Steven Womack - By Blood Written

Collier gazed at the jury for a few last moments. “Thank you,” he said quietly, then turned and sat down at the prosecutor’s table.

“Mr. Talmadge, are you prepared to deliver your opening statement at this time?” Forsythe asked.

Talmadge stood. “Your Honor, we’re going to defer our opening statement until the state has concluded its case.”

“Very well,” Forsythe intoned. “General Collier, call your first witness.”

Monday afternoon, Nashville

Of all the things that had amazed her over the past year-

from falling in love with Michael to seeing him become a major literary celebrity to watching the world explode around them as these insane charges went on and on-perhaps the most astonishing of all was the clinical detachment with which the morning had gone by.

For three hours nonstop, from the district attorney’s opening statement until the judge declared a lunch break at twelve-thirty, witness after witness took the stand and related a series of events that should have horrified and repulsed everyone beyond description. Instead, the professional voices spoke quietly; the lawyers intoned with leaden heaviness; the jury watched attentively throughout most of the morning, with only a few eyes glazing over.

It was all Taylor could do to keep still. She wanted to scream, to jump up and yell: “Have you all lost your minds? Look at him! He’s normal, like you and me! You and me …”

Her eyes burned from lack of sleep. She felt frustrated, desperate. Her skin crawled with invisible insects under her clothes, in her hair. She fought to keep still.

And the voices went on and on. The first police officer on the scene described the grisly scene in the detached, un-emotional way he’d been taught in his report-writing classes at the academy. The first investigators on scene described how they cordoned everything off and began following accepted standard procedure-always accepted standard procedure-in their evidence collection, the samples, the bags, the labels, the sign-offs from one person to the next. The forensic examiner described the procedures for making a preliminary determination of cause of death, the estimates of time of death.

Explanations of algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis …

the singsong litany of death’s sweet terms and verses. The clinical analysis and deconstruction of life gone from a mass of rotting tissue, the light gone, energy dissipated into the universe.

Taylor wanted to scream.

The hardest parts were the photographs. Somehow, detachment was easier to maintain when it was all just words.

But the pictures, the blowups of the mutilated bodies, paraded in front of the jury-then and then alone did Taylor see a visceral reaction from the jury. Heads turned away, faces screwed up in winces …

A woman sobbed.

They took lunch at the City Club on Fourth Avenue, an exclusive, members-only club where Talmadge had a standing reservation five days a week. The two younger attorneys had rushed back to the office to research a couple of issues and to report back to the consultants who would soon be testifying for the defense. If they were lucky, they would grab a quick sandwich and a soda somewhere as Talmadge, his daughter Carey, Michael, and Taylor sat around a corner table with a gorgeous view of the city from twenty floors up.

White-coated waiters brought them tall glasses of iced tea and expensive gourmet food Taylor couldn’t bear to touch.

They talked little, the silence between them awkward, heavy. Talmadge described a little of the history of Nashville, of its incredible growth over the last twenty-five years from what had even in the seventies still felt like a small town to the churning, multicultural megalopolis it had become. Nashville had become a mini-Atlanta, Talmadge complained, as his daughter grinned at him, patronizing the old man.

Taylor stared at Michael, who seemed to be taking this all in stoically. Taylor estimated he’d said barely ten words all day. As they left the courthouse, through a gauntlet of television cameras, he’d not even taken her hand. He seemed off in his own world, shut down and removed from anyone or anything else.

Finally, Taylor couldn’t take it any longer. “Wes,” she said, interrupting a monologue about his long involvement in the movement to bring professional football to Nashville.

“Where are we?”

“What?” Talmadge asked, confused.

“I mean,” Taylor said, leaning forward over her plate,

“where are we in this whole process? How did this morning go? I’m not an attorney. I’ve never done this before. How is it going? How bad does this all look?”

Michael turned to her, his face a blank mask.

Talmadge cleared his throat, then settled back in his chair.

“Okay, this is how I read it. The initial part of a trial like this is always difficult. You see the crime scene, how awful it is. The evidence is gruesome, the pictures even more so.

But this is the time when you have to keep your emotions in check. Yes, we’re human. Yes, we can’t help but react to this kind of horror. But we also have to keep our wits about us, our intellect intact. And looking at this from a legal point of view, an intellectual point of view, all they’ve done so far is prove that a crime was committed. They have presented no evidence that can tie Michael directly to any of this.”

Taylor felt the tightness in her chest loosen just a bit, and she let out a long breath. “Okay, then it’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Of course not,” Talmadge replied. Carey reached out and took Taylor’s hand in hers.

“It’s going to be fine,” she said. “You’re doing great. Just hang in there.”

Taylor squeezed Carey’s hand back, grateful for the touch, then turned to Michael. “You’re so quiet,” she said. “Isn’t there anything you want to say?”

Michael’s eyelids seemed heavy as he stared at her. “What can I say?” he asked after a moment. “Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. There’s nothing we can do about it now except endure it.”

He looked back down at his plate, staring at it as if it were some object from another planet that had landed on the table in front of him.

“Michael, are you okay?” Taylor asked quietly. “Do we need to get you something?”

“Like what?” he answered, not taking his eyes off his plate.

“Like I’ve been on antidepressants for six months. Maybe it’s time you thought about it.”

He jerked his head up and glared at her. “No,” he said firmly. “Never.”

Taylor shrugged, looked away.

Talmadge and his daughter looked on, uncomfortable.

A hotel desk clerk testified that Michael had checked into a Hampton Inn the afternoon of his book signing. Around five, he left the hotel and returned by nine, then had gone back out around ten-thirty. No one saw him return.

A clerk at the airport branch of a rental car agency testified Michael rented a car on Friday afternoon and returned it by eleven-thirty A.M. Saturday. He’d put forty-three miles on the odometer.

The manager from the Davis-Kidd bookstore established that Michael had indeed been in Nashville that Friday night in February and had signed books before a large and enthu-siastic crowd.

Two more witnesses followed, all establishing facts of the case that were essentially self-evident. By three-thirty that afternoon, Taylor was struggling to keep her eyes open. She looked over and scanned the jury. Their eyes were beginning to wander as well. One man was scribbling something on a notepad. Another woman’s head bobbed up and down on her shoulders as she fought to stay awake.

“You have to understand,” Talmadge had said to them weeks earlier when they were in town for a conference, “a criminal trial is basically an eye-glazer. It’s like being a life-guard; long stretches of tedium and boredom punctuated by moments of complete terror.”