Injustice (29 page)

“Anything else before we adjourn?” the judge asks, his gavel poised.

“Yes, Your Honor.” Monica stands again. “It looks like the U.S. Attorney's Office has an interest in this case.” She stares at me for a couple of seconds. “I've moved to prohibit mention of crimes from other jurisdictions. So in the interest of fairness, I'm requesting that
Mr. Davis and all other lawyers from the U.S. Attorney's Office be prohibited from any participation in this trial.”

Damn. If I had my way, I'd prosecute Henry myself, and I'd strap him to the gurney and stick a needle in his vein and push the red button without a qualm. I hate him. He wounded me and my loved ones. He murdered innocence. He murdered family. I wanted to offer Gregory my assistance and input, to talk strategy with him and put my staff at his disposal. Now dragon lady wants me sent to Siberia.

I stand up, about to argue with her. But it's not my place, and Gregory is probably thrilled with Monica's request. The last thing Gregory Nations wants is to share this limelight (and our inevitable victory) with anybody at all, much less a fed.

Judge Ballard smiles. He likes the idea that there might be some fireworks in this trial. He likes the fact that several reporters are already busily writing in notepads, even though pretrial hearings are usually as boring as it gets.

“Mr. Nations?” the judge says.

Gregory stands. He looks at Monica. I see something in his expression that I didn't notice before: contempt. I think back to the look Monica gave me when she first walked into the room, and I recognize it wasn't meant for me, except to the extent that she linked me to Gregory. They despise each other. The judge probably knows this already. He probably relishes it. It gives him a chance to get involved. He can wade in and pull them apart when he needs to.

“. . . preposterous request,” Gregory says. “Frivolous. Mr. Davis is licensed to practice law in this state and it's none of the defense's business who I have on my team.”

Monica is still standing. “Considering Mr. Davis's personal relationship to the defendant,” she says, “I may want to call him as a witness.”

“Hogwash,” I say. “I'm trying to convict the son of a bitch. You won't call me.”

“Don't be too sure.”

“I am sure.”

“I'm adding you to the witness list right now,” she says. She starts to write something.

“Bullshit,” I say. “You're just doing that to keep me off the prosecution.”

“Order,” the judge says. For good measure, he smacks the gavel. “How about we do this: Ms. Brill, you drop your objection to Mr. Davis being on the prosecution team. And, Mr. Nations, Mr. Davis, you agree not to object if Ms. Brill calls Davis as a witness. You'll still be protected by privilege, Nick, you just can't refuse to take the stand. Agreed?”

We don't like it, but we agree.

I
drive to the house to pick up Barnaby for the night. Tina is in the kitchen cutting up vegetables. The TV is on. She mutes it when I come in.

“Whatcha making?” I ask.

“Just a stir-fry for myself. Or for Barn and me. Or for . . . I don't know, you want to join us?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” She takes a beer from the fridge and hands it to me. She pours herself a glass of wine. “How'd it go today?”

I tell her all about the pretrial hearing.

“How'd Henry seem?” she asks.

“He just stared at the tabletop. He never looked up and didn't say a word. He wouldn't have known I was there if they hadn't been talking about me.”

“Who was talking about you?”

“Gregory and Monica.”

“Why?”

I tell Tina about the dustup over my involvement in the trial.

“So you're part of the prosecution team now?”

“Kind of,” I say. “Ex-officio, maybe.”

She takes a long weary breath.

“What?” I say.

“I wish . . .” She stops.

“Wish what?”

“That you were less like you sometimes.”

I have no idea where to go with this comment. But before I figure out how to respond, I see Henry on the TV screen. I grab
the remote and unmute it. “. . . being called the Mark of Cain Killer . . .”

Some cameraman staked out the rear entrance of the courthouse. It's a split-screen picture. In half of it, Henry is being led into the transport van, trying to look away from the camera. He can't shield his face with his hands because of the manacles. The other half-screen is Henry's mug shot, and I feel an unexpected twinge of something other than hatred. “I guess people are just who they are,” I say. I have no idea what I mean by this.

Tina is beside me watching. She is crying silently.

“Babe,” I say. I stand up and put my arm around her shoulders. She tolerates it but stiffens when I try to pull her close.

The TV cuts to a clip from Gregory's press conference a week ago: Gregory says: “. . . if Mr. Tatlock were to help us bring closure and peace to the families of those boys, we would be open to discussing a sentence of life without parole.”

Now it cuts to Monica Brill. She is in the hallway outside the courtroom. “Henry Tatlock is innocent of these charges,” Monica says. “Even if he wished to plead guilty, which he doesn't, he would be unable to meet the district attorney's terms because Henry knows no more about any of these crimes than you or me or Gregory Nations himself.”

Monica looks good on camera. I wonder if she does her makeup with an eye toward how it will look with TV lights blasting in her face.

The news moves on to another story. I turn it off.

The kitchen fills with the smell of sesame oil and soy sauce. It is dark outside. So far, I've seen no evidence of Craig in this house. I can hear the other TV in the living room. Barn is watching the show where a cartoon dog has a team of real kids (like Mouseketeers of a new generation) who have a scavenger hunt.

“I guess what I was thinking,” I say, “is I know he's guilty, but I don't believe he sat here with us scheming and hating. I think he loved it here and at the cabin and even at the office. I think he loved being part of something real. I think he wanted to be normal, but the demons always got the better of him. You know?”

“No,” Tina said, “I don't know. I don't know what to think. Lyd loved him, we cared about him, Barn loves him. Maybe I even loved him a little. When we were in hiding together, I understood why Lydia loved him. Honestly, I did. And if Lydia was so wrong, and I was so wrong, then I have no idea what to think about anything. Like . . . like who is Henry? Who are you? Who is Chip, or Ethan, or Upton? And if I follow that far enough, I end up thinking,
Who am I? Who is Lizzy or Barn?
I feel like some junior high schooler discovering, I don't know, sex or marijuana or e. e. cummings and realizing I never knew anything about life till this moment. You know? It's crazy-making, Nick. And all I can do is keep the TV on to create noise, and to work my cases and play with Barn and try not to think about any of it. But you're making me think, goddammit. So what I need you to do, sweetie, is I need you to talk about something else and eat dinner with me, and take Barn for the night if you need to—though I'd rather you not, but it's your night, so you can if you want—and then go away, but call me up in the morning so I know you're still alive, and Barn's still alive, and I'm still alive. And you can ask me in the morning if it's okay for you to come over for coffee, but you need to be okay with it if I say no. Can you do that?”

When I go home after dinner, I leave Barnaby with Tina. But in the middle of the night, I get up and drive over to park outside the house.

If Tina and I survive all of this as a couple, I'd love to take her someplace special. Italy, Hawaii, or maybe Baja, where we could see whales. Or the Galápagos. Yes, she'd love the Galápagos. I'd love the Galápagos. Barn would love the Galápagos: It doesn't get any better than giant tortoises and seagoing iguanas when you're four or five years old. Maybe Lizzy could come, too, and she'd take Barn off our hands for a few days so Tina and I could split the difference between
a family vacation and a late honeymoon. Maybe if I offer to pay for Ethan . . .

These thoughts are triggered by staring down at the earth from thirty thousand feet. It always makes me sentimental, especially when I'm alone. And I'm alone on this trip, winging off to the annual conference of the FLSPC (Federal, Local and State Prosecutors Coalition) in San Francisco.

As I suspected, Gregory Nations doesn't want my fingers in his pie, but having won that tiff with Monica, he now feels compelled to parade me around as a way of gloating his victory. “Nick, I have another press conference,” he said a few days ago. “Come stand with me.”

I did. It was awful. Rather than giving him the gravitas of federal enforcement, I felt like stage dressing. From now on, I'll keep my distance. And in furtherance of that intention, I decided to get out of town for the week.

Henry Tatlock's prosecution won't be a complicated trial. The state's case will look something like this: Kyle's mother will take the stand to talk about her son going missing, and about the search, and about their family's torment. Arthur Cunningham will talk about finding the body. Expert witnesses will talk about recovering and analyzing the DNA. Someone from the FBI will describe matching the crime scene DNA to Henry Tatlock in the national CODIS databank, which collects DNA profiles from all perpetrators in violent crimes. Gregory Nations will ask the FBI witness why Henry happened to be in that database. Monica will object because it refers to Henry's expunged juvenile record, which is inadmissible. Gregory will shout. Monica will shout. The judge will shout. The jury will be removed. Everybody will shout some more. The judge will rule. The jury will be brought back, and the judge will instruct them about what to disregard and what not to disregard. The state will rest, and Monica will put on an unsuccessful defense that neither negates the DNA evidence nor overcomes the emotional testimony of Kyle's family. The jury will convict, and then, sometime later, there will be a sentencing trial.

I fall asleep. I wake up when we start the descent toward San Francisco. I am scratching my cheeks. It's Tuesday. I didn't work yesterday, except to spend an hour on the phone with Gregory Nations's DNA guy. Last Thursday and Friday, I had no important meetings and no courtroom appearances. I haven't shaved since last Wednesday. Nearly a week.

I'm still groggy as we come gliding in over the bay. I doze in and out. We bank around. Looking out the window, I see the spires of the Farallon Islands far offshore. They look like shreds of a fantasy hovering in the mist. I know of the Farallons from a report Lizzy wrote in middle school about great white sharks. A population of them likes to stop by the islands every year to enjoy the annual seal-pup smorgasbord.

Now we bank the other way, and I can see Alcatraz right in the middle of the bay. It hasn't operated as a prison since the early sixties, but the buildings are still there, stark and ugly. It is nightmarish. I've read a bit. I know how the bureau of prisons operated a boat—a water taxi for the damned—taking prisoners out to Alcatraz and, in significantly fewer cases, returning them to the mainland at the end of their sentences. In drowsiness, I imagine myself captain of that unhappy ferry, transporting load after load of transgressors to their new life of exile, isolation, and futility.

Why do I imagine this? Why not imagine myself captaining a boat out to the Farallons, where, though the waves on its beaches turn crimson whenever sharks are on the hunt, at least it's not about captivity? It is about the dramas of nature, not the pathologies of man.

Or the Galápagos: Why not captain a boat to the Galápagos? I'll fill it with Barn and Tina, Lizzy and Ethan, maybe even Flora and Chip, and in happy familial sublimity, I'll transport them all out to Alcatraz . . .