Face of Betrayal (34 page)

Jim made a sweeping motion with his hands, wordlessly ordering his coworkers to leave. His chest ached. Greg grabbed a board and a couple of microphones and left the news tank at a run, Bob on his heels. Aaron took one last look at Jim, his face contorted by fear and regret, and then left. A second later, the fire alarm began to sound, a low pulse muffled to near nothingness by the soundproof door.

Chris was the only one left, staring at Jim through the glass. The two of them had been together for years. Every morning Chris and Jim—and more recently Victoria—got in early and put the show together, scouring the newspaper, the Internet and TV clips for stories that would light up every single one of the lines. “I’m praying for you, man,” Chris said, then released the talk button. He gave Jim one more anguished look, and then turned and ran. Jim wished he could run away. But he couldn’t run away from what the poison had already done to him. Now the muscles in both arms and in the tops of his thighs were twitching. He was so tired. Why did he have to hold his breath again? Oh yes, poison.

When he looked back up, Victoria was in the screener’s room. She moved close to the glass, her wide dark eyes seeking out Jim’s. Angrily, he shook his head and motioned for her to go.

Victoria pressed the talk button. “They say there’s gas, but I don’t smell anything out here. The booth is practically airtight, anyway.”

Jim wanted to tell her that “practically” wasn’t the same as really and truly. It was the kind of argument they might have on air during a slow time, bantering to keep things moving along. But he didn’t have the breath for it.

A part of Jim’s brain remained coldly rational even as his body sent more and more messages that something was badly wrong, and that things were only getting worse. He had not breathed since that first fateful gulp of air when he opened the package. A vacuum was building up in his head and chest, a sucking hollowness, his body screaming at him, demanding that he give in and breathe.

But Jim hadn’t made it this far by giving in when things were tough. It had been a minute, a minute ten maybe, since he opened the package. But then he did give in to another hunger—the hunger for connection. He was all alone and he might be dying and he couldn’t stand that thought. Jim moved to the glass and put his hand up against the glass, fingers spread, a lonely starfish. And then Victoria mirrored it with her own hand, everything between them forgotten, their hands pressed against the glass.

There was a band around Jim’s chest, and it was tightening. An iron band. It was crushing him, crushing his lungs. His vision was dimming, but he kept his eyes open, his gaze never leaving Victoria. Their matching hands pressed on either side of the glass. They were just two human beings, reaching out for each other, but destined to never touch.

With her free hand, Victoria groped blindly for the talk button, found it. “Jim, you’ve got to hold on. I hear sirens. They’re almost here!”

But his body was ready to break with his will. It hadn’t even been two minutes yet, but he had to breathe. Had to. But maybe he could filter it, minimize it.

Without taking his eyes from Victoria, Jim pulled up the edge of his shirt with his free hand, and pressed his nose and mouth against the fine Egyptian cotton cloth. He meant to take a shallow breath, but when he started, the hunger for air was too great. He sucked it in greedily, the cloth touching his tongue as he inhaled.

He sensed the shoots of poison wind themselves deeper within him, reaching out to wrap around all his organs. His head felt like it was going to explode.

No longer thinking clearly, Jim let his shirttail fall away. It didn’t matter, did it? It was too late. Too late.

He staggered backward. Tried to grab his chair and missed. Fell over.

Horrified, Victoria started screaming. She watched Jim convulse, his arms and legs twitching and jerking, foam bubbling from his lips.

And then Jim Fate was still. His eyes, still open, stared up at the soft fuzzy blue ceiling.

Two minutes later, the first hazmat responders, suited up in white, burst through the studio door.

Chapter 2

MARK O. HATFIELD UNITED STATES COURTHOUSE

February 7

F
ederal prosecuting attorney Allison Pierce eyed the 150 prospective jurors crowded into 16th floor courtroom in the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. No one had yet been called into the jury box or two of cherry-wood benches marked “Reserved” via scrawled notes on taped up pieces of paper. There were so many jurors that a few dozen were forced to stand, so many jurors that Allison could smell unwashed bodies and unbrushed teeth. She swallowed hard, forcing down the nausea that now plagued her at unexpected moments.

The would-be jurors carried backpacks, purses, coats, umbrellas, bottled water, books, magazines, and—this being Portland, Oregon—the occasional bike helmet. They ranged from a hunched over old man with hearing aids on the stems of his glasses to a young man who immediately opened a sketch book and startled doodling an eight-armed monster. Some wore suits while others looked like they were ready to hit the gym, but in general they appeared alert and reasonably happy.

There would have been more room for the potential jurors to sit, but the benches were already packed with reporters who had arrived before the jury was ushered in. Among them was a fortyish woman who sat in pride of place directly behind her daughter at the defense table. She wore far too much makeup and a sweater with a plunging neckline.

Everyone rose and the courtroom deputy swore the prospective jurors in en masse. After those lucky enough to have seats were settled in again, Judge Fitzpatrick introduced himself and told the jury that the defendant had to be considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and that she did not need to do or say anything to prove her innocence. It was solely up to the prosecution, he intoned solemnly, to prove their case. Even though she had heard the same words many times, and the judge must have said them hundreds of times over his nearly twenty years on the bench, Allison found herself listening. Judge Fitzpatrick never lost sight of the meaning behind the words.

When he was finished, he asked Allison to introduce herself. She stood and faced the crowded room, trying to make eye contact with everyone. It was her job to build a relationship from this moment forward, so that when the time came for the jury to deliberate, they would trust what she had told them. “I am federal prosecuting attorney Allison Hedges.” She gestured toward Nic. “I’m assisted by FBI Special Agent Nicole Hedges as the case agent.”

On some of the potential jurors’ faces, Allison saw surprise when they realized that the young woman with the pinned back dark hair was actually the federal prosecutor. She was thirty-three, but people always seemed to expect a federal prosecutor to be a silver-haired man.

Nicole was only four months older than Allison, but with her unlined dark skin and expression that gave away nothing, she could have been any age from twenty-five to forty. Today, Nic wore her customary dark pant-suit and flats.

Allison was dressed in what she thought of as her court uniform: a blue suit from JCPenneys, low pumps, and little makeup. Underneath her ivory silk blouse was a silver cross on a fine chain. Her father had given it to Allison for her sixteenth birthday, six weeks before he died.

The judge then pointed out the defendant, Bethany Maddox, dressed today in a demure pink and white dress that Allison was sure someone else had picked out for her—and that Bethany was wearing only under protest. The courtroom stirred as people craned their necks or stood up to get a glimpse of her. Bethany smiled, looking as if she had forgotten that she was on trial. Her defense attorney, Nate Condorelli, stood and introduced himself, but it was clear that the would-be jurors weren’t nearly as interested in Nate as they were in his client.

Today was the first step in bringing to justice the pair the media had dubbed the Bratz Bandits, courtesy of their full lips, small noses, and trashy attire. For some reason, the media loved to give bank robbers nick-names. The Waddling Bandit, the Grandmother Robber, the Toboggan Bandit, the Runny Nose Robber, the Grocery Cart Bandit—the list went on and on.

For a few weeks after their crime, grainy surveillance video of the pair had been in heavy rotation not just in Portland, but nationwide. The contrast between two nineteen-year-old girls—one blonde and one brunette, and both wearing sunglasses, short skirts, and high heels—and the big black guns they waved around had seemed more comic than anything else. On the surveillance tape, they had giggled their way through the robbery.

Even after they had been arrested—and of course they had been, the robbery had had about five seconds of planning behind it—the two of them had remained in the public eye, as family and friends stepped forward to plead their innocence or peddle tales of their unsavory past.

The week before, Allison had heard Bethany’s parents on
The Hand of Fate
, the radio talk show. The mother had told listeners that the two young women were not bandits, but rather, “little girls that made a bad choice.”

Bethany’s mother had seemed surprised when Jim Fate laughed.

The father, who was divorced from the mother, had seemed a little more in touch with reality, and Allison had made a mental note to consider putting him on the stand. “God gives us free will and it’s up to us what we do with it,” he had told Jim Fate. “Any adult has to make decisions and live with them—good, bad or indifferent.”

The girls weren’t the innocents they were now painting themselves. They had dropped out of college and started stripping and using drugs. With a male friend who worked as a bank teller, they began to plan a robbery. Incredibly, on the day of the crime they made a wrong turn and robbed the wrong bank. Things got more confusing when the teller panicked and threw the money at the girls. They giggled and scooped it up in pillowcases and even stuffed some down their surgically enhanced cleavage. But they had never stopped waving their guns (which they had borrowed from another girl at the strip club), at the terrified patrons lying trembling on the floor.

They had done it for the money, of course, but now it seemed they welcomed the fame that came with it even more. On their MySpace pages, the girls now listed more than a thousand “friends” each. Allison had even heard a rumor that Bethany—the blonde half of the pair and the girl who was on trial today—would soon release a hip-hop CD.

The challenge for Allison was getting a jury to see that what might seem like a victimless crime—and which had only netted eleven thousand dollars—deserved lengthy jail time.

The courtroom deputy read out fifty names, and the congestion eased a little bit as the first potential jurors took seats in the black swivel chairs in the jury box and in the much-less comfortable rows of benches that had been reserved for them.

Now the judge turned to the screening questions. A high-profile case like this necessitated a huge jury pool. One reason was that many of them might already have formed opinions on the case and therefore could not be unbiased. “Has anyone heard anything about this case?” Judge Fitzpatrick asked. “If you have responses please hold up your hand and we’ll pass a microphone to you so you can state your name and answer the question.”

Half the hands in the jury box went up. The law clerk handed the microphone to the first person in the first row. “My name is Melissa Delphine and I remember reading about it in the paper.”

“Did you form any opinions, Miss Delphine?” In Judge Fitzpatrick’s courtroom, the women, no matter how old or how married, were always “Miss.”

“Mild ones.”

“Could you put them aside?”

“I think so.”

“Then forget what you read in the paper. It might have been incomplete. It might have been wrong. It might even have been about completely different people.” No one expected jurors to have lived in a vacuum, but Judge Fitzpatrick would dismiss those who said their minds were made up. It would be an easy out, if anyone was looking for an out.

But many weren’t. Twenty-four hour news cycles and the proliferation of cable channels and Internet sites meant that more and more people might be interested in grabbing at the chance for their fifteen minutes of fame. Even the most tangential relationship to a famous or infamous case could be parlayed into celebrity. Or at least a stint on a third-rate reality show. Britney’s nanny or Lindsay’s bodyguard might be joined by a Bratz Bandits juror—all of them spilling “behind the scenes” stories. Allison wanted to make sure that none of the jurors wanted to sit in the box just for the media attention they might later receive.

The jurors listened to each other’s answers, looking attentive or bored or spacey. Allison took note of the ones who seemed most disconnected—she didn’t want any juror who wasn’t invested. Like a poker player, she was looking for signs or tells in the behavior of a prospective juror. Did he never look up? Did she seem evasive or over-eager? Allison also made note of the things they carried or wore: Dr. Pepper,
Cooking Light
magazine, tote bag from a health food store,
Wired
magazine, brown shoes worn to white at the toes, a black jacket flecked with dandruff. Together with the written questionnaire the prospective jurors had filled out earlier, and how they answered questions now, the information would help Allison decide who she wanted—and who she didn’t want—on the jury.

It didn’t take a mind reader to guess that Nate would plead that his client was too young—and quite possibly too stupid—to fully grasp what she had done. That it had all been a joke. That she had fallen in with a bad crowd. In their separate trials, the two girls would each claim that it was the other’s idea.

There was an art to picking a jury. Some lawyers had rigid rules: no postal workers, no social workers, no engineers, and/or no young black men (although the last rule had to be unspoken, and denied if ever suspected). Allison believed in looking at every person as a whole, weighing each prospective juror’s age, sex, race, occupation, body language.