"I do all the time."
"Ms. Reed, would you mind taking the red marker we've been using and draw a line through the grounds of the medical center so that the jury can see it."
Everyone in the courtroom was watching. It was almost a straight line form the Midtown Terrace Playground at the end of of Olympia down to Parnassus Street.
"And is this a level area, Ms. Reed?"
"Objection."
"I don't think so," Villars said again.
"No, sir, it's all uphill."
"Or downhill from Olympia Way?"
"Yes."
"So," Powell concluded, "if you ran through the medical center, you had only to cover a half-mile of ground as the crow flies, and all of it downhill. Even if the defendant had left her house at 9:40, she could almost have walked it…"
By Friday, Hardy was going crazy sitting in his office, or strolling down to Freeman's, or going by the jail to talk to Jennifer, or looking into store windows. Waiting for the verdict was its own special hell.
And if they lost, the case would become his and his alone. It had begun really to sink in that Freeman wouldn't even be there in the courtroom with him anymore – there was no reason for him to be. Freeman had been the guilt-phase attorney and – win or lose – his job was now over. He would write his appeal, if necessary, try for a new trial or a reversal, but as far as the courtroom was concerned, Freeman would play no more active role.
When Freeman had first asked him to be Keenan counsel – the attorney for the penalty phase of the trial – Hardy had not fully realized its implications. He should have, he told himself.
Now he alone would have the responsibility of convincing the same jury that convicted her, if it did, that Jennifer should not go to the gas chamber, that there were factors in mitigation. It would be his job to tell the jury what those factors might be.
But of course all this led back to his belief, now, that the jury might find her guilty. It wasn't, he felt, that the prosecution had done such a bang-up job proving that she'd killed her husband, and accidentally, in some undocumented fashion, her son. Nor, he was convinced, had Freeman been inept, in spite of what Hardy considered to be his occasional lapses of judgment.
No, if the jury convicted Jennifer it would be because they had become convinced that she was selfish, cold, a liar who stole from and cheated on her husband, a woman who mostly had shown anger rather than contrition – exactly the sort of human being who would do what Jennifer had been accused of.
And – the source of much of Hardy's angst now – if the jury believed Jennifer was such a cold-blooded person, they could also not implausibly believe that she deserved the ultimate penalty…
Hardy had asked Frannie if she could leave the kids with Erin for a couple of hours and have lunch with him, and now they were standing at Phyllis' station outside Freeman's office, making small talk, waiting on Freeman, who had invited himself along, when the telephone rang on Phyllis' desk.
"David Freeman," she said formally – her standard response to incoming calls – then listened, lips pursed, nodding once or twice. "Thank you." Hanging up, apparently forgetting the presence of Hardy and Frannie, she pushed the button on her intercom. "Mr. Freeman, the jury's coming in."
The gallery had filled up with media representatives in a remarkably short time. Hardy finagled a space for Frannie next to a reporter he knew on the aisle in the second row.
Jennifer was escorted in and brought to the defense table. She was wearing a white blouse and tan wraparound skirt with low heels. Freeman patted her hand, though she seemed not to notice, sitting without expression, showing no emotion.
When Villars directed her to, she stood at attention, staring straight ahead, flanked by Freeman on her right and Hardy on her left. The judge took the paper from the clerk, read it carefully, handed it to the clerk.
"As to the first count, we the members of the jury find the defendant, Jennifer Lee Witt, guilty of the murder of Larry Witt, in the first degree, with special circumstances."
Hardy felt his stomach churn. Half-turning, he noticed that Jennifer's reaction was the one he would have predicted – none. No, not quite. A muscle on the side of her jaw was moving, but otherwise she might have been waiting for a streetlight to change. He glanced at the jury box – they were seeing it, too. A cold woman, they must be thinking.
Behind them, in the gallery, there was an insistent buzz, but Villars, after a perfunctory tap with her gavel, was bent on the job at hand. "As to the second count," the clerk read, "we the members of the jury find the defendant guilty of the mrder of Matthew Witt, in the first degree, with special circumstances."
Freeman was holding her elbow. She did not appear to need the assistance.
I'm not going to break. I'm not going to let them break me.
They beat on you every way, every day, and their satisfaction is watching you fall apart. Then you break down. You beg them to give you another chance, you'll do better, anything you want. You'll change and be different and you won't even be yourself anymore if they would only stop making you hurt.
Which is all the time, now. Especially since Matt.
But I'm not going to let them anymore. Crying doesn't help. It never helped with Larry, with Ned, with Ken, even with these lawyers. They think it's an act, anyway, if I show how I feel. They don't know and even if they did, they wouldn't care.
Why do I want to convince everybody? Of what? That I'm not a monster? Why should I bother? Of course they found me guilty. They always have…
I am guilty in a way. I am to blame for getting myself to here, for becoming who I am – empty, used up. You let them beat on you long enough, eventually who you really are, that person goes away. Hides.
Well, I won't give them that satisfaction anymore. That's something. Maybe a start…
"I honestly didn't think they'd convict." Freeman's hair was all over the place in the late-afternoon wind. The sky was a thick gray blanket over the steps in front of the Hall.
Hardy had his arm around his wife, who was feeling sick, her hand clutched to her stomach. She had waited in the courtroom until it had cleared, until Hardy had come out after going into the private suite with Freeman and Jennifer. Where Jennifer hadn't wanted to talk about anything.
At least not with Freeman.
She told Freeman, a smile of fury on her face, that he was lucky he had made her pay up front. If she had known he was going to lose… wasn't he supposed to be the best?
He told her it wasn't over yet, of course that was her understandable reaction. But he'd be working on the appeal. There were grounds…
Hardy had listened to part of it, then excused himself – he would talk to Jennifer later, without Freeman – and came out to Frannie. She wanted to go home.
But Freeman caught them on the steps, wanting more post mortem. He was still fighting the case. He was going to appeal. "It came down to the three minutes…"
Hardy felt he had to say something. "That was my fault. I thought it was a big deal."
Freeman hit him on the arm. "That's bullshit," he said. "The whole thing was my show, don't kid yourself. I mean, I should have walked the route myself. If there was any way in the world she could have got to that bank in five minutes instead of eleven it was my responsibility to have found out how. Too many eggs in that basket." He pulled his jacket more tightly around him. "Anyway, I can probably get a new trial. Villars should have stopped this one after she granted my 1118."
Whistling in the dark? Hardy had a hard time imagining that Freeman wanted to go through this exercise again. He also doubted whether as a matter of law Freeman was right. But he really preferred not to get into that. Instead he said, "Maybe you should have crossed Lightner. That's when it went south. If they were having an affair we could have made the case that he had as good a motive as she did."