Battered women did not feel like they could get away. They were forever trapped in a situation from which they could literally neither run nor hide, and which would someday, in all probability, kill them.
Hardy believed Freeman could prove that Jennifer taking Ned's life had been justifiable, a sometimes valid form of self-defense that the courts had begun to recognize. Even with Judge Villars, even with the legislature failing to pass a law codifying BWS as a defense. Hardy was fairly confident they could get Jennifer off. Certainly, as he had pointed out, no jury in the State of California would call for the death penalty.
Jennifer was not stupid. She knew that if she agreed to assert the battered-woman syndrome, then her life, at least, would be removed from the equation – it would no longer be a capital case.
So the recurring question was: Why wouldn't she plead to it? Her reason was that it implied a defense against guilt, and she said she had no reason for a defense against something she hadn't done.
And she could not very well plead to one murder and not the other. No one would believe her. Powell would laugh at it. A jury would be insulted. No judge would be sympathetic. Yet Hardy found himself believing it. Jennifer Witt did not kill her son, she had not been there when he had been killed, she had known nothing about it. Matt rang true, and if he bought that – which was not at all the same as believing a jury would buy it – then working backward, all the other apparent duplicity made a perverse kind of sense.
She could not admit to any similarities, especially in so far as battery, between her lives with Ned and with Larry, especially once they'd gotten as far as trial.
There was no evidence that she had been beaten, and if they admitted at trial that she had been, in the jury's mind that would only make it more likely that she had killed both of her husbands. So her position had to be that no one had ever abused her. It was the only story that worked… And of course, truthful or not, David Freeman the lawyer gobbled it up and made it his own.
There was a pause in the downpour. Hardy was wearing tennis shoes, jeans and a green waterproof jacket. He got out of the car, and from where he stood, near the top of Olympia up the block from Jennifer's house, he could see a band of blue widening at the horizon. Even this early in the morning, and it was before seven, the air was strangely humid and heavy, laden with the smell of eucalyptus.
He didn't know why he had driven out here, or what, if anything, he expected to find or accomplish. Light- headed, he walked from his car up past the Witt house to the edge of the grove surrounding Twin Peaks, leading up to Sutro Tower, the source of the eucalyptus scent. A mother deer and her two fawns were rooting through the foliage there, fifty or sixty feet back into the trees.
The deer bolted, startled, disappearing into the woods. In the deep shade, Hardy blinked his stinging eyes, trying to clear his vision, stunned to see Jennifer Witt in a bright blue jogging outfit break from the cover of the trees and run toward him on the trail, then past him – no, close up it wasn't, of course, her – out to the street, where whoever it was turned down Olympia.
As he stood there, drizzle began to fall again and he ran, following her footsteps, around the corner and down the long block to his car. The woman, jogging faster than Hardy could sprint, had turned downhill on Clarendon.
The car spun on the wet pavement, then straightened. Hardy took the corner at Olympia and hydroplaned again, his wheels this time bouncing off the concrete corner-divider before he got the car under control again.
He was alongside the woman, slowing down and honking his horn, motioning for her to pull over. She flipped him off, stole a glance at her watch and kept going.
Hardy slowed, rolled down his passenger window and gunned it up to her again, honking. 'I need help,' he called out to her. Driving ahead another hundred yards, he pulled to the curb, throwing open his door and getting out. He held his hands wide, spread out at shoulder height, offering no threat. The woman slowed abruptly, stopping fifty feet up the street. The rain started coming in sheets.
'What?' she gasped. 'Can't you see I'm trying to run?' Hardy tooka step toward her and she put her hand to her hip. 'I've got mace here on my belt and I'll use it.'
'I need to ask you a question.'
A car passed going the other direction, slowed to look, then sped up the street.
'A question?' She shook her head in disbelief. 'Who the hell are you? Leave me alone.'
Hardy wished he could try the old badge trick but he didn't carry it as a matter of course. It was at home, there if he decided he might need to use it.
'I'm going by,' the woman said. 'You'd better leave me some room.' She was, in fact, holding what looked like a spray can in her hand and Hardy had no doubt she'd use it.
He had to talk fast, find some lever. She was coming toward him cautiously. 'You ever hear of Jennifer Witt? I'm her lawyer.'
'Good for you. I'm a runner.'
She turned it on, going by the other side of his car. There wasn't so much as a glance back as she flew down the street, around a curve and out of his sight.
Back in his car, Hardy consoled himself that it was probably nothing anyway. But then, three blocks later, he realized the truth of what he'd just done – he thought he might have stumbled on a nugget of truth in one of Jennifer's explanations – so he hadn't given up on her.
Jennifer had said she always started out walking for a couple of blocks when she left her house to go jogging. She had insisted that was her routine, and she followed it on the morning of December 28. And somebody else, with a resemblance to her, came running by her house just as some shots were fired. That person stopped, saw nothing, and continued running, right from Jennifer's gate. And was identified as Jennifer by the State's star eyewitness. Anthony Alvarez.
It almost gave him real hope.
Glitsky called after dinner and told them they should turn on the news because David Freeman was on.
Moses and his new wife Susan were over, and everyone was at the front of the house. While Hardy turned on the set, Moses plopped himself on the sofa. 'That guy gets more air than a hot-air balloon,' he said. Turning around, Hardy said that David Freeman was a hot-air balloon. When it suited him.
The man himself appeared on the screen. Unshaven, hang-dog, his tie askew over his wrinkled shirt, with sleeves partially rolled up – here was a man who'd been working all night and all day on behalf of his client. He was sitting on the edge of the desk in his office, his lawbooks visible behind him – and the sound came up. '… victory but, to be quite candid, I expected it. I have fought from the original arraignment to have this case dismissed for lack of evidence, and, of course, the judge's ruling here corroborates what I've maintained all along – Jennifer Witt is innocent. She did not do these things.'
Hardy and Frannie, now sharing their own secret about Ned, exchanged a glance. 'He is some piece of work,' Hardy whispered.
The young female reporter spoke earnestly into the camera. 'And, obviously buoyed by yesterday's victory, Mr. Freeman had some even stonger charges to make.'
This was edited tape, and again the sound bite picked up in mid-sentence. Freeman was answering another question. '… there's the political motive. I hate to bring this up, but it's true – Dean Powell is running for Attorney General on a pro-death-penalty ticket. At the same time, you can't have a death penalty just for black men. He needs a case like this, and he needs it right now. If Jennifer Witt hadn't come along he would have had to invent her.' Freeman hung his head, genuinely saddened by the flawed nature of humankind. 'Unfortunately,' he said, 'that's essentially what he did.'
Suddenly they were back in the newsroom and the anchorwoman was saying to his partner, 'Those are some pretty strong accusations, Shel, and we'll be following that trial every day here on Channel 5.'
'That's right, Jack.' Shel beamed at the camera, filling the screen. 'Want to know what happens when three sisters fight over the family dog?'
'Slick segue, Shel,' Frannie intoned.
Moses, leaning forward on the couch, shushed his sister, speaking to the TV. 'Yeah, three sisters and the
