“-whose ambitions exceed their sense of fairness and whose thirst for fame and recognition blinds them to the simple demands of justice.”
Bam! Bam! “Mr. Hardy, that’s enough. Mr. Stier, objection sustained. Mr. Hardy-”
But he was a step ahead of her. “I apologize, Your Honor. I got a little carried away.”
“Apparently,” she said. “Please don’t let it happen again. Jurors will disregard that last outburst of Mr. Hardy’s.” Then, back at Hardy. “All right. You may proceed.”
Hardy took a small breath, having made it at last to what had become almost his boilerplate closing. “This trial is about determining who caused the deaths of two people-Dylan Vogler and Levon Preslee. One died by gunshot wound and the other by the stroke of a cleaver. The evidence is quite clear on these points. But where the evidence is not clear, and in fact where it altogether fails, is where it purports to connect Maya Townshend to either of these murders. It is neither clear nor clean. Where it needs to be unambiguous, it is open to interpretation. Where it needs to dispel reasonable doubt, it only adds to it. No real evidence inexorably connects Maya Townshend to these murders.”
Now, his own adrenaline storm having passed, Hardy thought he could maintain his less dramatic tone and lull Stier into failing to object on argumentative grounds one last time. “As you were seated on this jury, you all swore an oath that you would presume the innocence of Maya Townshend. She must remain innocent in your eyes until the prosecution presents you with enough hard, physical evidence to prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt that she in fact committed these crimes. That means you must be sure of the intimate details of these crimes. When Mr. Stier tells you that he can’t say exactly how Maya killed Mr. Vogler or Mr. Preslee, he is admitting that he doesn’t have that proof. And without that proof there is doubt. Where there is doubt, there is innocence. My client, Maya Townshend, is innocent-and she will rely on your sworn oath to presume that innocence and, after you have weighed all the facts in this case, to return a verdict of not guilty.”
22
Braun called a recess as soon as Hardy sat down. While Maya was in the restroom, Hardy pushed his chair back to the bar rail and turned around, resting his elbow on it. “Well,” he said to what he hoped was his private little fan club of Kathy, Harlen, and Joel Townshend, “I think I got a few licks in, anyway. How’d it play out here?”
“Excellent,” Joel said.
Joel had become a rather more enthusiastic partner in Maya’s defense since the arrest. Of course, this had come at the expense of a seismic shift in his worldview. Before the weekend of Dylan Vogler’s death he’d never had occasion to think that the world wasn’t at base a fair and equitable place. He’d always had enough money and social standing to remain above the little mundane headaches that most people faced constantly-household bills, fights about money or time or chores. If he wanted to go out to dinner, they hired a babysitter and didn’t care what the meal cost. If he and Maya were tired or bored, they’d go spend a night or two in Napa or Carmel to rejuvenate themselves. Their friends were people more or less like them. And other people he met tended to be polite, at least to him personally. Perhaps even more fundamentally, he never really had to prove himself to get a loan or make a connection; he got the benefit of the doubt.
And now, not just suddenly but seemingly instantaneously, all of that had ended. The properties against which he’d taken out more loans to finance other properties and ventures were no longer rock-solid as collateral. His social life, with his wife incarcerated in the county jail, essentially vanished. He found himself amazed by how completely life changed when you got accused of wrongdoing. At first he’d held to the belief that this whole affair was just a mistake and if he could just find the right person to talk to and explain everything, it would all go away. He and Maya would go back to their real life.
But by now he had come to realize that this wasn’t going to happen. He and his wife were somehow “in the criminal justice system,” and this more than anything meant that the benefit of the doubt had evaporated. No one in the system was inclined to believe anything he said. The motivations for anything he did got skewed and twisted by people who started out by considering him, if not a criminal, then at least a shady character. And once they had that mind-set, nothing was going to change.
Now he was going on to Hardy: “I like the way you laid this conspiracy these people have cooked up right out there.”
“Me too,” Hardy said. “I couldn’t believe Braun let it in, but if she was going to let me, I sure as hell was going to run with it.”
“My concern,” Harlen Fisk said, “is it’s going to turn up the heat on Glass.”
“Let it,” Kathy West declared. “Harlen and I showing up here ought to be enough to do that. I welcome it. And, Diz, you just declared open war, which also suits me fine. Jerry Glass has got nothing on us. This will all get litigated away in civil court, but in the meanwhile this is where we fight it, where it can do Maya the most good.”
“It’s great you both came down for this,” Hardy said to Kathy and Harlen. “It was really a good idea, Kathy. Let them know we’re not cowering and hiding and plotting some backroom deal. I think it’s really shocked them.”
The mayor nodded. “That was my intention.”
“Are you planning on coming in every day?” Hardy asked.
This brought a smile. “When I can, maybe I will, if it will have some strategic value for you. But day-to-day, I’ve still got this city to run.”
“I should be here most days,” Fisk said. “Wave the flag for my sis.”
“So what’s the next step?” Joel asked.
“Witnesses,” Hardy replied. “We get down to it.”
If Paul Stier felt he’d taken a few hits from Hardy’s opening statement, or harbored any residual resentment at Judge Braun, he showed no sign of either as he stood in the center of the courtroom. “The People call Sergeant Lennard Faro.”
The head of Crime Scene Investigations stood up in the second row of the gallery and came through the door in the bar rail and up to the witness stand. Well-dressed as always in snug tan pants, a pink dress shirt, and a subtly shimmering light brown sports coat, he cut a dashing figure very much at odds with that of most other cops. With his spiky dark hair, gold stud earring, and well-trimmed goatee, he might have been a young graduate student or fashion designer; but even so, his experience and ease on the witness stand soon verified the credentials he outlined to Stier as they began-fourteen years on the force, the last eight with the CSI unit, the last six in charge of it.
“Now, Sergeant, what is your role at these crime scenes?”
“My team of three officers and I search the general area for physical evidence that might be related to the crime. We collect as evidence anything of interest. We also photograph the victim and the scene to try and create a record of everything at the scene as it was when we found it.”
Though a bit unusual, since murder trials often began with forensic and medical evidence, Hardy thought Stier’s decision to call Faro first was a good bit of strategy. This would put evidence at the crime scenes into the trial at the outset, potentially rebutting Hardy’s contention in his opening statement that there was little or no physical evidence tying Maya to the murders. It was also a prime opportunity to get pictures of the victims in front of the jury-real human beings who’d been murdered.
“Sergeant, were you present at the scene of Dylan Vogler’s murder?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And would you tell the jury how you proceeded?”
“Sure.” Faro, the consummate witness, nodded and came forward in the witness chair, turning slightly to be facing the jury. “I arrived at a few minutes before eight with three other crime-scene technicians.”