“But one thing I do know, ladies and gentlemen, is that the place they were working was completely legal in the city of Nashville and the state of Tennessee. The owner of that business, as distasteful as we might think it, paid his taxes and his license fees and his rent. We may not like it, folks, but it’s legal. And Sarah and Allison had a perfect right to be working there, as much as you and I might wish that they hadn’t.”
Collier paused here, as if studying the jury. Taylor could see he was trying to make eye contact with them, trying to reach them. She had thought initially that he seemed to be winging it.
Now she knew he wasn’t. He knew exactly what he was doing.
“You’re going to see some things here, ladies and gentlemen, and very soon, that are going to be hard for you to take in. For on that cold Friday night in February, someone-who we believe the evidence will show was the defendant, Michael Edward Schiftmann-entered Exotica Tans and murdered these two young girls. You’re going to see pictures of what the murderer did to these two young girls, and they’re going to be hard to look at. You’re going to hear experts testify as to the extent of their wounds and how much they suffered before death mercifully took them out of their pain.”
Collier turned and looked directly at the defense table, his stare hard and cold. Like stone, Taylor thought. A chill went through her as she watched the pallid man hold out a hand and point in Michael’s direction, then turn back to the jury as his voice rose:
“And you’re going to hear from a chain of witnesses, police officers, homicide investigators, forensic experts, and others who will trace the trail of Sarah’s and Allison’s blood from the place where they were brutally, mercilessly murdered to this man’s front door. We will present to you a chain of events and evidence that will establish beyond any reasonable doubt or exception that the man sitting here before you now took the lives of these two young, intelligent, beautiful women.”
Collier paused and took a breath, then lowered his voice and spoke calmly. “Now ladies and gentlemen, there are two kinds of evidence that you’re going to see here. The first is direct evidence. That’s the evidence given by eyewitnesses, experts, and others as to what they saw, what they did, what they personally can testify to from firsthand experience. The second kind of evidence is circumstantial evidence. This is evidence that requires us to examine it, and then deduce from what we see that something must have happened a certain way in order for what we just saw to be the way it is. This is evidence that requires us to make conclusions, draw inferences. This is evidence that forces us to think, to rely on our common sense, in order to discern the truth of something. If we come home from work and our spouse isn’t there and the car isn’t in the garage and the grocery list has been taken off the refrigerator door, then we deduce, or figure out, that our spouse has probably gone to the supermarket.
“Now in almost every criminal trial I’ve ever been involved in, the preponderance of evidence has been circumstantial, and this case is no exception. I’m going to tell you up front that we do not have a witness that places the defendant at the scene. No one saw the defendant kill Sarah and Allison. But we have other kinds of evidence that we will ask you to look at, and we believe and maintain that if you examine this evidence with a fair and open mind, you will conclude-as did we-that only one man could have committed these horrible deeds. Now I can’t put words in my esteemed colleague’s mouth as to what he’s going to say to you when he gets up here, but defense attorneys often try and convince you that circumstantial evidence is somehow less valid than direct evidence. That you should discount what you see because there’s no eyewitness to verify the results you conclude.
“Don’t let them, ladies and gentlemen. Don’t let them turn your eyes away from what you see and what you, with your intelligence and your common sense, have concluded must be the truth. You’re good people, you’re smart people, and you’ve taken on a tremendous responsibility. All the state can ask of you is that you use that common sense to give justice to Sarah and Allison, and to bring some peace and closure to their families and those who loved them.”
Collier gazed at the jury for a few last moments. “Thank you,” he said quietly, then turned and sat down at the prosecutor’s table.
“Mr. Talmadge, are you prepared to deliver your opening statement at this time?” Forsythe asked.
Talmadge stood. “Your Honor, we’re going to defer our opening statement until the state has concluded its case.”
“Very well,” Forsythe intoned. “General Collier, call your first witness.”
CHAPTER 31
Monday afternoon, Nashville
Of all the things that had amazed her over the past year-
from falling in love with Michael to seeing him become a major literary celebrity to watching the world explode around them as these insane charges went on and on-perhaps the most astonishing of all was the clinical detachment with which the morning had gone by.
For three hours nonstop, from the district attorney’s opening statement until the judge declared a lunch break at twelve-thirty, witness after witness took the stand and related a series of events that should have horrified and repulsed everyone beyond description. Instead, the professional voices spoke quietly; the lawyers intoned with leaden heaviness; the jury watched attentively throughout most of the morning, with only a few eyes glazing over.
It was all Taylor could do to keep still. She wanted to scream, to jump up and yelclass="underline" “Have you all lost your minds? Look at him! He’s normal, like you and me! You and me …”
Her eyes burned from lack of sleep. She felt frustrated, desperate. Her skin crawled with invisible insects under her clothes, in her hair. She fought to keep still.
And the voices went on and on. The first police officer on the scene described the grisly scene in the detached, un-emotional way he’d been taught in his report-writing classes at the academy. The first investigators on scene described how they cordoned everything off and began following accepted standard procedure-always accepted standard procedure-in their evidence collection, the samples, the bags, the labels, the sign-offs from one person to the next. The forensic examiner described the procedures for making a preliminary determination of cause of death, the estimates of time of death.
Explanations of algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis …
the singsong litany of death’s sweet terms and verses. The clinical analysis and deconstruction of life gone from a mass of rotting tissue, the light gone, energy dissipated into the universe.
Taylor wanted to scream.
The hardest parts were the photographs. Somehow, detachment was easier to maintain when it was all just words.
But the pictures, the blowups of the mutilated bodies, paraded in front of the jury-then and then alone did Taylor see a visceral reaction from the jury. Heads turned away, faces screwed up in winces …
A woman sobbed.
They took lunch at the City Club on Fourth Avenue, an exclusive, members-only club where Talmadge had a standing reservation five days a week. The two younger attorneys had rushed back to the office to research a couple of issues and to report back to the consultants who would soon be testifying for the defense. If they were lucky, they would grab a quick sandwich and a soda somewhere as Talmadge, his daughter Carey, Michael, and Taylor sat around a corner table with a gorgeous view of the city from twenty floors up.
White-coated waiters brought them tall glasses of iced tea and expensive gourmet food Taylor couldn’t bear to touch.
They talked little, the silence between them awkward, heavy. Talmadge described a little of the history of Nashville, of its incredible growth over the last twenty-five years from what had even in the seventies still felt like a small town to the churning, multicultural megalopolis it had become. Nashville had become a mini-Atlanta, Talmadge complained, as his daughter grinned at him, patronizing the old man.