Richard Patterson - Conviction

"Only about their noise. They kept me up at night."

"So you didn't like them."

"No, I did not." Lewis paused. "I disliked them both, and felt sorry for their grandmother. She was far more at their mercy than I was."

Eula Price, Mauriani saw, lowered her eyes. But James seemed impervious. "So maybe," he said with a note of triumph, "you wanted them to be the ones charged with this terrible crime. If not for your own sake, for Eula Price's."

Flora Lewis stiffened on the witness stand. "That's just not so."

"No? Then why didn't you tell your story to the police until three days later, when Inspectors Monk and Ainsworth showed up at your door?"

"I was afraid of them. Payton and Rennell, I mean."

James walked toward her, standing so close now that Mauriani, had he cared to, could have objected. "Was that your reason, Mrs. Lewis? Or did the police start asking questions about Thuy Sen, and then you saw your chance to get rid of Rennell and Payton Price—for good."

Flora Lewis half-rose from the witness chair, as though to thrust her face even closer to his. Her voice quavered with fury. "I saw Rennell Price drag that little girl inside. I saw how scared she was. And now I can't sleep for seeing that every night.

"Make something like that up? I wish I had. Then I wouldn't feel like a murderer for not calling the police."

James paused, taken aback. Mauriani glanced at the brothers. Payton glared at the witness with a naked hostility the prosecutor could feel. But not Rennell. Stretching his legs in front of him, he gazed at the ceiling, a study in ostentatious boredom.

* * *

"Jesus," Carlo murmured across time. It struck Terri that for Carlo, as for her, the anger and reprisal enveloping Rennell Price fifteen years before had become a presence in the room.

"Oh," she assured her stepson, "there's so much more."

SEVENTEEN

IT WAS EDDIE FLEET, MAURIANI HAD TOLD TERRI, WHO BROUGHT his case to vivid life.

The first image Fleet implanted in the jurors' minds was of Rennell, materializing from the darkness outside Fleet's door. From the witness stand, he sounded haunted and subdued. "He just stood there," Fleet told Mauriani. "All he said was, 'We got need for your car.' But I knew right then this was something like I never seen before."

"Why was that?"

"It was cold out, but the sweat was runnin' off his face. More than crack, man—the dude was scared."

Fleet's eyes appeared to fill with remembered panic. In the silence of the courtroom, Mauriani could sense the jury's rapt attention.

"So you both got into your car?"

"Yeah." Fleet paused to gaze at his hands, as though studying the dirt beneath his nails. "We drove down to their house," he said at length. "Payton and Rennell's. And still Rennell's not tellin' me nothin.' Just lookin' out the window, like there must be people after us, and sayin', 'This is trouble, man.' " For the first time, Fleet's eyes flickered toward the defendants, and then he added softly, "It surely was all of that."

"What happened next?"

"We got there. Then Payton opens the door." As though remembering, Fleet shook his head. "He looks so scared he's like to crazy. Then he lets me inside."

The last few words were infused with awe. Mauriani let it echo for the jury, then asked, "What did you see there?"

"Her." For an instant, the words caught in his throat. "The girl that was missing."

He stopped abruptly, as if this could forestall the events which followed. It struck Mauriani that, by craft or accident, Fleet had a gift for drawing in his listeners. In deliberate contrast, the prosecutor inquired matter-of-factly, "Where exactly did you see her?"

"On the floor." Fleet's voice combined reverence with dread. "She was dead, and drool was coming out her mouth onto the rug."

In that moment, Mauriani sensed, James's attack on Flora Lewis had turned back against him, and the jurors' disgust at his treatment of Chou Sen was transforming into hatred of his clients. Mauriani's next question might be all they needed to feel at home with that.

"Did anyone describe what happened?" he inquired.

Once more, Fleet glanced at the defendants. "Yeah," he responded quietly. "Rennell did."

For whatever reason, Mauriani thought, Fleet was stretching the drama out; perhaps there was no tragedy so terrible that it did not afford someone a moment's pleasure. "What exactly did Rennell say, Eddie?"

Fleet looked down. More softly yet, he answered, "He said she'd choked on come."

* * *

There were moments where Mauriani could feel the flow of a trial change, like a suddenly quickening stream sweeping all before it. Those words were such a moment. By the end of Fleet's narrative, when Rennell was laying Thuy Sen's body on the water, Mauriani imagined death entering the courtroom, and not just Thuy Sen's.

Before he sat, Mauriani glanced at both defendants. Payton riveted Fleet with a look of hatred so visceral and venomous that it felt like an electric current. But Rennell sat back, eyes veiled, as though Fleet's narrative did not involve him. Mauriani spotted Candace Bender in the jury box, watching the brothers with something akin to horror—not only at what she had heard, Mauriani felt certain, but at the men she saw before her now.

* * *

For the first segment of cross-examination—too long, Mauriani thought—James drew out the litany of Eddie Fleet's criminal record. By its end, the jury could have had no doubt that Fleet was a crack-dealing, girlfriend-beating, gun-trafficking sociopath and, as such, fit company for Payton and Rennell. But not that he was a liar.

"This tale you've told us," James said with theatrical disdain, "you made a deal with the prosecutor to tell it, right?"

Fleet merely shrugged. "No deals, man."

"No deals? Didn't they find crack cocaine in your girlfriend's apartment she said belonged to you?"

"She said that." The sheer pettiness of such a crime, compared with the weight of Thuy Sen's death, seemed to evoke in Fleet a flash of amusement at Yancey James. "Two lousy rocks ain't enough to make me a liar. Not about somethin' like this."

James placed both hands on his hips, softening his voice. "What about something like dumping a dead nine-year-old? The only thing we know for sure is that Thuy Sen's body was in your trunk—the whole rest of the story we've only got your word for. The jury needs to know what Mr. Mauriani promised you to tell it."

Fleet steepled his hands together. "All the cops and the D.A. told me," he answered with studied composure, "was they'd consider my cooperation if I told what happened in court. They said I'd better not be lying, and never made no deals."

James moved closer. "But you are lying, aren't you. You're lying about my clients to cover for your crime."

Abruptly, Fleet's expression turned defiant. "All I was doin'," he retorted, "was helpin' out my friends. Didn't want this little girl to die, don't know exactly how it happened. By the time I saw her she was already dead."

"But we've only got your word for that, don't we. Just like we've only got your word about Payton and Rennell."

Calm renewed, Fleet regarded James impassively. "Don't know about that," he answered. "Before I told the police what happened, they'd already tore up the grandmother's house for evidence.

"We're not all sittin' here just because of me. Seemed like a lot of what I told them they already knew." He paused, eyes sweeping the courtroom, and a sense of the inevitable crept into his voice. "Like that this little girl choked to death right where I saw her. Just the way Rennell told me she did."

* * *

On the stand, Charles Monk pressed the button on the tape recorder.

His own disembodied voice sounded in the courtroom. "You didn't want for her to die, did you?"