Robert said, “Then conference him in.”
“He could be overheard talking in his room,” Ananberg said. “And we don’t know if those phone lines are secure.”
“He gets exhausted pretty quickly,” Rayner said. “I’m not sure if he has the focus or stamina right now to pay these deliberations the meticulous attention they demand.”
“I say we wait for him to recover,” Tim said.
Rayner faced them, his hands trembling slightly. “I spoke to his doctor at length today. His prognosis… I’m not sure that waiting for hisrecovery is the wisest idea.”
Robert blanched. “Oh.”
Mitchell got busy scratching his forehead.
Shock turned to sadness before Tim could get a handle on it. It took him a moment to regain his composure, then he nodded at Rayner to move ahead.
Rayner grabbed a binder and tossed it on the table. “Terrill Bowrick of the Warren Shooters.”
On October 30, 2002, three seniors at Earl Warren High had gotten into a sixth-period altercation with the starting lineup of the school basketball team. They’d retreated to their vehicles and returned with ordnance. While Terrill Bowrick stood guard at the door, his two coperpetrators had entered the school gymnasium, where they’d fired ninety-seven rounds in less than two minutes, killing eleven students and wounding eight.
The coach’s five-year-old daughter, Lizzy Bowman, who’d been watching practice from the bleachers, had caught a stray bullet through her left eye. Greeting Angelenos on their doorsteps Halloween morning was a front-page photo of her father on both knees, clutching her limp body-a reverse Pieta for the new millennium. Tim remembered vividly how the coach’s jersey had borne a blood imprint of his daughter’s face, a crimson half mask. Tim had set down the paper, dropped Ginny off at school, then sat in his car in the parking lot for five minutes before walking to his daughter’s classroom so he could see her again through the window before leaving her.
The two gunmen, lean stepbrothers bound by a perverse codependence, had claimed there had been no premeditation. Their father was a pawnbroker-they’d been transporting the weapons between two of his stores, just happened to have dueling SKSs and four mags in the trunk when they’d lost their cool. Second-degree murder at worst, their defense lawyer claimed, maybe even a push for temporary insanity. A foolish argument, but good enough to get past your average foolish jury.
The prosecutor, unable to play the brothers off against each other and faced with wrathful media and a community hell-bent on vengeance, had realized he could roll Bowrick with a grant of immunity. Bowrick, a second-time senior who’d just stumbled across the threshold of his eighteenth birthday and thus was sweating heavy, could testify that they’d planned the shooting in the preceding weeks, thus establishing premed and giving the prosecution an express train to murder in the first. The stepbrothers, also not Oppenheimers in the classroom, were legal adults as well.
The prosecutor slid the immunity grant past the media by pointing out that Bowrick was the least culpable co-conspirator and that his participation had been the least egregious. He slid it past his division chief by making clear that Bowrick, a twig of a kid with a lame arm and a limp, could play to jury sympathy and that all the evidence to prove up the premed was circumstantial. By providing independent corroboration, Bowrick could shore up the case.
After Bowrick testified, the brothers were convicted and fast-tracked for capital punishment. Bowrick walked with a plea to a lesser charge-accessory after the fact-and was granted a deal for probation and a thousand hours of community service, no time served.
“So that’s what a school shooting buys you these days.”
Mitchell joined in Tim’s disgust. “About the same sentence you’d get for spray-painting graffiti on your neighbor’s shiny new Volvo.”
“Let’s bear in mind that he was only an aider and abetter,” Robert said. His eyes, glassy and loose-focused, betrayed the slightest identification with Bowrick, the outsider.
“Maybe he didn’t fire the weapon because he couldn’t hold it properly with an atrophied arm,” Tim said.
“And regardless, Robert,” Rayner said, “an aider and abetter is subject to the same sentence as those who actually perpetrate the crime.”
“Less the gun enhancements,” Robert said.
“No one needs the gun enhancements. It was a capital-punishment case.”
Robert tilted his head, a gesture of concession. “Right,” he said. “That’s right.”
“The case precedent is pretty clear on this one,” Ananberg said, “particularly for accomplices of this type. Aiders and abetters have gotten dinged on special circumstances for everything from lying-in-wait allegations to multiple-murder allegations.”
Bowrick’s booking photo sat faceup to Tim’s right, the border nudging his knuckles. Despite Bowrick’s attempt to approximate good posture, the flare of his dishwater-blond bangs barely notched the five-foot-eight line painted on the wall behind him. A jagged half-coin pendant dangled from a thin gold necklace. Sullenness pervaded his features. He didn’t have the confidence to give off surly; his was the pasty-white face of hope beaten down to unhappy submission. He was sullen like a kicked dog, like the kid picked last, like a deflowered girl after her lover’s too-hasty departure.
Ananberg backed them up, and Rayner led them through the case from the beginning. They started by scouring the evidence reports-admissible and inadmissible. Their evaluative capabilities had drastically improved as they’d grown more familiar with Ananberg’s procedure, leading to sharper focus, more incisive arguments, and a wider exploration of potentialities. The deliberations were all the more impressive given the divisiveness at the meeting’s outset.
When the final document had made its way around the table, Tim slid it into the binder and glanced up at the others. “Let’s vote.”
Guilty. Unanimous. Ananberg, who’d cast her vote last, crossed her hands on the table, her expression oddly content.
“There is one major complication,” Rayner said. “After he went state’s evidence, Bowrick went into hiding.” He spread his hands, Jesus calming the seas. “The good news is, he didn’t go into witness protection. Not formally. But he was getting death threats, his property vandalized. After someone tried to burn down his apartment, he switched his name and moved away. Only his probation officer knows where he is.”
“I’ll find him,” Tim said quietly.
“If he’s still under the thumb of his PO, he’s still laying his head somewhere in L.A.,” Robert said.
Mitchell’s fingers strummed on the table. Stopped. He looked at Rayner. “Can you pry where he’s staying from the PO?”
“Too messy,” Tim said before Rayner could respond. “Too many trails leading back to us.”
“We know he’s logging community-service hours,” Robert said. “Why don’t we run a check on what programs are up where, give a glance?”
“I said I’ll find him,” Tim said. “Without stoking any fires. I’ll take care of it quietly. You all sit tight and keep silent.”
Rayner was standing at the safe, his back to the others. Before Tim could move to rise, Rayner turned and let another black binder drop on the table. Tim’s eyes went past him to the last black binder in the safe. Kindell’s.
He wondered if Ananberg had even attempted to get him the public defender’s notes from Kindell’s binder.
Rayner followed Tim’s gaze behind him to the open safe. He smiled curtly, reached back, and closed it. Tim continued to find Rayner’s petty power plays galling, despite their transparency.
“What do you say we tackle one more case now while our brains are warmed up?”
Tim checked his watch. 11:57.
“I got nowhere to go,” Robert said.
Ananberg’s laugh, sharp and short, rang off the wood-paneled walls. “I don’t think any of us has anywhere to go. Tim, do you have to get home?”
“I don’t have a home, remember?”