William Bantling was a renowned taxidermist, recognized many times over for his talents by the Southeast Chapter of the American Taxidermy Association. A number-five scalpel is often used as a tool in the craft. Normally, the animal is dead before the procedure is done; however, in certain instances, a live animal may be used to achieve a more ‘realistic look’, particularly in the animal’s eyes. That, of course, would explain the luminol-illuminated blood smears.
The blood smears on the number-five scalpel found in Bantling’s shed were too small to achieve an accurate
sample for DNA testing. Tests did indicate the presence of animal blood, though, most probably from a bird. The red blood cells discovered on the blade had nuclei, something that human red blood cells do not have. The swirls left on the blade that initially matched Anna’s blood type also appeared to be ‘manufactured’, as were the three drops of her blood found on the floor in the shed. So said the Chief of Pathology from Albert Einstein.
C.J. knew that you could find an expert somewhere who would say almost anything, refute even the most airtight evidence with conviction, if paid enough. Psychologists who would blame pro wrestling for a teenager’s act of cold-blooded murder; doctors who would blame death on a heart attack rather than on a drunk driver. For the right price, there were witnesses for any defense, any legal theory. And sometimes it worked. But to actually watch her case crumble, come apart at the seams… to see Bantling’s smile grow more and more confident as the jury nodded involuntarily at the testimony of his parade of witnesses, the coquettish glances in Bantling’s direction of Juror Number Five occur more frequently, the fear that once appeared in her eyes replaced now by an inquisitive lust… it was all too much. C.J. knew that her cross-examinations were not up to par, her tone of voice sounding more and more desperate with each witness. It was obvious that she had not prepared questions on these witnesses, that she had been taken by surprise,
ambushed,
and she felt the jury’s trust in her wane.
She had not slept all weekend. Nightmares of her rape were now replaced with nightmares of Bantling’s acquittal. His twisted bloodred smile in the clown mask,
turning to her in the courtroom and laughing. Laughing as Hank the bailiff unlocked the handcuffs and leg shackles and let him go free. And then him walking toward her, at her, while everyone just watched. Dominick, Manny, Lourdes, her parents, Michael, Judge Chaskel, Greg Chambers, Jerry Tigler, Tom de la Flors. All just watching while he threw her on the prosecution’s table and stuffed her panties in her mouth, a shiny new jagged knife in his hand slicing the buttons off her blouse.
Her appearance was almost scary, she knew. The dark circles were impossible to hide now on her pale, sallow face, the chewed fingertips too gnawed for even fake nails. Her suits hung on her as if she were a mannequin at a bad dress shop.
Just get through today, and tomorrow will surely get better,
she continually told herself, although she knew otherwise. She knew from past experience that the spiral only headed one way. If Bantling walked, she was done. It was over. Now that seemed like only a matter of time.
At a quarter to six, Judge Chaskel dismissed the jury for the day. ‘Ms Rubio, how many more witnesses do you intend to call so I can get an idea of scheduling?’
‘Just two or three more, Judge.’
‘Does your client intend to testify?’
‘I’m not prepared to answer that just yet, Judge. I don’t know.’
‘Well, if he does, do you think you will be done by tomorrow evening?’
‘Yes, Judge. Of course, that also depends on the prosecutor’s cross.’ She looked in C.J.’s direction.
‘Let’s take it as it comes, Judge. I don’t know how long my cross will be. I will probably need time to prepare if the defendant testifies,’ C.J. said wearily.
I will probably be disbarred if he testifies, Judge. Then come the men in the crisp white suits.
‘I understand that. We are moving along nicely, though. I’d like to do closings on Thursday then, unless, of course, you need some additional time, Ms Towns-end, and a charging conference on the instructions to the jury on Friday morning. Then we’ll give it to the jury by Friday afternoon. A quick verdict and we’re done by the weekend.’
And then we’re done by the weekend.
And it will all be over. Just like that. By the weekend. In time for the Dolphins’ playoff bid, and the Coconut Grove Art Festival.
By the weekend, fate would be forever decided.
82
She sat in her office, the blinds of course drawn, the sound of the Channel 7 news anchor barely audible on her small portable television, a mountain of paperwork lying uselessly on her desk, next to a cold bowl of soup and her fifth cup of coffee. The Cupid trial, of course, was the lead story on the six-thirty news, followed by a spin on a fraudulent investment company that had bilked South Florida seniors out of millions, and a blurb about a missing college student from Fort Lauderdale with epilepsy. She hated going home. She hated staying here. There was no escape anywhere. And that was the problem. At least until the weekend.
And then we’re done by the weekend.
A faint rap sounded at her door, and before she could answer, it slowly opened. She expected to see an irate Jerry Tigler before her, maybe even a concerned Dominick Falconetti and Manny Alvarez, whose calls she had avoided all week. She didn’t expect a smiling Gregory Chambers.
‘May I come in?’ he asked, entering anyway, looking about her office.
Her back stiffened and she shook her head, but strangely enough, could not find her voice in time and he sat down before her.
‘How have you been?’ he asked, his brow furrowing with a look of concern. ‘I just came from the sex offender training symposium downstairs, and I thought
I’d stop up. You haven’t made our last two sessions, and I am a bit worried about that. With all the stress that you are under.’
‘I’m fine. Just fine,’ she said, her head still shaking. ‘I think you should go,’ was all she could say.
‘You don’t look fine, C.J. You look sickly. I have watched you on TV and I am downright worried about you.’
‘Worried about me? You are worried about me?’ She couldn’t hold the anger in anymore, the hurt, the confusion. ‘I came to you for help, Greg – Dr Chambers – I trusted you as a doctor, as a friend, and you were fucking with me the whole goddamn time!’
A look of hurt and surprise crossed Greg Chambers’s face. ‘What are you talking about, C.J.?’
‘I was there. I was at your office!’ she screamed.
‘Yes, Estelle said you came by last week,’ he began defensively, the look of confusion still on his face, ‘but you were gone when I came out. That’s exactly the behavior you’re exhibiting that I am concerned about –’
She cut him off, her voice now choked with tears. Tears that she could not hold back. ‘And I saw. I saw it, right there, in your office. In your appointment book.’
‘You looked through my appointment book? C.J., how could you –’
‘You were treating him, too! Bantling, that son of a bitch. All this time and you said nothing. You knew all along that he had raped me and you played me like a fool.’
Greg Chambers’s shocked face now grew dark at the sound of her allegation. ‘I knew nothing of the sort. Listen to me, C.J. I did treat him, Billy Bantling, that is true –’
‘And you said nothing! How could you do that? How could you not tell me?’
‘I do not owe you an apology or an explanation, but I will afford you a limited one because of our long-term relationship. Our friendship.’ The anger rose in his voice as he spoke, and although he struggled to contain it, his tone was cutting and she suddenly felt small and unsure. Weak. ‘As a prosecutor, you know full well that I cannot divulge the fact that I am treating someone. The very fact that someone is a patient of mine is confidential and privileged. And I would never disclose that information. Never. I took an oath. Not for anyone or anything, without the consent of the patient. Unless there was a known conflict, which there was not.
‘I never knew that there was a connection until you came to me and told me that the subject arrested in the Cupid investigation was the man who had raped you. And at that time my relationship with Bill Bantling was severed, obviously, because of his arrest. Of course, I will not share anything with you that occurred in my sessions with Bill, so please don’t even ask. Just know that I would never compromise any of my patients. Never. And while this might sound cold, C.J., to attack my professional integrity and imply such a thing without first consulting me is offensive and insulting. I was in a difficult position and I did what I ethically was required to do.
‘Now I came here to see how you were doing, to see if I could help. But I no longer think that that is a good idea. As your doctor, I do suggest that you continue therapy with someone else, however, because you are exhibiting signs of a breakdown.’ He rose to leave.
A sudden, inexplicable feeling of shame overwhelmed
her. Her thoughts ran together clumsily, colliding now in confusion. ‘I don’t know what to do anymore,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know who to believe, what to believe. It’s all coming apart and I can’t control anything. Nothing is real. I don’t know what is real anymore, Dr Chambers.’ The tears flowed from her eyes, even though she thought there were none left.
It was too late. Greg Chambers was angry, the words had been said and could not be taken back. ‘I warned you not to take this case on because you were too close, C.J. Perhaps that lack of distance has warped your perspective on things, on relationships. Perhaps you’ve made the wrong alliances, ones you now no longer trust. Decisions made under stress and confusion are often poor ones.’
‘Dominick? Do you mean him?’
‘I’m simply advising you as I did months back. Distance adds perspective, which is what you seem to need. Continue therapy and you will see that. Good evening.’
He shut the door behind him with a dull thud, leaving her alone again in her office.
She buried her face in her hands, sobbing, the façade fracturing under the stress, the splintering cracks threatening everything she had sought to rebuild over the past decade.
And she never even saw the picture of twenty-one-year-old Florida Atlantic University college student Julie LaTrianca that flashed momentarily across the TV screen behind her, or heard the comments of the perky and doe-eyed news anchor who described the dark-haired beauty’s disappearance from a Fort Lauderdale bar on New Year’s Eve as ‘mysterious’.
83
Twenty minutes after Greg Chambers walked out of her office, the phone rang on her private line at her desk. She let it ring at first, but it kept up, and finally on the tenth ring she picked up, wiping the tears on her face with the back of her hand.
‘Townsend. State Attorney’s.’
‘C.J., it’s me. Dominick.’ She heard police sirens in the background, lots of them, mixed with loud shouts from many different voices.
‘Dominick, it’s not a very good time for me. Can I call you –’
‘No, you can’t call me back. And it is a very good time for you, trust me. We found them, and you need to get down here.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘I’m at a mobile home in Key Largo, just off of U.S. 1. It belonged to Bantling’s dead aunt, Viola Traun. We found the hearts. All of them. Stored in a freezer in her kitchen. We also found pictures, C.J. Tons of pictures of each victim, taken on some black background while they were being tortured on this metal gurney. Some even while they were being killed. Snuff pictures. Looks like maybe his shed. He had everything here.’
‘How did you find – ?’ Her heart was pounding in her chest, a mixture of relief, excitement, fear, panic. Too many emotions overloading the circuits.
‘I found a bench warrant issued by a judge out of
Monroe County for Bantling. Just issued a few weeks ago; that’s why we never saw it. It’s a civil contempt warrant. Bantling was the guardian of his aunt’s property when she was alive, and he failed to file some sort of bullshit accounting within sixty days of her death, so the judge issued a warrant, not realizing, I suppose, that Bill Bantling was the very same William Bantling on trial for murder in Miami. I found out about the house and came down with Manny, and the owner of the trailer park let us in. What a place. The pictures were in the freezer with the hearts. Don’t worry, it’s all kosher, because the trailer was going into foreclosure for nonpayment of back rent on the land. The landowner had right-of-possession papers and all. I made sure. But we need a warrant before we go any further. I don’t want to fuck this up.’
‘Oh my God.’ She struggled to catch her breath. ‘Okay. I’m on my way.’
‘We got him, C.J.,’ Dominick said, his voice a whisper of excitement. ‘He’s all ours now.’
84
Juror Number Five stopped smiling and Bill Bantling stopped laughing when C.J. announced on Wednesday morning that she was reopening her case. And by noon, after Special Agent Dominick Falconetti had retaken the stand for two hours, none of the jury members would even glance in Bantling’s direction, and an emotional chill could be felt taking over the courtroom. By the end of testimony that afternoon, two male jurors had broken down in tears, and three female jurors had vomited after viewing the actual heart of Anna Prado, now preserved in a see-through evidence bag, followed by the horrific pictures found in Viola Traun’s freezer. That included a pale-faced Juror Number Five, who perhaps saw herself a few months down the road caught on film in one of Bantling’s trophy photos. Anna Prado’s mother was again escorted sobbing and screaming hysterically out of the courtroom, but this time around Judge Chaskel somberly decided to break for lunch. The tide had definitely turned.
During the lunch break, Dominick charged William Rupert Bantling with ten additional counts of first-degree murder, and dropped ten more pink arrest forms on the Dade County Jail as a hold, in the what now seemed unlikely event that this jury let him walk. Lourdes waived her client’s right to a First Appearance Hearing, and by late afternoon announced to Judge Chaskel that her client would not be testifying on his own behalf. Bantling’s
cocky smirk was now replaced with a nervous, defiant twitch, and his face had grown pasty and pale-looking. Violent, hushed squabbles could be heard erupting between Lourdes and him at the defense table.