Randy Singer - By reason of insanity

She hated this man.

"He's hot," said one of the inmates. Others joined the commentary, making lewd comments about what they'd like to do with Kenny.

"Shut up!" yelled Tasha.

Kenny's lawyer sat next to him as Kenny answered questions from a former prosecutor now making a living as a CNBC host.

"Sure, we had sex," Kenny was saying. "But it was always consensual."

Catherine felt the pressure building inside her head and chest. She wanted to turn away, but somehow she couldn't.

"On more than one occasion?" asked the host.

"Yes, more than one occasion." Kenny smirked in a way that said the conquering hero had been intimate with his conquest too many times to count. "We were college students. We had an ongoing relationship."

The catcalls started again, so loud this time that Catherine couldn't hear the next question. But she heard Kenny say that a few other fraternity brothers had called recently to tell him they had been sexually involved with Catherine as well. One of them said that Catherine had threatened to drag Kenny into her murder case.

Cat felt her face flush as the taunting in the cell merged with the roaring in her head. She looked around at the inmates-smiling, mocking her, making all manner of suggestive noises.

"I've got a family," Kenny was saying. "A wife and kids. The last thing I wanted was to be dragged into something like this-a desperate woman's lawyers accusing me of things I didn't do."

"Shut up!" Cat yelled, more to the television than the inmates. "Shut. Up."

"Chill, woman," one of the inmates said.

"I wish he'd accuse me of a few of those things!" said another, and everybody laughed.

"I mean it," Cat said. She turned on the trustee as her anger exploded. "Turn this off!" she demanded.

The woman shrugged. "We already voted. Democracy at work."

Cat stormed toward the woman. "Shut it off!" she yelled. She turned toward a table of inmates right behind her. She grabbed an inmate's plastic tray and flung the half-eaten lunch at the elevated TV screen. She missed, so she grabbed another one and this time hit the mark. She cleared another table with one sweep of her arm, sending trays of food flying to the floor.

The bars of the pod seemed to pulse and billow, keeping time to the anger-laced adrenaline flowing through Cat's body. She was vaguely aware of the inmates staring at her, the doors near the guard post clanging open, Tasha coming toward her to calm her down.

Cat whirled toward the trustee again, stopping just inches away. "Turn it off now!" she demanded. She grabbed the remote and spun back toward the television just as the guards reached her. One knocked her to the floor, facedown. A second put a knee in her back. They cuffed her hands and dragged her to her feet, escorting her out of the pod toward solitary confinement.

As Cat left, she could still hear the TV in the background, the grating voice of Kenny Towns protesting his innocence. "I feel sorry for Catherine O'Rourke," he was saying. "I hope she gets the psychological help she needs. I just wish she had left me out of this."

Cat walked without resistance toward the isolation unit. She had never felt so powerless in her life. The man who had raped her, a man who was never brought to justice, who had never even apologized, was now playing the victim! Her insides roiled in rage. She wanted to rip his heart out, the same thing he had done to her.

Three days later, when Catherine O'Rourke left solitary confinement, she made a series of collect calls to Quinn Newberg. The first two times she called, he didn't answer. She reached him on her third try.

"I'm ready to change my plea," Cat said.

Two months later-

Wednesday, August 20

The whole world hates the insanity plea.

Quinn was reminded of this basic truth as he pulled into the courthouse parking lot and prepared to face the protesters and media. Reverend Harold Pryor and his spiteful band of followers stood at their posts in front of the courthouse steps, carrying signs with a blowup of Catherine's face and a simple message: Baby Killer. Yesterday they had shouted in Quinn's face and pronounced damnation on him as he climbed the steps. Quinn had lost his cool and asked the reverend if he didn't have some abortion clinics he could go bomb. Today Quinn was determined to keep his mouth shut.

The lawyers had finished jury selection the prior afternoon, and Quinn would give the opening statement for the defense this morning. He didn't feel close to ready. In the last two months, Quinn's normally hectic pace had increased until life seemed a blur of frenzied activity, an adrenaline-laced roller coaster ride under the white-hot glare of media cameras. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a good night's sleep. He spent every minute preparing witnesses for two major trials, "commuting" from Las Vegas to Virginia Beach, visiting both Annie and Catherine in jail, and sneaking up to Washington, D.C., every few weeks to see Sierra.

He had spent an inordinate amount of time talking with Catherine. It was all a necessary part of trial preparation, he kept telling himself. Yet after hours of talking through the metal vents in the bulletproof glass of the attorney interview booths, Quinn still hadn't solved the mystery of Catherine O'Rourke and her multiple personalities, if indeed she had them.

Since the day of Catherine's outburst during Kenny Towns's television interview, she had been nothing but a class act, answering every one of Quinn's questions with quiet grace and seemingly endless patience. She had endured numerous sessions with Dr. Mancini and two separate sessions with the commonwealth's forensic psychiatrist, a precise Asian-American man named Dr. Edward Chow.

Quinn climbed out of his car and pulled his suit coat from a hanger in the back. He pulled it over his limp right arm first, struggling to slip into the jacket without lifting that arm up and away from his body, a movement that still sent stabbing pain through the unrepaired rotator cuff. After he wriggled into the suit coat, he grabbed his briefcase and headed across the black asphalt parking lot, the heat already radiating from the surface even though it was only 8:30 in the morning.

Quinn picked up the pace as the reverend and a few others jogged over to him and started walking beside him, shouting in his face as he approached the courthouse.

"Not today," Quinn grumbled.

"The blood of the kidnapped babies is on your hands!" shouted the reverend.

"Your client is a baby killer!" echoed a younger woman.

"Baby killer! Baby killer!" The protesters and cameramen formed a moving mob around Quinn as he reached the courthouse steps. Red camera lights blinked while shutters clicked and whirred. Quinn kept his gaze straight ahead, tuning out the protesters as he entered the doors of the courthouse.

The door closed, and the welcome sound of relative silence flooded the hallways. The protesters seemed very far away.

"Good morning, Mr. Newberg," said one of the guards at the metal detector.

"Good morning, Deputy Aaronson."

Quinn plunked his loose change and keys inside a small plastic container to pass through the screener. "Quiet day, huh?" Aaronson asked.

Quinn smiled. "If this is your idea of a quiet day, I'd hate to see a riot."

This brought a big grin from the deputy. "If you win this case, you might just get your chance."

Quinn walked into the courtroom, placed his briefcase at the defense counsel table, said a few words to Marc Boland, and slipped through a side door into a small, gray hallway with no outside windows. Just off the hallway were two even smaller rooms hidden behind heavy metal doors with a single narrow slit about a third of the way up. On a typical court day, male inmates would be herded into one room and females into the other. For the past three days, Catherine had been the only occupant of the female cell. Her friends and sister had brought her a fresh change of clothes each day, and the deputy allowed her to put them on before entering the courtroom.