Flat Lake in Winter Page 5

  No, it wasn’t the money. And it certainly wasn’t the work. Getting his teeth into a murder case was what made this business worthwhile in the first place. It hadn’t been the big cases that had ultimately driven Fielder from practice; it had been the little ones - the petty drug possessions, the shoplifts, the car thefts, the turnstile jumpers. That and the business of running a law office.

  “Hello.” It was a woman’s voice.

  “Hi. This is Matt Fielder. I’m returning Kevin Doyle’s call.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Not that he hadn’t tried his best to duck the first two cases Doyle had called him on, too: He was on trial; he was too busy; he had a vacation coming up. But both times, Doyle had brushed those excuses aside, seeming to sense immediately that it was only Fielder’s uneasiness about doing death work that he was hearing. And it was that very uneasiness, of course, that had caused Doyle to put Fielder on his short list in the first place.

  Both times, Doyle had succeeded in prevailing upon Fielder. Both times, Fielder had managed to overcome his reluctance and hit the ground running, soon finding himself far too involved in the defense of his clients to dwell on what might become of them if things went wrong. And both times, circumstances had fortunately arisen to ensure that things wouldn’t go wrong - at least not fatally wrong.

  But this time promised to be different. Doyle himself had made that clear in his message. “The DA’s a meateater,” he’d said. “This could be the real thing.”

  “Doyle here.”

  “Hey, Kevin. Matt Fielder.”

  “Thanks for getting back to me, Matt. How’s life in the woods?”

  “It’s been a learning experience.”

  So much for the small talk.

  “I’ve got a live one, Matt.”

  “So it sounds.”

  “Twenty-eight-year-old kid up in Ottawa County. Far as we know, he’s got no priors. Living on an estate with his grandparents in someplace called Flat Lake. Wakes up sometime Sunday night and butchers them in their sleep. State police have an oral confession. They’re arraigning him nine o’clock tomorrow morning in Cedar Falls.”

  “Who’s the DA?”

  “Guy by the name of Gil Cavanaugh. Don’t know too much about him, other than that he calls himself a conservative Republican, he’s a friend of the NRA, and every four years he gets reelected on a law-and-order platform tougher than the one before. Got 88 percent of the vote last time he ran.”

  “Lovely,” was all Fielder could think to say.

  “One more thing,” Doyle added. “He didn’t even give us notification. Claimed he wasn’t aware of the case.”

  “Can’t your branch office in Flat Lake handle this?”

  “Our branch office in Flat Lake?” Doyle laughed. “We don’t have anyone within 100 miles of Ottawa County.”

  “Except for me.”

  “Except for you.”

  Fielder found a clean spot on his sweatshirt to mop his forehead dry again. “I don’t want this,” he told Doyle. “We both know they’re going to try to kill this kid.”

  “I need you to help me out for now, Matt. If you still want out in a week, say the word. I’ll pull you off it. Promise.”

  “Right,” Fielder said. They both knew that by week’s end he’d be up to his elbows in it, and there’d be no way he’d let go of it.”

  “Thanks,” said Doyle, exhibiting that rarest skill of all in the legal profession - the good sense to shut up when you’re ahead. “Kid’s name is Jonathan Hamilton. Cedar Falls, nine o’clock.”

  “You bastard,” said Matt Fielder.

  THE OTTAWA COUNTY COURTHOUSE is a two-story brick building located directly on Main Street, about halfway between Maple and Birch. Since there are only a dozen streets in all of Cedar Falls, Fielder had little difficulty finding it. He pulled his ancient Suzuki to the curb, where it obligingly wheezed to a stop of its own accord.

  Before slipping into his suit jacket, Fielder gave it a good shake, hoping to rid it of the odor of mothballs that had followed him from the cabin. It had been close to a year since Fielder had felt compelled to dress up in his lawyer costume, and he hadn’t missed it a bit. He tightened the knot of his tie as he climbed the three steps, hoping he wouldn’t get too much flack over the work boots that were all he’d been able to find that morning. He carried an old attaché case that had been filled with bags of soil samples and jars of suspected termites, until he’d emptied it out the night before in order to make room for a pad of paper, a couple of pens, and some legal forms.

  Inside, the building smelled of mildew and dry rot. The wall paint was peeling, and the dark wood floors were stained and uneven. He found a door marked COUNTY CLERK, knocked once, and entered. A gray-haired woman looked up from behind a service window and smiled. If she noticed his boots, she didn’t comment on them.

  “Good morning,” Fielder said.

  “Good morning,” she echoed, pleasantly enough.

  “I’m here to represent Mr. Hamilton, on the murder case. And I’m new around here.” Fielder made a habit of announcing his ignorance at the first available opportunity. He’d found that people tend to want to help those unashamed enough to admit they were out of their element.

  “Well, don’t you worry about that,” the woman said. “I’m Dorothy Whipple, the County Clerk. But you can call me Dot - everyone else does.”

  “Thank you, Dot. I’m Matt, Matt Fielder.”

  “Hello, Matt. Now, first thing. Are you admitted to practice in New York?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Good.” He watched as she fished around for a Notice of Appearance. “Are you retained” - she stressed the first syllable, pronouncing it reetained - “or eighteen-b?” By “18-b,” she meant appointed by the Assigned Counsel Plan.

  “Actually, neither,” he said. “I’ve been brought in by the Capital Defender’s Office, which technically makes it section 35-B, of the Judiciary Law.”

  “Hmmmm,” she fretted. “Don’t have a box on the form for that. Guess we’ll just have to do a write-in.”

  Fielder found himself hoping that whoever else he’d encounter that morning would be half as accommodating at Dot Whipple, but he knew better. Even in his Bronx and Manhattan capital cases, he’d found judges, clerks, court officers, and stenographers who were completely thrown when they found out he’d been designated by an authority other than one they were accustomed to dealing with on a daily basis. One judge, presented with a simple order seeking the appointment of a mitigation expert to investigate a defendant’s background, had literally run from the bench, screaming

  A moment later, the trooper stuck his head out of the doorway and said, “This way, Counselor.”

  THE FIRST THING that struck Fielder about Jonathan Hamilton was how youthful-looking he was, and how very handsome. He had broad facial features, with the unusual combination of prominent cheekbones and thick lips. Except where he needed a shave, his evenly tanned skin looked as though it would be soft to the touch. Even the bristles of his three-day beard looked soft, sprouting through his skin in individual blond hairs, rather than casting a shadowy stubble across his cheeks. A shock of blond hair fell straight down his forehead. But all of those features faded into the background, to some degree; it was Jonathan’s eyes that were truly arresting. They were a pale blue - so pale as to almost suggest blindness, and so startling in their openness that Fielder found it difficult to look into them at times, yet impossible not to.

  The truth is that Matt Fielder is himself an extremely good-looking man. But his dark hair, nearly black eyes, and chiseled jaw must have presented a stark contrast that morning to Jonathan Hamilton’s blond hair, pale blue eyes, and almost beatific features. In the weeks and months to follow, the media would never run a print article, or carry a televised sound bite regarding the case, without displaying a photo of one man or the other, and often of both. A prominent film producer would go on record as hoping for an eventual acquittal, just so both
men could get a chance to play themselves in the movie version.

  The pen adjacent to Part One is large enough to hold a half-dozen prisoners at once, though it is doubtful that it has ever been called upon to do so. That Tuesday morning, Fielder and Jonathan had it all to themselves. Their initial meeting was conducted standing up and separated by iron bars. Fielder, who is an even six feet tall, found himself looking up into Jonathan’s face.

  “My name is Matt Fielder,” he said, extending a business card between the bars. “If it’s all right with you, I’m going to be your lawyer.”

  Jonathan took the card and frowned at it for a long moment, prompting Fielder to wonder whether his client was able to read at all. Then Jonathan began running his thumb over the card, at a spot where Fielder’s own fingers had left a smudge on the surface. When the thumb didn’t seem to do the trick, Jonathan switched to the sleeve of his shirt, rubbing in a determined, circular motion, singularly occupied with the business of ridding the card of its imperfection.

  Fielder had the feeling that Jonathan could have easily spent the next fifteen minutes absorbed with the card. He displayed none of the urgency most defendants did when first given a chance to confer with a lawyer, and asked none of the usual questions. That left it up to Fielder to shape the conversation.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” Fielder asked.

  Jonathan hesitated, then answered rather sheepishly, “I guess so.”

  “Tell me,” Fielder said, in as gentle a tone as he could muster.

  “Grandpa Carter and Grandma Mary Alice?” Looking to Fielder to make sure he’d got the answer right.

  “Right,” Fielder said. He had the feeling he was talking to a small child, a child who had somehow been outfitted with the body of a very large man. “What about them?”

  “They say I hurt them.”

  “Hurt them?”

  “K-k-kilt them.”

  Fielder hesitated before asking the next logical question. There were times you asked a client if he was guilty, and there were times you didn’t. Fielder was in the process of trying to figure out which kind of time this was, when Jonathan surprised him with a question of his own.

  “Wh-wh-what could they do to me?”

  “What do you mean?” Fielder was pretty certain what Jonathan meant, but he wanted to hear how much Jonathan himself knew.

  “Can they give me c-capital punishment?”

  Fielder’s cardinal rule was, never lie to a client. It wasn’t so much a moral thing as a pragmatic one. Get caught in a lie, and you’d never be believed again. He wasn’t about to break the rule, not even now. “Yes,” he said. “It’s possible.”

  There was a long silence while Jonathan appeared to digest that news. Then he asked, “What is capital punishment?”

  Fielder explained that capital punishment meant the death penalty.

  “When would that be?” he asked.

  “First of all,” Fielder explained, “I’m here to see that that doesn’t happen, ever. But even if I fail, even if I strike out twenty-seven times in a row, I promise you that nothing like that could possibly happen for many, many years.”

  “So it wouldn’t be, like, tonight?”

  Fielder allowed himself a small smile. As gently as he could, he explained to Jonathan that there could be no execution without all sorts of stuff first - a full investigation, pre-trial hearings, a jury trial, a separate sentencing hearing, and multiple appeals - things that would truly go on for many years.

  “So it can’t be tonight,” said Jonathan. “No matter what.”

  Fielder gave Jonathan his solemn promise that it couldn’t be that night, or any night soon. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he could detect a visible difference in Jonathan. All of the tension seemed to go out of his body. It was as though he was truly incapable of contemplating the indefinite future: His horizons stretched no farther than morning and night.

  During the twenty-five minutes that Fielder was speaking with Jonathan, the courtroom had gradually filled up, and when Fielder returned he found it packed with spectators, reporters, sketch artists, and the just plain curious. As he made his way across the room, he picked up the tail end of a hushed conversation. A tall, silver-haired man was telling a huddle of listeners, “. . . and they’re sending some Jew lawyer up here to represent him.”

  A few moments later, Dot Whipple tapped Fielder on the shoulder. “How ‘bout I acquaint you with your adversary?” she said with a wink, leading the way to where the very same silver-haired man stood still holding court. As Dot introduced them, the man smiled broadly at Fielder and extended his hand.

  “Gil Cavanaugh,” he said. “District Attorney.”

  Fielder looked him in the eye and returned the smile, but let the hand hang there in midair.

  “Matt Fielder,” he said. “Jew lawyer.”

  EVEN AS FIELDER and Cavanaugh were getting acquainted in the Ottawa County Courthouse in Cedar Falls, some fifty miles to the north, in the town of Malone, the Franklin County Medical Examiner was beginning her postmortem examination of the bodies of Carter and Mary Alice Hamilton.

  Dr. Frances Chu was no stranger to autopsies, having either officiated or assisted at nearly 2,000 of them in her eight years as an assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. When she’d seen a listing for the Franklin County position, offering escape from the city at a salary only slightly lower than the one she’d been making, while permitting her to maintain a part-time private practice of her own, she’d quickly sent off her resume. They’d called her three days later and asked her one question: When could she start? Five weeks later, she was wrestling the steering wheel of a Ryder rental truck, her two daughters asleep beside her, her Ford Fiesta in tow, asking herself why she’d never thought to look at a map before accepting the job.

  Malone, New York, is about as far north as you can go before you have to start speaking French to be understood. It is farther north than almost all of Vermont and New Hampshire, and much of Maine. It is farther north than Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is 100 miles farther north than Toronto. Local folk are fond of saying that there are two seasons in Malone: July and winter. And as Frances Chu and her assistant began work that Tuesday morning, the temperature in the unheated autopsy room was 53 degrees. July was clearly over.

  Dr. Chu was hardly the squeamish type. She’d seen just about everything there was to see during her New York City tour. Multiple-gunshot-wound victims, machete slashings, ritual mutilations, jumpers, floaters, and even a “space case” or two - where the victim had slipped and become pinned in the tiny space between a subway car and the station platform, fully conscious and in virtually no pain, until the train had to be moved - at which time it took about sixty seconds for every internal organ and drop of blood to drain from the body. Since her arrival in Malone, almost all of the violent cases Dr. Chu had seen were hunting accidents or MVAs (motor-vehicle accidents) of one sort or another: head-ons, roll-overs, windshield divers, tree-climbers, and moose-stoppers.

  But none of her previous cases had readied Frances Chu for her autopsy of the Hamilton bodies. After getting over her initial shock and completing the examinations, she confided to her assistant that in all her years, she had never seen two persons so badly purposefully injured at the hand of another person. A small extract from her autopsy report illustrates the nature of her findings.

  The male victim . . . exhibits in excess of 100 stab wounds, concentrated in - but by no means limited to - the face, neck, and upper-chest areas. All of the major veins and arteries in the neck are severed, as is the spinal cord. [Two of] the vertebrae of the upper spine are deeply cut, to the point of being nearly severed. . . .

  The female victim . . . is almost identically stabbed, except that in [her] case the second and third vertebrae have been completely severed, leaving the [head] attached to what remains of the upper torso by a layer of derma and muscle approximately 3 cm in thickness.

  To
ward the end of her report, Dr. Chu attempted to draw certain conclusions from her findings.

  Because of the number and severity of the wounds, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the wounds are the result of a single instrument or multiple instruments. However, it appears that none of the wounds is inconsistent with having been caused by a large-bladed knife, smooth near the point and serrated near the handle. The blade must have been approximately 130 cm in length, and 40 cm in width at its widest point.

  To anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of cutlery and a familiarity with metric equivalents, Dr. Chu was almost certainly describing a hunting knife with a five-inch blade.

  “ALL RISE!” called Dot Whipple. “The County Court, in and for the county of Ottawa, is now in session, the Honorable Arthur Summerhouse presiding. Please be seated.”

  The room came to order as a very short man wearing a very long black robe strode in and took his place behind the bench. Arthur Summerhouse was sixty-four at the time, but fighting every day of it. What was left of his hair had been dyed jet black and combed back-to-front in an obvious attempt to cover up what nature had chosen to reveal. A small mustache, also jet black, adorned his upper lip, perhaps intended as a bit of distraction from the battle being waged on top.

  “Good morning,” said Judge Summerhouse.

  “Good morning,” echoed those who were accustomed to the drill.

  “For arraignment,” announced Dot Whipple, “Docket number Nine-seven-slash-three-three-four. People versus Jonathan Hamilton. Two counts of murder in the first degree.”

  Gil Cavanaugh rose from his seat at one end of the long counsel table. Matt Fielder took his cue and stepped up to the middle of the table. As they gave their appearances to the court reporter, two uniformed troopers escorted Jonathan Hamilton in from the side door and stood him, handcuffed behind his back, next to Fielder. They took one step back and remained there, immediately behind Jonathan.

  “Your Honor,” Fielder said.

  Judge Summerhouse looked up from a folder he’d been examining. “Yes?” he said.