The Kills (11 page)

"Then
I'll see you tomorrow afternoon, unless you need help from my assistant during
the day."

I hung up
the phone and walked into the kitchen, turning on the light to see just how
bare the cupboard was. There was a delicious slab of a smooth
pâté,
mousse de canard,
in the refrigerator, left over from my weekend purchases. I scrounged for some
crackers and a few cornichons for garnish, poured a Diet Coke, and headed to
the den to try to unwind before my last review of the morning's presentation.

The phone
rang before I sat down on the sofa. "I was about to give up on you,"
Jake said. "Thought you'd be home early. I've already left three
messages."

"I
haven't even been in the bedroom to pick them up. I'm just sitting down to
dinner," I said, describing my meal to him.

"Doesn't
sound like enough to keep body and soul together. I'll have to make up for that
tomorrow night."

"What's
all the noise in the background?" I asked.

"It's
the party at the British embassy I told you about. They've got all the
Washington correspondents here, sort of an annual meet-the-press deal. Dinner
and dancing, but it's about to break up."

Who's your date?
is what I really wanted to
ask Jake, but under our new arrangement, we were both free to spend time with
other people if we were not available, since our jobs interfered with our
personal lives so frequently. Instead, I told him I couldn't wait to see him
and tried to believe it when he whispered that he loved me into the telephone.

I dialed
my best friend and former college roommate, Nina Baum, who lived in California.
"Great timing. You just got me coming in the door."

I could
hear her four-year-old son screeching in delight at her arrival. "I'll let
you go. Call me over the weekend."

"You
sound flat, Alex. What's going on?"

No one on
earth knew me better than Nina. We had leaned on each other through every good
time and bad in each other's lives. I told her what had happened to my case,
how depressing it was to see the photos of Queenie at the morgue, and how
jealous I was to think of Jake at a party with someone else.

"You've
heard me on this subject, Alex." Nina was not keen on Jake Tyler. She had
adored Adam Nyman, the medical student I'd met during my law school days at
Virginia. She had mourned with me when he had been killed in a car wreck on his
way to our wedding on Martha's Vineyard, and she had helped me throughout my
slow emergence from the black hole into which I sunk after absorbing the news
of Adam's death.

In the
years since that tragedy, I had never let myself get as close to anyone as I
had to Jake, only to find that my dearest friend, whom I trusted implicitly,
thought he was too superficial and self-involved for me.

"Try
your damn case, will you?" Nina said. "You want to know what time
Jake gets home tonight? Forget it. You want to know what whoever she is he
settled for in your absence was wearing to the party? Trust me, you would never
have bought the rag in the first place. You want to know how much she knows
about you? If she isn't sticking pins in a tall, blonde, mud-wrestling voodoo
doll who thrives on competition by this time, she ought to go out and buy one
immediately. Speak to you on Saturday. I've got to go feed Little Precious."

I laughed
at Nina's nickname for her son and put down the phone.

When I
finished my snack, I spread all the case papers out on my desk. I had outlined
an opening statement, and now took half an hour to reduce it to an abbreviated
list of bullet points. I smiled as I thought back to my first felony trial,
when I'd stood before the jurors with a painstakingly detailed speech, written
in essay form, of which I'd read every word. Midway through, the judge
interrupted and wiggled his finger at me, asking me to approach. "Miss
Cooper, this isn't a book report. Put down those pages and
talk
to the people before you lose
them."

I had
learned to abandon the crutch of too many notes and simply sketch out the main
points I needed to make. The advantage of vertical prosecution-of working a
case from the moment of the first police report up to the verdict-was that we
knew the facts cold and could proceed without any notes or outlines.

In the
morning I would spend one last hour with Paige Vallis, steadying her before her
difficult day on the witness stand. I arranged all the questions I would ask
her and made a list of the items I would ask the court to premark for
identification, to avoid delay in the presence of the jury.

By
midnight I had undressed and turned out the light, but the adrenaline that
fueled my courtroom rhythm made a good night's sleep impossible. At six o'clock
I got up and showered. Blow-drying my hair, I looked at my reflection in the
mirror and wondered how long it would be before the dark circles that
frequently took up residence beneath my eyes during a trial would reappear.

I
finished dressing and dabbed some perfume on my wrists and behind my ears. I
called a car service and went down to the lobby to wait for the sedan to take
me to the office, and I was at the coffee cart at the building entrance before
seven-thirty.

My car
was still there, so the first call was to AAA, to tow it to my repair shop and
replace the two tires. Then I settled down to the business on my desk until
Mercer arrived with Paige Vallis almost an hour later.

I closed
my door to give us more privacy. She didn't need to go over the facts again.
The events of March 6 were indelibly etched in her mind's eye. I knew that if I
questioned her about them now, it would heighten her state of nervousness, as
well as take the emotional edge off the presentation she would make to the
jury. Instead, we talked about what I thought the pace of the trial would be
and when we might expect to go to verdict.

"Andrew's
lawyer?" Paige asked.

"Robelon.
Peter Robelon. What about him?"

"Do
you have any better sense of what he's going to do to me?"

We had
been over this countless times, and Paige didn't like it better than any other
witness. When the assailant in a sexual assault case was a stranger, the
defense did not have to attack the victim. They could acknowledge that a
vicious crime had occurred, and suggest that the woman was tragically mistaken
in her identification of the defendant. Poor lighting, little opportunity to
see his face clearly, and general hysteria were the traditional arguments
against a reliable identification by a rape victim. All of that changed when
DNA technology replaced the survivor's visual memory as the means of confirming
who her attacker had been.

But it
was terribly different when a woman was assaulted by someone known to her-a
friend, a coworker, a lover, or an ex-boyfriend. More than 80 percent of sexual
assaults occurred between people who knew each other, so identification was not
the issue at trial. Yet these victims were far more likely to have their
credibility attacked in the courtroom.

Mercer
was standing beside his witness, removing the lids on the cardboard coffee
containers he had brought for each of us. "It's like Alex has been telling
you all along, Paige. Robelon can only go one way in this case. He can't say it
never happened and that you're making this whole thing up. The presence of
Tripping's DNA makes that impossible."

"So
it's that I consented? That I'm lying about this, right?"

I nodded
my head.

"Will
the jury already know that when I walk into the room and take the stand? I
mean, does he just say that when he addresses them the first time?"

"I'm
sure he'll plant that seed in their minds," I said. Robelon was a good
lawyer and likely to be more subtle than most. I didn't think he would outright
accuse Paige Vallis of being a liar. Rather, he would paint the jury a picture
in very broad strokes, setting them up to believe that she had been hungry for
this relationship, pursuing Andrew Tripping and unhappy when something went
wrong during the night in question.

I hated
this moment in the process. I hated being the person who had to deliver the
victim into the hands of my adversary, in public view, to tell this story of
trust and betrayal to a courtroom full of strangers. In the months since Paige
reported the crime, I had struggled with Mercer to gain her confidence, to ask
about intimacies that most people never discuss outside of their bedrooms. Now
that I had gained that acceptance, I could not give her a victory without first
exposing her to public humiliation and dissection.

"Will
there be newspaper reporters at the trial?" she asked.

"I
don't expect any. So far they haven't expressed interest in the case, and I
can't imagine why that would change. Did you end up asking a friend to come
with you? Anyone to sit in the courtroom for moral support?"

Paige
gnawed at the corner of her lip and twisted a handkerchief in her hands.
"No. I haven't got much family. Distant relatives are all. And my closest
girlfriend told me to forget about going through a trial, to walk away from the
whole thing."

My
paralegal, Maxine, would be her anchor during the trial. They had worked
together since Paige's first interview here, and I had encouraged them to talk
to each other regularly. Maxine would be the virtual handholder for her through
these next difficult hours.

"Do
you think Andrew will take the stand?"

"I
haven't a clue at this point, Paige." So much of that will depend on how
you do, I thought to myself. Robelon did not have to make that decision until I
had completed my case and rested. If Paige held up well throughout
cross-examination, then he might gauge it necessary to let Andrew Tripping
speak to the jurors. It could be a real problem for the defense, since the
"bad acts" that had been ruled inadmissible on my direct case were
things I could question him about if he chose to testify on his own behalf.

She could
see that I was frustrated by my inability to give her definite answers about so
much of what we were facing. "It seems so unbalanced," she said,
forcing a wan smile. "You have to tell them everything about your case,
and about me, but they don't have any obligation to do the same."

I
returned the smile. "You've got to relax a bit and let me worry about that.
It's a very uneven playing field, but Mercer and I are used to it."

I stood
up to move Paige into the adjacent conference room and give her a newspaper to
read for the time remaining before we went to court. "Alex, one more
thing. Did you get a ruling about my sexual history? I mean, can Mr. Robelon
ask about other men I've had intercourse with?" She colored deeply as she
spoke to me.

We had
talked about this issue before. "I thought I explained this to you,"
I said, sitting down again so I could look Paige directly in the eye.
"That's why I gave you such a hard time about exactly what went on between
you and Andrew on the three occasions you were together."

Like
every witness I interviewed, I had pressed her aggressively about whether there
was any kind of sexual overture or foreplay before the rape. It was common for
many women to minimize or omit that fact from their narratives, fearful that a
prosecutor would refuse to entertain a case in which there had been any sort of
consensual conduct leading up to the crime.

"I've
told you the truth about that, Alex."

"Then
why are you worried? Nothing else is relevant."

"I
went on-line last night," she said, now wringing the handkerchief between
her hands. "I started to look up articles about cases that had been
written up in the newspapers. Sort of to see what to expect."

I guess
everything I had told her had not provided enough reassurance.

"I
found a long feature in the
Times
that quoted you last year, talking about how bad the laws used to be. It kept
me up all night."

"That's
old news, Paige. That's all changed now." Rape shield laws had passed in
every state in America in the last quarter of the twentieth century, protecting
victims from questioning about their sexual activity with men other than the
defendant. But until that time, a woman who had ever had intercourse prior to
the rape-who was "unchaste"-was assumed to have consented to the act
with the man on trial. The courts defined the ideal victim as a "virgin of
uncontaminated purity."