It would look like a boating accident. He’d gone drunk-boating often enough—and had been
seen
drunk-boating often enough—to make this plausible.
But the idea of pouring water on his face, as his eyes bulged in terror, until he died—it was impossible. He was a monster, but he didn’t want to be a monster. And even if he was monstrous, he was a person, made by God, in all his flaws.
“I can’t do it,” I said. It sounded like I was admitting I couldn’t read, or drive.
Wendy nodded in agreement. She couldn’t either. “Kathy?”
Kathy shook her head. She took out her flask of vodka and took another swig.
We stared at him. He shivered back at us.
“We can’t let him go,” I said.
“We can’t hold him in that wheelchair forever. Eventually, he’ll have to pee.”
“He probably already has.”
“I promise, ladies, I won’t tell anyone. Please. Let me go. We’ll pretend this never happened.”
“That’s doubtful,” his wife said.
“I swear.” He spoke through chattering teeth. “I didn’t realize how much I’d hurt everyone. I thought no one would be affected, that this was something that would happen in private. You forced me to realize how many people I’ve hurt. If you let me go, I swear, I’ll do everything I can to make things right.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“I could pay the families of the girls. I could get counseling, and then help others like me. I could start a charity.”
“Like the charity arm of your sports camp?”
“No, no, no.” His eyes leaked tears. “This is a real wake-up call for me. I swear, it’ll be different now. Please, let me prove it to you.”
“Or you could just go get your rifle and kill us.”
“I wouldn’t do that. I swear. No harm, no foul. Wendy, you’re the mother of my daughter. She needs both of us. Kathy, I’ve taken so much from you, I wouldn’t take any more. Jody—I—I care about you. I always have. I wouldn’t hurt you. Please, ladies. Give me a chance. You won’t be sorry.”
He met our eyes with his. He was completely at our mercy, and that is a powerful and humbling feeling.
I doubted that he had “always cared” about me, which threw doubt on everything else he said. He would obviously say anything at that point. But, despite logic, the urge to believe him was strong. I
wanted
to believe he had been concerned about me all those years, despite his complete radio silence. I wanted to believe that he could change, that
people
could change, and that I could be an instrument of that change. And I had an instinct to try to help him now that he’d asked for my help.
What is in female DNA that makes us want to fulfill others’ requests? It’s amazing how much you can get from us just by asking.