High in Trial - By Donna Ball Page 0,1

and shot the clerk with a thirty-eight caliber weapon before departing, scraping his right front fender on the concrete pylon beside the pump as he fled. Jeremiah Allen Berman was extradited to North Carolina on armed robbery charges, protesting his innocence and demanding his rights every mile along the way.

He was arraigned within forty-eight hours and a trial date was set. The prosecutor offered three years and his court-appointed attorney told him to take it. At first he was cocky. Why were they cutting him a deal if they were so sure he was guilty? Because they couldn’t prove it, that was why. Because they didn’t have a security camera tape or a bullet or anything but a couple of half-assed witnesses to put him at the scene. Plus, he was innocent. He was totally going to skate if it went to a jury. Meanwhile, the Hanover County jail was clean and the food wasn’t half bad. He’d take his chances.

By the time he started to reconsider his decision a few days later, it was too late. The store clerk was dead, and Jeremiah Allen Berman was facing the death penalty for a murder he did not commit.

~*~

FRIDAY

The Present

~*~

TWO

Twenty-nine hours before the shooting

I’ve always thought I’d like to write a book entitled Everything My Dog Needs to Know My Mother Taught Me. My mother wasn’t a dog trainer. But she was a great mother. Aside from how to tie my shoelaces and the importance of regular dental checkups, she imparted quite a few important life lessons, such as:

—Honesty is the best policy. It’s easier than lying and usually has fewer consequences.

—Always do your best. Less is cheating.

—Winning is better than losing. Always.

Okay, so the meaning of that last one is probably more like trying to win is its own reward, or perhaps even it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. I have to admit, I’ve always been a little on the competitive side. A teacher once described me, somewhat generously, as goal-oriented. My goal is winning.

My name is Raine Stockton. My father was a judge and my mother was the arbiter of all things gentle and proper in the small Smoky Mountain town of Hansonville, North Carolina, where I still live. I’m afraid I’ve fallen a little short of her standards when it comes to gentility and propriety, but I do try my best to impart to my dogs the same important life lessons she taught me. Honesty, for example, is as desirable a quality in a dog as it is in a human, and you hear a lot of talk about “honest” dogs on the competitive circuit. Frankly, I’ve never met a dishonest dog, but when trainers and handlers call a dog honest, what they usually mean is he’s consistent, dependable, and earnest. What you see is what you get.

My golden retriever Cisco is extremely consistent: consistently distractible, consistently curious, consistently unpredictable. For example, with only one group ahead of us for our very first run of the agility season—the one that would set the tone for the rest of the year—he was completely and obsessively focused, not on me, his partner, his handler, and the only member of our two-member team who could actually read the course map the judge designed, but on Brinkley, a sassy golden retriever who’d recently become his new BFF.

Brinkley, good dog that he was, was warming up by weaving through his handler’s legs and practicing focus by dropping to a sit on command and maintaining eye contact. Cisco watched him in eager fascination, ears forward and grinning, as I sank down onto the bleachers, tugging him into place beside me. The Excellent class was finishing up; Open—in which we were entered—was next. Cisco had completed walk time, play time, warm-up time at the practice jump, and a pep talk. I was wearing my lucky Golden Retriever Club of America sweatshirt, my lucky agility socks, and the Air Bud cap my young friend Melanie brought back from her spring break trip to Disney World in Orlando. My shoelaces were double knotted. My long brown ponytail was threaded through the back of my hat, securely out of my way. I was ready. Cisco was ready. There was nothing more we could do until the judge called our class.

We’d traveled from Hansonville to Pembroke, South Carolina, for the three-day AKC sanctioned agility trial, which was the traditional opening of the competitive season in our part of the country. It was