The Kills Read online

  “Will the jury already know that when I walk into the room and take the stand? I mean, does he just say that when he addresses them the first time?”

  “I’m sure he’ll plant that seed in their minds,” I said. Robelon was a good lawyer and likely to be more subtle than most. I didn’t think he would outright accuse Paige Vallis of being a liar. Rather, he would paint the jury a picture in very broad strokes, setting them up to believe that she had been hungry for this relationship, pursuing Andrew Tripping and unhappy when something went wrong during the night in question.

  I hated this moment in the process. I hated being the person who had to deliver the victim into the hands of my adversary, in public view, to tell this story of trust and betrayal to a courtroom full of strangers. In the months since Paige reported the crime, I had struggled with Mercer to gain her confidence, to ask about intimacies that most people never discuss outside of their bedrooms. Now that I had gained that acceptance, I could not give her a victory without first exposing her to public humiliation and dissection.

  “Will there be newspaper reporters at the trial?” she asked.

  “I don’t expect any. So far they haven’t expressed interest in the case, and I can’t imagine why that would change. Did you end up asking a friend to come with you? Anyone to sit in the courtroom for moral support?”

  Paige gnawed at the corner of her lip and twisted a handkerchief in her hands. “No. I haven’t got much family. Distant relatives are all. And my closest girlfriend told me to forget about going through a trial, to walk away from the whole thing.”

  My paralegal, Maxine, would be her anchor during the trial. They had worked together since Paige’s first interview here, and I had encouraged them to talk to each other regularly. Maxine would be the virtual handholder for her through these next difficult hours.

  “Do you think Andrew will take the stand?”

  “I haven’t a clue at this point, Paige.” So much of that will depend on how you do, I thought to myself. Robelon did not have to make that decision until I had completed my case and rested. If Paige held up well throughout cross-examination, then he might gauge it necessary to let Andrew Tripping speak to the jurors. It could be a real problem for the defense, since the “bad acts” that had been ruled inadmissible on my direct case were things I could question him about if he chose to testify on his own behalf.

  She could see that I was frustrated by my inability to give her definite answers about so much of what we were facing. “It seems so unbalanced,” she said, forcing a wan smile. “You have to tell them everything about your case, and about me, but they don’t have any obligation to do the same.”

  I returned the smile. “You’ve got to relax a bit and let me worry about that. It’s a very uneven playing field, but Mercer and I are used to it.”

  I stood up to move Paige into the adjacent conference room and give her a newspaper to read for the time remaining before we went to court. “Alex, one more thing. Did you get a ruling about my sexual history? I mean, can Mr. Robelon ask about other men I’ve had intercourse with?” She colored deeply as she spoke to me.

  We had talked about this issue before. “I thought I explained this to you,” I said, sitting down again so I could look Paige directly in the eye. “That’s why I gave you such a hard time about exactly what went on between you and Andrew on the three occasions you were together.”

  Like every witness I interviewed, I had pressed her aggressively about whether there was any kind of sexual overture or foreplay before the rape. It was common for many women to minimize or omit that fact from their narratives, fearful that a prosecutor would refuse to entertain a case in which there had been any sort of consensual conduct leading up to the crime.

  “I’ve told you the truth about that, Alex.”

  “Then why are you worried? Nothing else is relevant.”

  “I went on-line last night,” she said, now wringing the handkerchief between her hands. “I started to look up articles about cases that had been written up in the newspapers. Sort of to see what to expect.”

  I guess everything I had told her had not provided enough reassurance.

  “I found a long feature in the Times that quoted you last year, talking about how bad the laws used to be. It kept me up all night.”

  “That’s old news, Paige. That’s all changed now.” Rape shield laws had passed in every state in America in the last quarter of the twentieth century, protecting victims from questioning about their sexual activity with men other than the defendant. But until that time, a woman who had ever had intercourse prior to the rape-who was “unchaste”-was assumed to have consented to the act with the man on trial. The courts defined the ideal victim as a “virgin of uncontaminated purity.”

  “But that case you cited in the article?” she asked.

  “It was decided before I got to law school. It’s history, Paige.”

  At the time I studied the case, I had been stunned and disgusted that in my lifetime there was still a court in this country that threw out a man’s rape conviction because the accuser had not been a virgin. Using the flowery rhetoric that referenced ancient Roman history, the court had asked: “Will you not more readily infer assent in the practiced Messalina, in loose attire, than in the reserved and virtuous Lucretia?” The unfaithful wife of Claudius was the Eighth Judicial Circuit’s vision of an unfit victim, just as they held up to the world the virtuous Lucretia, who killed herself rather than see her rapist brought to justice.

  “There’d have to be some direct relevance to Andrew’s case,” I told her. “They just can’t go fishing into your private life anymore.”

  “C’mon, Paige,” Mercer said, leading her out to the conference room. “Alex’ll rip the throat out of anybody who tries to go after you that way. Won’t happen.”

  They were almost at my door when she turned to look at me. “There’s something else I need to tell you, Alex.”

  My fingers froze on the sheaf of papers in my hand. I was less than an hour away from addressing the jury. If Paige had not been honest with me about some fact in the case, this was my last chance to make that discovery.

  “I had a phone call last night from a man I was-well-was involved with.”

  “Sexually?” Mercer asked. There wasn’t enough time to be subtle.

  “Socially, first. Then, yes, sexually.”

  Now I was standing, too. “Let’s cut to the chase. Does it have anything to do with Andrew Tripping? With this trial?”

  “It might.” Paige’s teeth were practically biting through her lip as she hesitated.

  “The reason he called was to try to persuade me not to testify today.”

  “Someone threatened you?” I asked, as Mercer spoke over me, trying to get the man’s name at the same time.

  Her head swung back and forth between the two of us. “I can’t exactly call it a threat. But it seems he talked to Andrew yesterday. He actually came to the courtroom and met with him.”

  I slapped my hand on the desk as I looked at Mercer. There hadn’t been many people in Moffett’s trial part, and I thought immediately of the lawyer who was the young boy’s legal guardian. “Graham Hoyt,” I said aloud. “The kid’s lawyer.”

  “No, no. I don’t know who that is. That’s not his name,” Paige protested. “It’s Harry Strait, the one I’m talking about. He’s a government agent, like Andrew Tripping claims to have been. He’s with the CIA, I think.”

  10

  “And at the conclusion of the case, ladies and gentlemen, I will again have the opportunity to stand before you,” I said, walking to the defense table and stopping directly in front of Andrew Tripping. If I wanted the twelve good people in the box to look him in the eye and declare him guilty, I needed to show them that I was not afraid to do that myself. “At that time, I will ask you to consider the testimony of the witnesses who appeared before you, discuss the evidence that has been presented, and find this defendant guilty of the crimes with which he is charg
ed.”

  Thorough, calm, understated. I had given them the basic elements of the crime, read the indictment, and previewed Paige Vallis’s story. That way, when she gave them more, they would be surprised and somewhat pleased that I had not promised anything I could not deliver. Dulles Tripping, though essential to this case, was practically a footnote, so uncertain was I of the role he would be allowed to play.

  Robelon was cool. He started his presentation at the podium, but then stood behind his client’s seat, placing his hands on Tripping’s shoulders. He was embracing the falsely accused man, as it were, just as Emily Frith leaned in to pat the defendant on the forearm.

  He was staying away from specifics, laying in the general picture of the struggling single-parent father, trying to put bread on the table and care for a rambunctious child.

  He didn’t make my witness out to be a monster, but the under-current was set in motion.

  The foundation he was building on would lead him to sum up, I assumed, with a description of Paige Vallis as emotionally unstable, socially insecure, confused by Andrew’s mixed signals, and insensitive to his personal travails.

  “Don’t be taken in by Ms. Cooper, sitting here all alone at counsel table, while the three of us do our job with her witnesses,” Robelon said, with a wink at the panel. I always liked that dynamic, assuming some jurors would cast me in the role of the underdog going against the triad of the defense team. In this instance, I thought, glancing across at them, they looked like corporate travelers sitting abreast in the business-class section of a New York to Chicago flight.

  “She’s got all the enormous resources of law enforcement available at her fingertips,” he went on. “Believe me, if there was evidence to be found against my client, she had the means to gather every bit of that.”

  It may have been bullshit, but juries believed that argument. There was nothing the NYPD could do to enhance this case. We take our witnesses as we find them. Give us your tired, your poor, your hungry-and then, while you’re at it, might as well throw in your psychos, junkies, liars, whackjobs, and hookers. I didn’t believe in dressing any of them up or polishing their performance before the jury in any case I had ever tried. It was a technique that was bound to backfire. Whatever the point of weakness that would be apparent in the courtroom-whether drug addiction, mental illness, or any alternative lifestyle-that was the vulnerability that the perpetrator had identified and attacked on the street.

  Robelon closed with the routine keep-an-open-mind pitch. He made no promises about whether his client would testify, insisting instead that he would hold my feet to the fire and dare me to prove my case.

  “Let’s have your first witness, Ms. Cooper,” Moffett said.

  “The People call Paige Vallis.”

  One of the court officers walked to the side door in the middle of the courtroom, which led to the corridor that housed the bare, dingy witness room. I stared at the group we had selected-eight men and four women-as every head followed him.

  Fifteen pairs of eyes-twelve jurors, two alternates, and a curious judge-scrutinized Vallis as she walked in front of the first row of benches, alongside my table, and stepped up to her place on the stand. The officer asked her to put one hand on the Bible and raise the other to take the oath. She was trembling as she complied with his direction.

  There was not a single spectator in the room, except for my paralegal, who was there to help steady Paige with eye contact and a reassuring smile.

  “Good morning,” I said to her, as I rose to begin my questioning. “Would you please tell the jury your name?”

  Vallis reached for the paper cup filled with water before she spoke. It shook as she lifted it, and water splashed over its edge. “My name is Paige Vallis.”

  I took her through a series of pedigree questions, which I had told her I would use to try to calm her down, and get the jury to relate to her. If she could describe her background and her work to them, it would settle her in before moving into the more highly charged testimony about the crime. I wanted to humanize her for the people who would judge her credibility, so that they could understand she had no reason to fabricate the story she was about to tell.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Here in Manhattan, in TriBeCa.” The judge had agreed with me that she did not need to put an exact street address into the public record.

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m thirty-six.” We were exactly the same age, I thought, looking at the young woman whose life had become unraveled on the evening of March 6.

  “Were you raised in New York?”

  “No, I was not.” I had prepped her to look at the jurors and talk directly to them, and she was trying to do that as she answered. She was dressed in a navy blue suit with a pale yellow blouse, and her naturally curly brown hair was swept back away from her plain-featured face. “I was born here, in the city. My father was in the diplomatic corps, so I spent most of my childhood abroad.”

  “Would you tell us about your educational background?”

  “I attended the American schools wherever my father was posted. I returned to this country to go to college, and received my bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. I worked for a few years after graduating,” she said, describing a number of entry-level jobs. “Then I decided to go to business school, and got my master’s from Columbia five years ago.”

  Vallis had impressive academic credentials. So did a lot of crazy people I knew.

  “Where are you employed, and what specific duties does your job involve?”

  “Before my graduation, I was recruited by an investment banking firm, where I had done a summer internship,” Vallis said, clearly comfortable discussing the work she did. “The company is called Dibingham Partners. I’m a research analyst there, and I specialize in foreign equities.”

  Vallis went on to describe to the jury exactly what she did to investigate overseas companies in order to make recommendations about whether to purchase stocks for her customers’ portfolios.

  I flushed out the promotions she had been given and the number of people she supervised, establishing the stability of her professional performance.

  “Are you single, Ms. Vallis?”

  “Yes, I am. I’ve never been married.”

  “Do you know the defendant in this case, Andrew Tripping?”

  Vallis cleared her throat and glanced quickly at the defense table. The few moments of relaxed testimony she had given came to an abrupt end, as she visibly tensed as she answered the question. “Yes, I do.”

  “For how long have you known him?”

  “I met him in February of this year. February twentieth, to be exact.”

  “Your Honor, may we approach?” Robelon got to his feet. This was his style. Just as my victim was about to get her narrative going, he would interrupt as frequently as he could. It served the dual purpose of rattling the witness and distracting the jury from her story.

  Moffett shrugged and reluctantly waved us up. He made Paige step down to the side as we huddled before the bench. “What is it?”

  “I’m having trouble hearing Ms. Vallis. I’d like permission to move my chair over there.” Robelon pointed to a spot behind my seat, directly in front of the jury panel.

  “Sure. Go-”

  “I’ll just ask the witness to keep her voice up. Peter can sit exactly where he’s supposed to.”

  “What’s your beef, Alex?” Robelon asked.

  “You ought to use one of your client’s bayonets to clean the wax out of your ears. The only time you develop a problem is when a witness is testifying and the prosecutor’s back is turned. The last time you repositioned yourself between me and the twelve angry men in the box, you spent the entire time rolling your eyes at them in disbelief and mumbling under your breath just loud enough so they could hear your comments.”

  “Cut it out, you two,” Moffett said, turning to Paige. “Do you think you can speak any louder, young lady? Mr.
Robelon needs to hear everything you say.”

  “I can try, Your Honor.”

  He waved us back to our seats and I picked up my questioning.

  “I’m going to direct your attention, Ms. Vallis, to the evening of February twentieth. Would you tell us where you were and how you met the defendant?”

  “Certainly. I attended a lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations, at their building on Park Avenue. I’m a member of that organization, and I had arranged to meet a girlfriend at the event, which started at seven o’clock. Then we were going to go to dinner together.”

  “Did you keep that plan?” I asked.

  “No. I mean, I did go to the lecture, but my friend’s plane was held on the runway in Boston because of snow. She called on my cell phone to tell me she wouldn’t be able to make it.”

  Paige Vallis paused. “There was a cocktail reception after the lecture. I knew a number of the people there, so I decided to stay and chat for a while.”

  “Did you have anything to drink or eat at the reception?” Bring it out on the direct case, so that it didn’t look like I was trying to hide any alcohol that was involved.

  “Wine. I had a couple of glasses of white wine. Two. Nothing to eat.”

  “Did Mr. Tripping approach you that evening?”

  “Objection. Leading.”

  “Overruled. Ms. Cooper’s just trying to set some background up here.”

  Paige waited for the judge to tell her to proceed. “Three of us were standing together, talking about the situation in the Middle East, and what our own personal experiences had been there. Andrew must have heard me-”

  “Objection as to what he might have heard.”

  “Sustained. Just tell us what he said or did.”

  The objections had their desired effect. Paige Vallis was shaken each time Robelon called out the word, as though she had done something wrong.

  “Andrew Tripping asked me about Cairo,” she said. “He wanted to know when I had lived there and for what reason.”

  Tripping started fidgeting as she spoke, trying to get his lawyer’s attention. Robelon brushed him off, continuing to take notes on the details in Vallis’s testimony that he had not heard before. The defendant put his head together with Emily Frith, whispering to her, distracting several jurors from the flow of the testimony.