clutched in one arm. This time, all twelve members of the jury looked angry, and they weren’t alone. The rumble of sympathetic outrage from the packed courtroom had the judge raising his gavel to a menacing angle until it subsided.
Pauline’s testimony was unemotional, factual, almost dry, but by now everyone knew how many times she had told their story, and if anything the lack of feeling engendered more pity rather than less. When the defense attorney asked her why she and her sisters had run away to Anchorage, she told him, sparing no detail of the sexual abuse visited on all three of them by their stepfather. When the defense attorney asked her why they had turned to prostitution, she said, “Why should we give it away for free? We had enough of that at home.” When the defense attorney asked her if she or her sisters had killed Da Prez, she said, “He was nice to us. We were warm and dry, and we had clean clothes. He watched out for us. Why would we kill him?”
Laura tossed her ponytail a lot. When the defense attorney asked her if she’d killed Da Prez, she said in what looked like honest indignation, “No! He was nice to us. He took us to the movies.” Tears welled up in the big brown eyes she turned on the judge. “You’re not going to let them send us back to
Linda spoke steadfastly to her Barbie doll. When the defense attorney asked her in the gentlest possible voice why she and her sisters had moved in with Jefferson, she said simply, “We were hungry. And it was cold outside.” When asked if she or her sisters had shot him, she only shook her head, her little girl hands smoothing Barbie’s blond curls.
The last witness for the defense was the woman testifying now, a Native Alaskan like the defendants, and from their own place, an enormous wilderness north and east of Anchorage, a place of isolated villages, few roads, and a population vastly outnumbered by the resident wildlife. Yes, she knew the girls’ family. Yes, she knew the girls’ parents. She told of the girls’ father, drowned while fishing in Alaganik Bay six years before, and of their mother, dead in childbirth three years before. Yes, she knew the girls’ stepfather, in whose custody the three girls had spent the two and a half years prior to running away, and related a litany of offenses in a list longer than the Domesday Book. When asked why such a person remained in charge of minor children, she made such an obvious effort not to cast an accusing look at the judge that everyone looked at him anyway. His expression was not reminiscent of pride in his profession.
The jury wasn’t out for fifteen minutes, and they came back in with a unanimous verdict of not guilty. The courtroom burst into applause. A smile spread across the judge’s face. He didn’t bother gaveling them into silence.
DFYS swept down onto the girls and enfolded them in a warm, bureaucratic embrace. The press snapped photos and updated their blogs on their smartphones. The president of a local bank posed with the girls and a very large check, which represented the donations of thousands of Alaskans, alerted to the plight of the orphans by continuous and excruciatingly detailed news coverage, including graphic details, sociological commentary, and many heartwarming photographs of the girls in their new foster home with loving and thoroughly vetted foster parents, in their new schools, and guest-judging the largest cabbage at the last Alaska State Fair.
Unnoticed, their character witness slid through the crowd to the door, where a husky-wolf mix with ears big enough to cast their own Bat-Signal waited. Next to the dog was the prosecuting attorney.
The closing doors dimmed but did not obliterate the joyous noise inside the courtroom.
“Well, Kate?” said the big man with the red hair and the food-spotted tie.
“Well what, Brendan?” she said.
He looked at the double doors that led into the courtroom. “Justice done?”
For a man who had just lost a major trial in the first segment of every television news show that evening, he looked remarkably pleased with himself.
“WHAT A CIRCUS,” Kate said. It was difficult to make herself heard over the din. “Who leaked?”
“I don’t know,” Brendan said, his face grim. He led the way through the horde of journalists, Kate following in his wake, speaking no further word until they were safe behind the door of his office. They sat and regarded each other glumly. “We’ll have to try them now,” he said.
Kate could not hide her dismay. “Even the twelve-year-old?”
“Come on, Kate. Maybe even especially the twelve-year-old. The NRA has everyone in Juneau by the balls, and you know their tagline as well as I do. Guns don’t kill people, people do. The Brady Law didn’t change that, it just ratcheted up the decibel level. They fixed it so we have to try almost anyone of almost any age who uses a firearm in the commission of a crime, and this is murder.”
She thought, but didn’t say, that there was a dedicated lack of enthusiasm to the prosecution’s entire case. Nevertheless, Brendan was right. The district attorney’s office was now firmly caught between the Scylla of public opinion and the Charybdis of political necessity, and they were going to have to trim their sails very ably indeed not to end up drowned in one or eaten alive by the other.
“BELIEVE IT OR NOT, he wasn’t that bad a guy,” Brendan said. “We hauled him in a couple of times for assaults on johns who beat up on his girls. He protected them, avenged them when he couldn’t, fed them, kept them in clean clothes, even had a GP check them out once a month. Signed the older ones up with Family Planning, if you can believe that. Paid for their abortions at a legitimate clinic. Bought condoms by the case at Costco and taught his girls how to use them.”
“Even the twelve-year-old?” Kate said.
Brendan raised a hand, palm out. “I know, and you’re right. I’m just saying. Da Prez wasn’t the worst pimp on the street, not by a long shot.”
She couldn’t argue with him. Over the past year too many Alaska Native girls, runaways from abusive family situations in Bush villages, said abuse almost invariably fueled by alcohol, had wound up on the street in Anchorage. On average, one in three of them was recruited into prostitution, and once they had been groomed, most pimps regarded them strictly as a cash-producing asset all too easily replaced by the next kid off the plane.
Brendan sighed. “The kids land in Anchorage, and they’re cold and they’re hungry and they’re lonely, and they’re hanging out at the Dimond Mall begging for change, and somebody rolls up in a Hummer and promises them the moon. Hard to turn that down.”
The FBI’s Anchorage office had recently taken a task force into the Bush to warn the elders of the trend. “They came to Niniltna,” Kate said. “The whole village turned out at the gym for their presentation.”
“It’s not like people in the villages haven’t noticed their children have been disappearing.” Brendan’s mouth twisted. “And it’s not like most of them don’t know why.” He looked up. “You know the Akuluraks?”
“Knew of them,” she said. “Obviously didn’t know enough.”
“Come on, Kate. You can’t be there for everyone.”
Her bleak expression was answer enough.
“THEY’RE FROM NINILTNA?” Brendan snatched up the phone. “Get Jim Chopin at the Niniltna trooper post for me, pronto.”
THE THIRTY-YEAR-OLD HOUSE was ranch style, built on a slab with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Green patches of moss grew on the roof, but the blue paint on the siding was only just beginning to peel, and the grass was freshly mowed.
Inside, the fixtures and furniture were worn but clean. The living room had a large flat-screen television and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with DVDs, including every Disney film since
Two girls sat close to each other on the couch, looking up at a third who sat on the coffee table, facing them. The.357 dwarfed her right hand, but she held it competently, the butt in a firm clasp, finger outside the guard, safety on, the barrel pointed down and away. “I know it’s been rough,” she said. “But we all agreed it was the only way.”
