Retribution (44 page)

‘On his way over from DCJ. They’re walking him right now,’ Hank said.

‘Why isn’t he here now? I said nine A
.M
., Hank. Not nine-fifteen. Only the judge is allowed to be late.’

‘Yes, Judge, but it seems he gave them a little bit of trouble across the street this morning,’ said Hank. ‘He didn’t want to cooperate.’

Judge Chaskel, obviously irritated, shook his head. ‘Well, I don’t want the defendant being brought in by Corrections in front of the jury pool. That will taint them. Hold off on bringing them in until he gets here. How many potential jurors do we have downstairs waiting, Hank?’

‘Two hundred.’

‘Two hundred? This close to the holidays? That’s pretty good. Let’s start with the first fifty and see how we do. And I want a word with Mr Bantling before we try sitting a jury in this case.’ He looked down at Lourdes over his glasses. ‘Ms Rubio, your client is getting a reputation for being a troublemaker both in and out of the courtroom.’

Lourdes looked embarrassed, as if the conduct of her client when out of her presence were somehow her fault. Last week’s status conference was the first time C.J. had actually seen her since Halloween, and like that day in the judge’s chambers, she noted that Lourdes would not look directly at her. ‘I’m sorry, Judge –’ she started, but was interrupted by the thud of the jury box doors being opened. Three beefy corrections officers walked into the room with William Bantling in shackles and handcuffs. He was dressed in an expensive charcoal Italian suit and white shirt with a light gray silk tie, also designer. Despite having lost what C.J. guessed to be about twenty pounds,
he looked quite dapper, except for the left side of his face, which was red and bruising. The officers sat him down hard next to Lourdes, who, C.J. noticed, moved her chair ever so slightly away from his.

‘Don’t take off those cuffs, just yet, Officer. I need to have a word with Mr Bantling,’ the judge said sternly. ‘Why was he late being brought over here?’

‘He had a fit, Judge,’ the corrections officer responded. ‘He started cussin’ and screaming that he wasn’t going to the courthouse without all the jewelry he came in with. Called us a bunch of thieves. We had to restrain him to get him out of the cell.’

Why can’t he have his jewelry?’

‘It’s a security risk.’

‘A watch is a security risk? Let’s not cross over into the absurd now, Officer. I’ll allow him to wear his jewelry here in court.’

Judge Chaskel narrowed his eyes and looked at Bantling. ‘Now, listen here, Mr Bantling. I have seen your outbursts in this courtroom and I have heard about your tantrums elsewhere and I am going to warn you right now that I am neither a tolerant nor a patient judge. Three strikes and you’re out, and you already have two. If necessary, I will have you bound and gagged and dragged over here for court every day in your red jumpsuit if you do not conduct yourself properly. Do I make myself clear?’

Bantling nodded, his cold eyes never leaving the challenging stare of Judge Chaskel. ‘Yes, Your Honor.’

‘Now, does anyone have anything else, or are we ready to pick a jury?’ Bantling turned his stare toward C.J. His secret dangled precariously over the open pit.

Judge Chaskel waited a moment and then continued.
‘Okay. No one else has business. Let’s get on with it. Officer, remove those cuffs and shackles on Mr Bantling, and Hank, go fetch the first lucky fifty. I want to pick a jury before the week is out. Let’s not drag it on past the Christmas break.’

Even as she felt her lungs constrict and the room spin nervously, C.J. met Bantling’s stare defiantly with her own. Ever so subtly, his pink tongue crept out of the corner of his mouth and moved across his upper lip, and then a slow, knowing smile spread across his face. His mouth glistened in the bright courtroom lights.

She knew then that it would not be on this day that he would break his silence to the world. He would make her squirm with the waiting, with the not knowing. He would wield his secret like a lethal weapon, pulling it out when he needed it most, and striking quick and fast and hard and aiming right for the jugular.

And she would never even see it coming.

71

The jury of five women and seven men was sworn in on Friday afternoon at 2:42
P.M
., exactly eighteen minutes before the courthouse closed early for the Christmas holiday. Juries are not sequestered in Florida, and so all were permitted to go home to their families. Four Hispanics, two African-Americans, and six Caucasians made up the jury of William Bantling’s peers. They ranged in age from a twenty-four-year-old deep-sea-diving instructor to a seventy-six-year-old retired bookkeeper. All lived in Miami, and although all had heard of, and/or read about, the Cupid murders, all stated that they had not yet formed an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant, and all took an oath that they could be fair and impartial to both sides.

The courthouse was completely deserted by the time C.J. packed up her briefcase and files and headed back across the street. Even the press had gone home early, finding jury selection to be decidedly dull and uneventful.

The State Attorney’s Office was no different. Tigler had closed the office at 3:00 also, but most people had gone home by noon. C.J. passed by the rows of empty cubicles in the secretarial pool, decorated with colorful cardboard Christmas decorations, their waste-paper baskets full of torn red, white, and green wrapping paper. A large pushcart, normally used for carting files from the vault downstairs, was left abandoned by the
copy machine, overflowing with discarded plastic cups half filled with soda, and paper plates with half-eaten finger foods, all left over from the office Christmas party that she had missed. Most of the Major Crimes attorneys had left for their two-week vacations as early as Monday, trying to burn up unused leave time before they lost it, and their offices sat dark and empty.

C.J. went through the stacks of mail that sat in her in-box, piled high after just one week in trial. After a couple of hours she packed up her files, the ones that she would need to help finish up writing her opening statement, and locked the others away in the filing cabinet. She grabbed her coat from the back of her chair and her purse, her briefcase, and her pull cart, and she headed slowly to the elevator bay. She had often heard it said that more people committed suicide around the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s holidays than any other time of the year. Not only was it the most wonderful time of the year; it could also be the loneliest time of the year.

She walked out of the lobby into the now dark parking lot, and quickly buttoned her coat up. Even this far south in the Sunshine State, the night air can turn chilly with a cold front and a nasty December wind off the Miami River.

Everyone else had plans for the holidays, plans to spend time with friends, with someone they loved. Not her. For C.J., there was no one this holiday season, and it would pass as the others had in a long string of Christmases – without the Joy of the Season or Peace on Earth or Goodwill Toward Men, or any other cliché saying that was fancied on a cheap store-bought Christmas card. Of course, there was always California and her
parents, if flying to the West Coast for two days were even an option, but sad and nasty memories always hovered over their visits, a constant threat to any real conversation. Her mother would avoid talking about anything bad, leaving only the weather and musicals as topics of discussion for a week. Her dad would stare at her sadly, waiting for her to flip out again, she supposed. Once a year for a week in the summer was all she could emotionally handle, and definitely not now, not even for a holiday dinner. Bantling had taken those relationships from her, too. This year, she would stay home again with Lucy and Tibby and a homemade turkey. But this year there would be no Jimmy Stewart and
It
’
s a Wonderful Life.
Instead, in the solitude of her kitchen, she would be writing and rewriting and rewriting again her opening statement, preparing her direct examination, starting to word her closing argument, in a concerted effort to kill a killer.

It had been exactly one week since she had heard from or seen Dominick, and she wondered how he would be spending his Christmas. Family? Friends? Alone? She realized at that moment how very little she knew about him, but at one time had hoped to learn. She wanted to think that maybe when this case ended they could go back to what they had started, but deep down she knew that was probably impossible. He had been too final when he left, when she had let him walk out that door.

Chalk up yet another sacrifice for the greater good.
But this one wasn’t small.

She reached her Jeep and loaded in her files and briefcase, waving that all was okay to the security guard who stood watching from the warmth of the brightly lit
lobby of the Graham Building. Then she drove off toward Fort Lauderdale and turkey for one, never once noticing the familiar face in the shadows who stood silently watching.

Watching. And waiting.

72

‘If I were to remain seated and say nothing, just sit here and not say one word – you would think him guilty, although the law has told you he is not.’ Lourdes sat still in her chair, as she made her opening statement. She faced the judge_’s bench, and spoke to the jury as if she were voicing her own private thoughts aloud.

C.J. had just sat back down in her seat after delivering what she thought was a good, solid, to-the-point opening that left no room for speculation, to the hushed crowd of spectators and camera crews. And now it was Lourdes’s turn.

Lourdes allowed moments to pass in silence, and then she turned finally in her seat and faced the jury with a mixed look of disbelief and disappointment. ‘You all look at my client now as if he were a butcher. You are obviously frightened and sickened at the very vivid, very gory picture that the prosecutor has just painted you for the last hour. Without question, Anna Prado was a beautiful young woman, brutally mutilated by a madman. And you think him guilty, as if the prosecutor’s words were enough to lead you to that conclusion. And you want to be frightened and sickened at the very sight of William Bantling as well, although common sense tells you this good-looking, well-educated, successful businessman certainly does not warrant that reaction.’ She put her hand casually on Bantling’s shoulder and rubbed it as a subtle sign of her support. Then she shook her head.

‘But what the prosecutor has offered you in her opening statement is not proof, ladies and gentlemen. It is
not
evidence. It is
not
fact. It is assumption. It is conjecture. It is speculation. It is an
assumption
that the evidence, the facts, that she
hopes
to present in this case, that she
believes
will be presented, that those facts, when loosely strung together will make a damning chain. She wants to force you all to come to the conclusion which she has already drawn for you: that my client is guilty of first-degree murder. But I caution you, ladies and gentlemen, that things are not always what they might seem. And facts – no matter how vile and bloody they might be – when strung together don’t always make a chain.’

Lourdes rose now and stood before the jury, scanning their faces. Some jurors turned their eyes away, ashamed of themselves at having drawn the very conclusions that Lourdes now accused them of, of disobeying the oath that they had only last Friday sworn to uphold.

‘All movie producers are the same, and their goals are the same. The ultimate goal is that they want you to see their movie. Their multimillion-dollar over-budget movie that they have spent months to create. And, in this endeavor, they will try to sell you on how great their movie is before you even walk in the theater. They want you to run around awed simply by their two-minute trailers, telling your friends and family, “This is a great movie!” even though you have not even seen it. They want you to buy the posters and the T-shirts and the merchandise and cast your vote for best actor all before you have even taken your seat. And many will, even without having seen the movie. All because of the exciting two-minute preview that assured them the movie was going to be great. It was going to be fantastic. The next
“Best Picture” at the Oscars. And Ms Townsend has certainly done her job well here today, ladies and gentle-men. She has filled her trailer with action and blood and grisly details and lots of special effects. It looks great. It sounds great. But, I caution you, don’t buy your ticket just yet. Because just as a string of terrific-looking scenes run together in a magnificent trailer by a very talented producer’ – Lourdes turned and deliberately faced C.J., subtly pausing for effect – ‘won’t necessarily make a good movie, neither will a bunch of gory, vicious facts strung together make a very good case. No matter how many special effects that they throw at you to impress you. A bad movie is still a bad movie.

‘My client is innocent. He is not a killer. He is not a serial killer. He is a talented, successful businessman who has never before gotten so much as a traffic ticket.

‘An alibi? Mr Bantling was not even at his home during the hours the medical examiner will tell you that Anna Prado was supposedly killed in the shed out in the back of his house. And he’ll prove it, although he is under no obligation to prove anything.

‘The murder weapon? Mr Bantling is a renowned taxidermist, and his projects are on display at various local museums and establishments. The scalpel found in his shed is actually a tool he uses in his craft, not a murder weapon. The microscopic blood traces found on it are animal in nature, not human. And he’ll prove it, although he is under no obligation to prove anything.

‘The blood? The blood smears, as Ms Townsend vividly described for all of us in her opening, that were detected “all over the inside of his shed” by the chemical luminol are again, animal in nature, not human. Let me point out that
three
’ – she raised three fingers up before
the jury and walked slowly before them, watching their faces closely, never losing their attention – ‘count them,
three
, microscopic bloodstains matching the DNA of Anna Prado were found in that shed, a shed that the state alleges was actually sprayed with Anna Prado’s blood when her aorta was severed, but where only three
microscopic
drops were found. Found, ladies and gentlemen, by a desperate FDLE special agent who has needed a name and a face for the serial killer Cupid he has hunted for over a year. An agent whose whole career rests precariously on finding that face, naming that name.