Perhaps the witness spoke with regret. Perhaps with sorrow. But there was no mistaking the identification.
So singled-out, Luther Dunphy shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. A faint flush came into his doughy face. He did not look up but stared at the table in front of him. His big hands clenched into fists on his knees. He was one who had lived his life at the margin of others’ attention. Perhaps since boyhood he had not wished to be singled out.
Among the witnesses were medical workers at the Women’s Center who’d just been arriving at the Center at the time of the shootings, who had fled to hide behind a Dumpster in terror of being shot. There were the Broome County sheriff’s deputies who’d been on guard duty at the Center that morning, whom the sudden outburst of gunfire had taken totally by surprise. There were emergency medical technicians who’d rushed to the scene of the carnage, too late to help either of the stricken men.
There was the county medical examiner, who’d drawn back the shroud from Gus Voorhees’s devastated face and upper body.
You have determined—death was instantaneous for both men?
Yes. Certainly.
She had no need to listen yet she was listening. She had no need to look at photographs of the fallen men projected on a screen yet she was looking. It was required for Gus’s sake, she thought. His terrible suffering should be shared, if at a distance. His terrible suffering should be revealed to as many witnesses as possible.
In the jury box the jurors listened, and the jurors looked. For the most part their expressions were impassive. They were very ordinary-seeming men and women—nine men, five women. (Twelve jurors, two alternates.) All white-skinned, and all middle-aged or older. Jenna would have liked to see younger jurors, and more women. (The ideal juror, from her perspective, would have been a young black woman.) She did not want to think of the power that resided in these strangers, to punish the guilty man as he deserved, to provide some measure of justice for the victims.
Mostly, Jenna tried not to observe the jurors for fear she might see something in their faces that might upset her. Tersely she’d said to a friend in Michigan, with whom she often spoke on the phone, that the jurors had seemed to her rural.
It wasn’t a joke exactly. Well yes, it was a joke. But not exactly.
On the final day of the prosecution’s case a former Catholic priest took the witness stand. Through a haze of headache pain Jenna listened with mounting alarm.
This was a hostile witness, the prosecutor had told Jenna. The ex-priest had not wanted to testify though he was an eyewitness to the shootings; he’d been served a subpoena by the district attorney and had had no choice but to cooperate, under penalty of being found in contempt of court.
Donald Stockard had left his church parish in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1996, and had left the priesthood the following year. He’d been a protester at the Broome County Women’s Center for several months but he had not, he insisted, known Luther Dunphy by name.
“Mr. Stockard—or, excuse me, shall I say ‘Father Stockard’?”
“I am no longer a priest as I explained. ‘Mr. Stockard’ is fine.”
“And why are you no longer a priest, Mr. Stockard?”
“For a—personal reason.”
“Was it because your parish in Lincoln was unhappy with you? Complained to the bishop about your sermons? Wasn’t that it?”
“It was a confluence of reasons . . .”
“‘A confluence of reasons’—can you explain?”
“I did not feel—I do not feel—that the Catholic church has been sufficiently active in opposing abortions—legalized infanticide—in the United States . . .”
Stockard spoke haltingly. He was very ill at ease, with a sallow, damp-looking skin, a faint stammer. His face was long and morose and his mouth quivered with emotion.
“You were disciplined by your bishop—wasn’t that it, Mr. Stockard? You were moved out of the parish and forbidden to ‘recruit’ anti-abortion protesters . . .”
“I elected to quit the priesthood. I was not ‘fired.’ My decision to quit was not made quickly but after much anguish . . . I still have strong ties to my parish in Lincoln. I have strong ties to my beliefs. I am not so alone as people think.”
Jenna saw how, for the first time since the start of the trial, Luther Dunphy lifted his head, and regarded the witness with concern. He was sitting very still, his fists now on the table in front of him. Stockard, in the witness chair, stared blinking at the prosecutor as if he feared about what the prosecutor would ask next.
But the prosecutor only asked Stockard to describe what he’d seen at the Women’s Center on the morning of November 2, 1999.