Act of God (21 page)

He spoke to people on the fringes of the case, to neighbors, to friends and acquaintances, to potential witnesses. He nosed
around the police department and the courthouse, befriending a clerk here, an assistant there, but he knew that Corey Latham’s
story wasn’t the one he was looking for. Nor did it turn out to be the prosecutor or anyone from the investigation team. Finally,
on a sunny afternoon in early July, Kirby called his office.

“I don’t know about the Pulitzer,” he said, “but I’ve got the subject for my story.”

“Who is it?” the publisher of
Probe
asked.

“It’s the kid’s attorney,” Kirby replied.

“But she won’t talk to you,” his boss asserted. “She isn’t talking to anybody.”

“Well, that’s the whole point now, isn’t it?” the reporter said. “Why isn’t she?”

J
udith Purcell skidded into the driveway of her Beacon Hill home, relieved that she had managed to make it all the way there,
and jumped out, fearing an imminent disaster of some kind. The smoke coming from under the hood of her car was so thick it
had almost blinded her the last several blocks.

She couldn’t believe it. When the last thing she needed was trouble with the car, this definitely looked like trouble, and
she didn’t know the first thing about cars. She stood there, frightened and frustrated, and started to cry.

“It would be better if you turned off the engine,” a voice behind her said.

Judith gasped. “Of course,” she responded. “I should have thought of that.”

“Let me,” the voice said.

She watched as a man came around the side of the car and proceeded to climb inside, turn off the engine, extract the keys,
and pop the hood with calm efficiency. He was not particularly tall, and not particularly trim. His sandy hair was badly in
need of cutting, and it looked as though he hadn’t
shaved for days. He was wearing khakis and a T-shirt, and didn’t look familiar.

“If you’ve got a garden hose handy,” he told her, I’ll cool this down and take a look for you.”

Judith produced the hose, turned it on at the man’s instruction, and watched as he first doused the smoke and then disappeared
under the hood.

“Just let me get a screwdriver,” he said a few moments later, trotting over to a pickup parked in the street, and rummaging
around in the bed. Returning with a small toolbox, he disappeared under the hood again.

“It’s nothing serious,” he declared, perhaps fifteen minutes later. “A loose radiator hose, that’s all. I’ve tightened it
back up, and it should be okay for now. But if it blows again, you might want to take it in to your mechanic and let him check
it out.”

“Oh thank you,” she breathed. “I don’t think I could have handled something serious.”

“Modern conveniences,” he said with a grin. “We can’t live with ’em, and we can’t live without ’em.”

“Are you from around here?” she asked.

“No,” he replied. “I’ve just been doing some work for the people across the street.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“A little bit of everything, I guess,” he told her. “I’m your basic handyman.”

“Oh, in that case, please, let me pay you for your time and trouble,” Judith said immediately.

“Not necessary,” he assured her with a broad grin. “It’s always my pleasure to come to the rescue of a damsel in distress.”

The damsel smiled back. “Do you also tilt at windmills?” she asked.

The man chuckled. “Whenever possible,” he replied.

He looked to be somewhere in his forties, and while he wasn’t especially good-looking, he had a nice face, and he spoke
as if he were educated. His eyes were what most drew her attention. It seemed as though they had been looking at the world
for at least a hundred years. “Well then, sir,” she declared, “you have my undying gratitude.”

“I’ll be back over here tomorrow,” he said with a little wave. “In case the car acts up again.”

She thought about her dripping faucet, her running toilet, her leaking windows, her erratic oven, and her clogged gutters,
but not about the fact that she had no money to hire someone to fix them.

“What’s your name?” she asked anyway. “If you’re not too busy, I might have some work for you.”

He smiled. “I’m not too busy,” he said. “And my name is Tom. Tom Kirby.”

W
ith very little fanfare, spring became summer. The days were drier than normal and cooler than expected, but otherwise unremarkable.
For Dana, the best part of the season was that daylight lasted until almost ten o’clock.

It had become her habit to take advantage of that, and work late into the evening. She found it easier to do what she referred
to as her courtroom planning once the phones had been switched over to the message service, the bustle and chatter of the
busy office had subsided, and there were few, if any, interruptions. Corey Latham’s trial was scheduled to begin in a matter
of weeks, and she had been working sixteen-hour days since the middle of June.

During that time, she had rarely made it home before dark, and only barely made it to Molly’s tenth birthday party. She couldn’t
remember the last time she had cooked a meal for her family, or the last time she and Sam had made love.

Thankfully, he understood. Or if not, at least he accepted it. Perhaps more than she, he had recognized from the start the
demands that the Latham case was going to make on her, and on
the family. As much as he could, he had filled their scant time together with pleasant evening jaunts around town and happy
picnics in the park. Despite his best-laid plans, however, someone from the media usually managed to spot them.

“Tell us your strategy,” they begged from the other side of a street, the next table at a restaurant, a neighboring blanket
at Green Lake.

“I’m saving it for the jury,” Dana always replied with a tight little smile that made it clear the inquisitor was to intrude
no further. She resented their persistence, and the uncomfortable feeling they gave her of being cornered, like an animal.

The transition from prosecutor to defense attorney had not been an easy one for Dana. Despite her repartee with Brian Ayres
over angels and devils, it had always been her intention, after a brief stint in the prosecutor’s office, to change sides.
After all, she wasn’t her father’s daughter for nothing. But she had struggled with it for years, perhaps, subconsciously,
right up to this very moment.

“How can you defend such scum?” she had asked, the summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Stanford, when her father
was in the middle of a gruesome rape trial.

“This is an equal opportunity system,” Jefferson Reid told her. “Defending him guarantees you and me and everyone else in
this country a process that protects all of us.”

“How would it protect the victim to have her rapist go free?” Dana countered.

“I’ll tell you how,” her father replied. “Remote as the possibility may seem to you, what if this ’scum,’ as you call him,
didn’t do it? What if the evidence against him was flimsy at best, or manufactured at worst, only everyone wanted him to be
guilty, so they didn’t much care? Now, let’s say you were
his
daughter, and he went to prison for fifteen years for a crime he didn’t commit. How would you feel?”

“Angry,” she admitted. “So, is he innocent?”

Reid shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to wait for the jury to tell us.”

After fourteen years in practice herself, Dana had come to believe wholeheartedly in the adversarial system as a fundamental
part of the judicial process, and she fully understood and agreed with the need to challenge the state to prove its case beyond
a reasonable doubt. Still, there was something about the apparent ease with which some defense attorneys could circumvent
the rules and manipulate the truth on behalf of a client that upset her sense of moral balance.

After a lifetime of watching her father represent his share of guilty defendants, and marveling at his skill, it always seemed
to her that he had a line that he would not cross, which in her eyes, anyway, seemed to justify his actions. She had tried
to find that line for herself, despite the pressure she sometimes felt to win at all costs, but she was never quite as comfortable
with her position as she had been with her father’s. Until now.

Now there was Corey Latham. And she could see clearly all the reasons why it was so important to protect the rights of every
defendant. Because unless there was vigorous defense of the guilty, she knew there could be no chance for the exoneration
of the innocent.

The transition from defender to champion had taken place so gradually that she had not even been aware of it at first. It
had begun with her accepting the case, and assigning the standard presumption of innocence that she applied like a blanket
to all her clients, without thinking or judging, simply as a matter of law.

Then, ever so slowly, and without her actually realizing it was happening, that perfunctory presumption gave way to the possibility
that Corey Latham really might not be the Hill House bomber after all. His confusion was just too real, his vulnerability
too great, his sincerity too obvious, his story too credible, and the evidence far too vague.

“I think I’ve probably read more books in the past few months than I did in my whole life,” he said with a sheepish grin one
day in July. “I just finished
Les Misérables
, and I have to tell you, I know exactly how Jean Valjean must have felt.”

“He spent almost his whole life as a victim,” Dana replied. “Hopefully, you won’t have to.”

“He made one little mistake, and that started everything. But he wasn’t a bad man. I believe he had principles. I believe
he was a good man.”

“At one point or another in our lives, many of us become victims of circumstance.”

At that, Corey had sighed. “Sometimes, at night, you know, when I lie in bed, I listen to the sounds of this place,” he said.
“Men banging around in their cells, whispering to one another in the dark, crying out in their sleep. And I think there’s
this whole world I never knew anything about before, running parallel with the world I grew up in, and I wonder how we can
be so ignorant of each other.”

“This world is not your world, and don’t you ever start thinking it is,” she declared, somewhat more vehemently than perhaps
was warranted.

He smiled at her then, delight tinged with sadness. “You know what?” he said mischievously. “I think you like me.”

“Never mind that,” she said, a bit embarrassed by her outburst. “Tell me how you’re getting along with Dr. Stern.”

“He’s okay,” Corey said. “For a shrink.”

“Do you like him?”

“Yeah, I like him, I guess. He’s funny. He makes me laugh sometimes.”

“That’s okay,” Dana said. “I’d just appreciate it if you didn’t make him cry.”

“Do you think he’ll find me insane?”

She looked at him quizzically. “Do you want him to?”

“Hell, no. I don’t think I’m crazy. But it’s like he’s got this
invisible microscope peering into my brain, and even I don’t know everything that’s in there.”

She smiled. “As long as you tell him the truth,” she said, “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

Leaving the jail that day, Dana realized she no longer accepted just the possibility of Corey Latham’s innocence. In her mind,
it was now a probability. And by the end of July, after four months of such conversations in the cramped interview room, after
having taken the time, in spite of herself, to get to know the person behind the horrendous indictment, the probability became
belief.

Shortly after that conversation, Brian Ayres had begun the process of disclosing the thrust of his case, turning over documentation,
analyses, and witness lists to the defense. The material consisted of evidence found in Corey’s car and home, a witness who
saw what could have been her client’s vehicle at Hill House the night before the bombing, and various other witnesses who
would testify to Corey’s state of mind and actions after he found out about the abortion. Dana spent hours sifting through
it all, bouncing ideas off Joan Wills and Craig Jessup, until gradually the shape of a strategy came into focus.