CHAPTER 40
The morning came quickly. It had been after midnight by the time Tracy had gotten to her motel in Silver Spurs. She’d lain down on the bed but sleep had not come easily. She remembered seeing the glow of the clock on her nightstand at 2:38 a.m., and had gotten up from the bed for good at 4:54 a.m.
When she pulled back the drapes, she saw a white curtain of snow falling from a low gray sky outside the window. The snow already blanketed the ground and clung to tree limbs and power lines. It tempered the sounds of the small town, giving everything a false sense of calm.
Tracy had reserved the motel room while in Seattle, wanting to avoid the potential of a reporter snapping a photo of her and Dan leaving Dan’s home together in the morning. After the shooting, Dan had pressed her to stay at the house, debating the wisdom of her being alone at the motel. She’d dismissed his concern as she’d dismissed the threat when Roy Calloway had brought it up. “It’s just some crazy who had too many beers,” she’d said. “If the person had wanted to kill me, he had a clean shot to do it, and he wouldn’t have used buckshot. I have my Glock. That’s all the protection I need.” In truth, she hadn’t wanted to put Dan or Sherlock in any further danger.
She drove into the Cascade County Courthouse parking lot an hour before the hearing, hoping to avoid much of the press. The parking lot was already three-quarters full, and cameramen and reporters buzzed about the news vans parked along the street. When they spotted Tracy, they wasted little time filming her as she crossed the parking lot toward the courthouse. The reporters shouted out questions.
“Detective, will you talk about the shooting last night?”
“Do you fear for your life, detective?”
Tracy headed for the expansive courthouse steps leading to the building’s peaked pediment, ignoring the questions.
“Why were you at Dan O’Leary’s house?”
“Do the police have any suspects?”
As she neared the steps, the pack of reporters and cameramen grew thicker, making her progress more difficult. A line of hopeful spectators bundled in winter clothes flecked with snow also blocked the front entrance, snaking down the steps and spilling along the sidewalk, adding to the congestion.
“Will you be testifying, Detective?”
“That will be up to the attorneys,” she said, remembering that she and her family had never waited in line to enter the courthouse during Edmund House’s trial.
“Have you spoken to Edmund House?”
She pressed on through the crowd to the south side of the building and the glass-door entrance that had been reserved for family members, witnesses, and counsel during House’s trial. The correctional officer just inside the door didn’t hesitate to open it when Tracy rapped on the glass. He also didn’t ask her for any ID before ushering her inside.
“I was Judge Lawrence’s bailiff the first go-round,” he said. “I guess this is like déjà vu all over again. They’re even using the same courtroom.”
To accommodate the anticipated crowd, Judge Meyers had indeed been assigned the ceremonial courtroom on the second floor where Edmund House had been tried twenty years earlier. When the correctional officer allowed Tracy to enter the courtroom early, she stepped back in time to those awful days. Almost everything about the courtroom remained the same, from the rich marble floor to the mahogany woodwork and the vaulted box-beam ceiling, from which hung the bronze-and-stained-glass light fixtures.
Tracy had always likened courtrooms to churches. The ornate judge’s bench, like the hanging cross, was the focal point, elevated at the front of the room looking down on the proceedings. Counsel sat at two tables facing the bench. A railing with a swinging gate separated them from the gallery, which at present was a dozen empty pews on each side of an aisle. Witnesses would enter the courtroom at the back of the gallery and walk down the aisle, pushing through the gate and proceeding between counsel tables to the slatted wooden chair on the elevated witness stand. The jury box was to the right of the witness stand. To the left were the wood-sash windows that at present displayed the still-heavy snowfall.
Only the technology had changed. A flat-screen television occupied the corner of the room where an easel had formerly been used to display photographs to the jury, and computer screens adorned each counsel table, the bench, and the witness stand.
Dan had set up at the table on the left, closest to the windows. He looked back over his shoulder and gave Tracy a brief glance when she entered, then went back to reviewing his notes. Despite the prior evening’s events, Tracy thought he looked sharp in a navy-blue suit, white shirt, and solid silver tie. By contrast, Vance Clark, who stood at the table beside Dan’s and closest to the empty chairs in the jury box, already looked spent. He had his blue sport coat off and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up his forearms. Hands pressed flat on the table, Clark was hunched over a topographical map, head bowed and eyes closed. Tracy wondered if he’d ever pondered the possibility that he might someday be back in this courtroom, sitting opposite the same defendant he’d convicted twenty years earlier. She doubted he had.
When the courtroom door swung open behind her, more of Tracy’s past entered. Parker House, Edmund’s uncle, hesitated when he saw her, as if trying to decide whether to enter or to leave. He’d aged. Tracy estimated him to be in his midsixties now. His hair had thinned and turned gray, but it still hung in strands over the collar of his Carhartt jacket. His face, tanned and weathered from years working outdoors, had sagged from the effects of a lifetime of hard living and hard drinking. Parker thrust his hands in the pockets of worn blue jeans, lowered his eyes, and made his way along the back wall to the opposite side of the courtroom, the sound of his scuffed, steel-toed work boots echoing. He took his seat in the first row behind Dan, the same seat where he’d sat throughout the first trial, usually alone. Tracy’s father had made it a point to greet Parker each morning of the trial. When Tracy had asked him why, her father had said, “Parker is suffering too.”
Tracy approached Parker’s seat. He had his head turned away from her, looking at the snow continuing to fall outside the windows. “Parker?”
Parker looked surprised to hear his name, and after a seeming moment of indecision, he stood. “Hey, Tracy.” His voice was barely above a whisper.
“I’m sorry to put you through this again, Parker.”
His eyebrows inched together. “Yeah,” he said.
Not knowing what else to say, she let him be. Instinctively, she also went to the first pew, behind the prosecutor’s table. It had been the pew in which she had sat with her mother and father and Ben, but the familiarity of her surroundings suddenly overwhelmed her, and she realized her emotions were more raw, and the edge between composure and tears more thin, than she was willing to admit.
She stepped to the second row and sat.
As she waited, Tracy alternately checked e-mails on her phone and looked out the wood-sash windows. The trees in the courthouse square looked as if they had been flocked, and the rest of the landscape had become a brilliant, pristine white.
Ten minutes before nine, the bailiff unlocked the courtroom doors and pushed them open. The crowd steadily streamed in, filling the pews as if at a movie theater, taking the best seats and discarding coats, hats, and gloves to save seats for others.
“No saving seats, folks,” the bailiff said. “It’s first come, first served, around here. Please put your coats and gloves under the pew so we can make room for the people still standing in the cold.”
If the gallery filled, as anticipated, it would hold more than 250 people. Based on the length of the line that had snaked down the courthouse steps and along the sidewalk, Tracy suspected some of them would be turned away at the door or forced to sit in the courtroom next door and watch the news feed instead.
Vanpelt entered with a press credential dangling from a string around her neck and sat near the front, behind Parker House. Tracy counted a dozen other men and women wearing press credentials. She recognized many of the people, the same faces who had attended Sarah’s internment, but this time none of them approached Tracy, though a few acknowledged her with a nod or a wistful smile that quickly faded.
With the gallery full, the doors to the courtroom again opened. Edmund House entered flanked by two correctional officers. The gallery fell silent. Those who had attended the first trial alternately looked on disbelievingly at the dramatic change in House’s physical appearance or whispered their disbelief to those around them. Unlike his trial, no one had attempted to clean House up to make a favorable impression on a jury. There would be no jury this time. He shuffled forward in his prison uniform—khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt that revealed his tattooed arms. His long, braided ponytail reached the center of his broad back, and the chains connecting the manacles around his ankles and leading up his legs to the belly belt rattled and clinked as the guards led him to counsel table.
At his trial, House had seemed indifferent to the stares of the spectators, but now he looked bemused by their attention. It made her think of his comment when she and Dan had first visited him in prison, about what it would be like to see the faces of Cedar Grove’s citizens when he walked the streets as a free man again. Hopefully, that would not be for a while. She surveyed the courtroom, noting two additional officers had entered and were standing near the courtroom exit, and that a fifth had taken up a position beside the elevated bench.
House turned, facing the gallery as the correctional officers removed the restraints from his wrists and ankles. Dan placed a hand on House’s shoulder and whispered in his ear, but House kept his gaze on his uncle, though Parker did not look up. Parker kept his head down, looking like a penitent praying in church.
Judge Meyers’s clerk, who had left when House had entered, returned through the door to the left of the bench and called the proceedings to order. Meyers followed quickly on his clerk’s heels, took the stairs to his bench, and in rapid succession dispensed with preliminary matters, including expected courtroom decorum. Then, without fanfare or preface, Meyers turned to Dan.
“Mr. O’Leary, as the burden rests with the defendant at this hearing, you may proceed.”
Twenty years later, they were underway.