By Reason of Insanity (43 page)

"What do you mean by that--'just basically freaks'?"

"She gets all red in the face and starts cursing and yelling, her eyes bugging out like she wants to kill someone--"

"Objection!" shouted Marc Boland.

Gates turned. "Which one of you guys is going to be examining her? You can't both make objections."

"I'm sustaining the objection," said Rosencrance. "Ms. Moorehouse, just stick to the facts. Don't characterize things.

"And, Mr. Boland, I suggest you and Mr. Newberg decide which one of you will be examining this witness. This isn't a tag-team match."

"I've got her," Quinn whispered to Marc.

"You sure?"

"I want her."

Gates kept plowing forward. "Just tell us what happened, Ms. Moorehouse."

"So then Barbie starts attacking everybody. She grabs trays of food and throws them at the TV. She goes ballistic on the trustee who has the remote. I mean, she just freaked."

"What did you do?"

"I tried to stop her. I didn't want her to get busted on somethin' this stupid. So I'm sayin', 'That guy on TV is a jerk, don't sweat it,' and Barbie just snapped."

Tasha paused, and Quinn sensed the punch line coming.

"So I jumped in front of her and tried holding her back, just to keep her from getting into more trouble."

"What did the defendant do?"

"She's like tryin' to fight through me to get at the trustee, screaming, 'Let me go,' and 'Stay out of this' and stuff? like that. After I calmed her down and she stopped strugglin', she just looks at me. She's still hacked but she's not, like, wild-eyed or anything anymore. And she just says to me, all calm-like, 'I should have done Towns first.'"

Moorehouse paused, her statement sucking the air out of the courtroom. Quinn heard a gasp from Cat's mother and sister, seated behind him.

"She's
lying
," Cat whispered to Quinn, her voice choked with desperation.

Quinn put a calming hand on Cat's knee. "I'll handle it."

"You're sure that's what she said?" Gates asked. "That she should have done Towns first."

"God's truth," Tasha responded. "Every word."

"And what did you understand that to mean?"

"That she wished she had capped this dude Towns first, as opposed to all these other guys."

"Did she appear normal at the time?"

"Objection!" This time it was Quinn.

"Sustained."

"Describe her demeanor when she made the statement."

"She was real calm," said Tasha. "I was like, 'Whoa, girl, you are
cold
.'"

88

"You've got a knack for picking friends," Quinn whispered to Catherine before he stood to examine Tasha. "Do you know if she took the stand in her last trial?"

Cat furrowed her brow. "I don't know, but I bet she did. She's pretty arrogant."

"Mr. Newberg?" prompted Judge Rosencrance.

Quinn grabbed a thick legal brief from the table, then stood and buttoned his suit coat, taking his time. He walked closer to the witness box than normal.

"Did you discuss your testimony with Mr. Gates before taking the stand?"

Tasha looked wary, even hostile. "I told him what I was going to say. That's all."

"Did he show you this document?" Quinn asked, waving it around a little with his left hand.

"No. I don't even know what that is."

"The prosecutor's handbook," Quinn said, "where it says, on page 53, 'If your expert witness falls apart on the stand, you can always fall back on a jailhouse snitch.'"

Tasha looked confused.

"Objection!" shouted Gates, his face growing red. "That's ridiculous."

Rosencrance looked like she might be trying to suppress a smirk. "It's cute; I'll give you that much," she said to Quinn. "But this is a murder trial, and we don't do cute in my courtroom during murder trials. This is a warning, Mr. Newberg. Next time it will cost you."

"Yes, Your Honor."

Rosencrance turned to the jury. "Please ignore that last comment by Mr. Newberg. It was just grandstanding, not evidence."

"Let's talk about your record," Quinn said. He placed the legal brief back on his counsel table. "How many felony convictions do you have, and what are they for?"

"Two," said Tasha. "One for possession and one for being an accomplice."

"An accomplice to what?"

"Armed robbery," Tasha said grudgingly, shooting daggers at Quinn with her eyes.

"Given the fact that you're in the city jail, I presume you're facing trial for another offense?"

Quinn waited for an objection--convictions were normally fair game but not accusations on crimes that hadn't yet gone to trial. When no objection came, it told Quinn what he wanted to know.

"Yes," Tasha answered. "Violation of state firearms laws."

"That's a serious offense," Quinn said. "Did the prosecutors promise you any kind of deal in exchange for your testimony in this case?"

"They said they might consider a deal."

"Might consider a deal. What kind of deal?"

"Maybe plead to makin' a false statement to a law-enforcement officer."

Quinn smiled. "What a deal! How could you say no to that? That sounds like it's only a misdemeanor. Am I right?"

"Yes."

"So, instead of facing your third felony and a long jail sentence under Virginia's three-strikes-and-you're-out law, you're looking at a simple misdemeanor?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe you could have asked Mr. Gates to throw in a small car."

"Objection." This time Gates didn't even raise his voice, as if Quinn wasn't worthy of getting a rise out of him.

"Mr. Newberg . . ."

"Sorry, Judge. I keep forgetting I'm not in Las Vegas anymore." Quinn smiled, but Rosencrance did not.

"Proceed," she said.

"As I understand your testimony, you told my client not to pretend to be the Avenger during a session with Dr. Mancini because lying gets complicated and she might get caught."

"Exactly."

"Is that based on your own experience with fabricating testimony?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"This last conviction of yours--the accomplice thing?--am I correct that you took the stand in your own defense?"

"Yeah, that's right."

"And a jury of your peers decided not to believe you, right?"

Tasha shrugged. "They got it wrong."

"But you're hoping that maybe this jury
will
believe you. Maybe this will be your lucky day."

"Objection. Argumentative."

"Sustained."

Quinn headed back to his counsel table and stopped.
I don't know what possesses me to do this,
he thought.

"When you get out of jail, Ms. Moorehouse, do you have any plans to visit Las Vegas?"

Tasha furrowed her brow. "No."

"Too bad. Guys like me love to see tourists like you walk into our poker rooms--always sure that
this
is going to be their lucky day."

"Objection!" Gates shouted.

This time, there was no smirk hiding under Rosencrance's glare. "Dismiss the jury!" she ordered.

After a tongue-lashing, she levied a two-thousand-dollar fine against Quinn for grandstanding. She instructed Marc Boland to keep his out-of-state co-counsel under control. She told Quinn he was in danger of having his
pro hac
status removed, making him ineligible to continue on this trial.

Quinn acted contrite, apologizing for pushing it too far. He said all the right things in all the right places, but a single thought kept floating through his head.

It was worth every penny.

89

One thing about solitary confinement--it gave a person time to think. And to read. On Friday night, her third consecutive night in solitary, Cat did a lot of both.

She might have been the only one, but she still believed in her own innocence.
Most
of the time. Not just innocence by reason of insanity, a game that lawyers played, but total and complete exoneration. She
wasn't
the Avenger of Blood. She
hadn't
killed Paul Donaldson. And she certainly hadn't killed those babies. Why wouldn't anyone believe her?

Cat was convinced that her visions were the key to solving this case. A few weeks ago, when she had embraced this conclusion, she'd decided to explore every possible explanation for the visions. If she knew what caused them, maybe she could figure out why she stopped having them. And, more importantly, the identity of the real killer.

She'd read the biblical book of Daniel at least three times. In Cat's visions, there was handwriting on the wall. Belshazzar, king of Babylon, had seen handwriting on the wall. Daniel had interpreted what that handwriting meant. All throughout the book of Daniel, kings had dreams or visions, and Daniel interpreted them. All the dreams and visions were messages from God. His finger literally wrote the words on the wall.

Dr. Mancini had seemed to embrace this spiritual explanation, at least in the early days before she had proffered her report about Cat's insanity. "God communicates through His written Word," she had told Cat. "And He showed us what love was like when He sent His Son to live among us. But occasionally, He also communicates through dreams and visions. Treat it as a gift, Catherine. Embrace these visions as God working through you."

But Cat was sitting in prison as a result of the visions. They certainly didn't feel like a gift.

She explored other explanations as well, scientific theories, but few of these seemed very plausible. Cat had read two books about science and the paranormal cover to cover. One book,
Spook
, dealt with scientific explanations of various aspects of the afterlife. It was, according to the author, "spirituality treated like crop science." The other book,
Ghost Hunters
, was about William James and a group of scientists called the Society for Physical Research, detailing their search for scientific proof of life after death.

Cat thought the scientists were every bit as confused as she was. They did, however, provide a few theories that made Cat think. Some members of the Society for Physical Research believed that telepathy could be viewed as a unique way that certain gifted humans communicated. Perhaps, in addition to the audible waves generated by voice patterns, humans also communicated through invisible and inaudible waves much like electromagnetic waves. Maybe some humans, like Catherine, were exceptionally tuned in to such waves, more so than the normal person.

This could mean that Cat's visions were the result of receiving information subliminally from another person who knew about these crimes. The most likely suspect was her confidential source, Jamarcus Webb. Maybe she had received subliminal information from Jamarcus and stored it away until it came out during the visions. Such an explanation would also account for why Cat hadn't received any more visions recently, since she had stopped meeting with Jamarcus.

Other scientists believed that dying persons sometimes gave off strong invisible signals--they called them "crisis apparitions"--which explained why many times people reported having an uneasy feeling at the precise moment of a relative's death, even if the dying relative lived quite a distance away. But Cat wasn't related to any of these folks. And her first two visions had occurred well after the actual kidnappings.

There was a final explanation, one so troubling that Cat rejected it out of hand. Demonic forces were sometimes responsible for dreams and visions, especially if someone had dabbled in the occult. Surely this couldn't be the case in Cat's life. She wasn't exactly a nun, but she hadn't been flirting with the dark side either. Not even in her childhood could she remember being part of a seance or even having her palm read by an amusement park gypsy.

On Friday night, Cat fell asleep still reading her books. She awoke, as usual, at 4:30 a.m. to the annoying sound of a guard scraping a flashlight over the prison bars. It had been another dreamless night. Wherever this power was coming from--whether it was spiritual or telepathic or something else--it had apparently deserted Cat during her hour of greatest need. Frustrated, she picked up her books and started reading again. Maybe she was missing something.

90

On Saturday, Rosemarie Mancini and Sierra came into town, and Quinn spent most of the day with his niece. He could tell that Sierra's time with Rosemarie had done her a lot of good. She seemed more self-confident and relaxed, full of chatter about her new D.C. friends. She and Quinn spent the afternoon lying on the beach, though neither of them set foot in the water. They went shopping for Sierra's school clothes at the Lynnhaven Mall and ate dinner on the back deck of a fish house nestled along the Lynnhaven River. They talked a lot about Annie, Quinn virtually guaranteeing an acquittal for Sierra's mom the next time around.

"I like D.C.," Sierra said. "And I like Rosemarie."