"Yes. One hundred and ten to be exact."
"So essentially, convicted felons told you that cops and prosecutors make them nervous? Seems to make perfect sense to me." The jurors and the audience laughed.
"Objection," Louis said. "He's mischaracterizing what the witness said."
"Sustained."
"No further questions for this witness, your honor."
Louis had, of course, saved his "big gun" for last. Enrique Villalobos slunk into the courtroom wearing an orange jail jumpsuit. He took the stand and leered at the women in the jury through his red-rimmed and yellow-jaundiced eyes, his lips pulled back from his brown-stained rodent teeth in what was intended to be a smile but looked like a grimace.
Under Louis's questioning, Villalobos recounted how he was standing beneath the pier that morning when he saw a young woman jogging toward him. "I hid in the shadows until she was close, then I jumped out and hit her. She was out of it pretty good and just lied there sort of moaning," he said, licking his thin purple lips, which sent a shudder of revulsion through every woman in the courtroom. "But I jumped on her and punched her in the face and stuff like that."
"What did you do then, Mr. Villalobos?"
"I decided that I was going to fuck her," he said, smirking. "I took off her shorts and then I did her dirty."
"What do you mean 'did her dirty,' Mr. Villalobos?" Louis asked.
"I fucked her in the ass," he replied, winking at one of the female jurors who quickly looked down at her notepad.
"And when you were finished raping Mrs. Tyler?"
"I hit her again a couple times to kill her so she couldn't identify me."
"Then why after all this time have you come forward now, Mr. Villalobos?"
Villalobos did his best to assume a look of shame but it came off more as constipation. "Well, it was like this," he said. "I have lived a life of sin. I raped women and even some children. But one night in prison, I had a dream that my soul was in danger and that innocent men were in prison because of my sin. The only way I could be saved was to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and to confess.
"So I talked it over with the prison chaplain and he encouraged me to talk to the prison superintendent and he told me to write to the Brooklyn District Attorney. And, well, you know the story from there."
"Were you offered any deals for this? Did you get something for this information?"
"Only a clear conscience," he said. "I'm what they call a lifer. The only way I come out of prison will be in a pine box."
"Thank you, Mr. Villalobos," Louis said, mopping his face. He turned to Karp. "Your witness."
Villalobos waited like a man facing a firing squad as Karp approached and said, "Mr. Villalobos, you testified that you hit Ms. Tyler repeatedly…hard enough to crack her skull in three places. Can you tell the jury what you used to hit her?"
Villalobos looked at Karp suspiciously. He'd been warned to be careful when answering, but this wasn't one of the questions he'd gone over with Louis. He looked over at the fat lawyer for guidance, but Karp stepped into his line of sight.
"Yes," Villalobos said and tried to smile. "It was a piece of driftwood I found under the pier."
"I see," Karp said. "And did you bite Ms. Tyler on the breast before or after you hit her with this piece of driftwood?"
"After," Enrique said, then looked at the women in the jury, "after I fucked her."
"Thank you, Mr. Villalobos," Karp said. "I have no further questions at this time for this witness-"
The remainder of his statement was interrupted by a murmur of astonishment from the audience. Even Louis looked surprised. But Sykes turned his back toward the jury and smirked, first at his colleagues who struggled to keep their faces noncommittal, and then at Liz Tyler. When he caught her eye, he smiled and made a kissing motion with his mouth.
"-however, I ask the court to hold Mr. Villalobos over so that I can recall him during the defense portion of the trial," Karp said.
Villalobos stopped smiling and looked over at Louis, who looked worried but offered no guidance as he rose to his feet. "Your honor, that is the plaintiffs' case."
31
Tuesday, January 25
The next morning, Karp was surprised to see Liz Tyler standing outside the courtroom without her police escort.
"I told them it wasn't necessary," she said when he asked. "I said it was fine if they just got me past the crowds at the screening area. They have better things to do than shepherd me around like I was in kindergarten. I don't know, maybe I'm starting to feel stronger."
"Have you given any thought to what you'll do when this is over?"
Tyler looked surprised, as if the question had never occurred to her. "I don't really think that far ahead, Mr. Karp. I know I must seem so weak to you. I know other women have survived what I went through and gone on with their lives, whatever that means. But if my life ended tomorrow, I wouldn't be sad. I'm tired of being afraid all of the time, Mr. Karp."
"Butch," he said.
Tyler smiled. "Butch… I think that's why I couldn't deal with resuming my life with my husband and child. I was afraid-not of what might happen to me, but that something might happen to them and I'd be powerless to do anything about it. Just like I was powerless that morning when Jayshon Sykes and the others raped me."
"You remember?" Karp asked.
Tyler hesitated. "I won't take the stand, if that's what you mean," she said. "I couldn't…and it probably wouldn't help you anyway. I'm sure Mr. Louis would soon have me confused. And to be honest, I still have a hard time differentiating what is nightmare and what was reality. But I remember Sykes was the one who first grabbed me and dragged me under the pier by my hair. And I remember…" She started to cry. "…I remember him on top of me but he couldn't…he couldn't finish, so he hit me again. The others…I remember faces and being raped, but it was as if I were crawling into a shell…they could have my body but they couldn't have me."
The last statement came out as a sob. Hesitantly, Karp put his arm around her, felt her tense and then relax against his chest. After a minute, she pulled back. "I'm sorry, but I think I needed that," she said and gave him her tiny smile. "I've never been able to find my way back out of that shell, Mr… Butch. It's like I'm living in a body that doesn't belong to me anymore."
As he began to present the defense case that morning, Karp briefly touched the damp spot on his jacket where Tyler's tears had soaked in. "Your honor, the defense calls Jack Swanburg to the stand."
Karp looked toward the back of the courtroom where a short, rotund man wearing bright green suspenders to hold up his pants entered. Swanburg looked a little like Santa Claus with his flowing white hair and beard, merry blue eyes, and a round belly that Karp suspected did, indeed, shake like a bowl full of jelly. However, Karp knew that the man's mild appearance belied his reputation as one of the country's foremost forensic scientists, a freelancer from Colorado who made his living examining forensic evidence for both prosecutors and defense lawyers.
On the witness stand, Karp quickly established that the man was a doctor of pathology with expertise in a variety of forensic disciplines, "including blood-splatter analysis, bite-mark identification, forensic photography, ballistics, and dactylography…better known as fingerprint analysis."
"Is there anything you're not an expert in?" Karp asked with a smile.
"Well, you'd have to ask my wife, Connie," Swanburg replied with a chuckle. "I'm not too handy around the house."
"Doctor, can you tell the jury how many cases you've testified in?"
"Nearly three thousand."
"For the prosecution or defense?"