“You ask me, he threw you and the case under the bus, and did it on purpose.”
“Let’s hope that wasn’t his intention,” I say, and what bothers me most isn’t that a television news segment was ruled admissible and shown to the jury but that the video was filmed at all.
For several seconds the dead woman’s gaunt leathery face was clearly visible as I was pulling her into the pouch-lined Stokes basket, and while it’s possible she’s no longer visually identifiable because of her severely dehydrated condition, I can’t be sure of that. Someone who knew her well, perhaps family or close friends, might have realized who she is, and that’s a terrible way to find out about a death. It should never happen.
“He’ll get acquitted,” Marino decides.
The wipers swipe and beat the glass, the hard, chilly rain drumming the roof and flooding the windshield as if we’re inside a car wash, and Channing Lott might be acquitted, and maybe he should be. I have no idea. But if jurors witnessed what I did barely an hour ago, they must have been given a different picture of the formidable industrialist who seemed genuinely caught off guard by the video he watched in open court. He struck me as tragic and terrified, sincerely grief-stricken, as he seemed to anticipate what he was about to see. Afterward he shut his eyes, almost collapsing in his chair with what appeared to be immense relief.
If he realized the dead woman isn’t his missing wife, then he shouldn’t have felt he was just granted a reprieve, not if he’s to blame for whatever’s happened to her. Finding his wife’s body right now would be the best thing for his case. It doesn’t matter what I might testify as to how long she’s been dead.
A jury would find such postmortem artifacts confusing, would be baffled by the idea of an intact body showing up in the Massachusetts Bay some six months after the person allegedly was a murder for hire. I also accept the distinct possibility that Channing Lott is a consummate sociopath, a poseur and manipulator who knew all eyes were on him during that pivotal moment when the news footage began to play. Maybe he intended to look sympathetic to whoever was watching, and he did.
“He may very well be acquitted, and if the jury has reasonable doubt, then that’s the right verdict,” I reply, and what I’d like to do this very minute is go home.
I want Advil, a long hot bath, and Scotch on the rocks, and I want to talk to Benton. I want to hear what he has to say about what just transpired in federal court. What are the rumors about Judge Joseph Conry that might help explain his anger toward me and unwillingness to sustain a single objection Dan Steward raised, few that there were? Then again, maybe I don’t want to know. It won’t change anything that’s happened.
“Well, no way in hell the jury’s going to convict him.” Marino leans forward, squinting, trying to see through billowing sheets of water, the lights of oncoming traffic blinding. “All Donoghue had to do was introduce the suggestion that Mildred Lott’s body just turned up now or might turn up later or maybe she’s not even dead. Showing that news clip was something, a picture worth a thousand words, even though it’s probably not her.”
“It’s not. Unless her medical records are fabricated and her height has shrunk.”
“Well, it looks like everything else shrunk.”
“Not her bones. Mildred Lott was supposed to be five-eleven, and this lady isn’t close to that.”
“You got to give her credit, though.” Marino continues talking about Jill Donoghue, because he saw every second of what she did, having found a seat in the back of the courtroom without my being aware.
He was there for the entire ordeal, witnessing the judge’s tirade and my punishment of a fine some five times stiffer than what’s typical, not that I’ve ever been fined before. That judicial fireworks display was a perfect opening for what Donoghue did next, to build me up as a qualified expert before implying that I’m a feminist home wrecker, a medical experimenter guilty by association of snatching Japanese body parts and perhaps even indirectly to blame for atom bombs being dropped. Marino saw all of it and has chatted about nothing else as we’ve driven endlessly, slowly, miserably, through high winds and pounding rain that a few minutes ago