Nearly two full days passed before Ziegler called the police again. They had not searched her garbage for evidence, Ziegler insisted, and Molly, the kitten, had not materialized. An officer drove his squad car to Ziegler’s apartment, and upon his arrival, Ziegler stood eagerly waiting. Nobody wants to dig through days-old rancid trash and come upon devastating evidence alone. Ziegler handed the deputy a bag of trash as she searched another, both of them pushing aside food scraps and used tissues like human scavengers. That’s when Ziegler unearthed a wad of black mesh and gasped, “This looks like it’s from a boxspring.”
Back inside her apartment, with Ziegler’s guidance, the officer matched the mesh to the undercarriage of Ziegler’s sofa, fitting it against the ripped-out portion. Just like Wilson, Molly was camouflaged inside—black fur blending into the black cavern of the hollow furniture. The officer spied her tufted ears and pulled her through the opening, like a magician pulling a limp rabbit from a hat. Molly’s matted and wet fur was curled into the shapes of metal sofa springs, and like Wilson, Molly was dead.
Ziegler glowered at the wet cat, each millisecond of disbelief fueling her frenzy. She ricocheted from room to room, hypothesizing and efficiently stockpiling evidence against Michalik. She found a plastic storage bin with kitty scratch marks on the inside, a wet towel coated with cat fur, and last but not least, the most damning evidence of all: an army uniform name tape labeled MICHALIK peeping from the bathtub drain, over which, one might imagine, Michalik had hovered as he filled Molly’s plastic death chamber from the cold tap. Joseph Michalik was the only person in Ziegler’s apartment when the cats went missing. Dozens of text messages between Michalik and Ziegler proved he was the last person to see the cats alive.
As Ryan prepared for trial, he worried the jury instructions read like a worksheet for a literature course titled Contemporary Courtroom Drama, and “army name tape” was the answer for a fill-in-the-blank question regarding the mistreatment of animals according to Wisconsin statutes. When Ryan appeared on TV a second time for the same case, he furrowed his brow, discussing Michalik’s life before the war, a criminally unblemished record, not even a speeding ticket. The pompadour thickness of Joseph Michalik’s wavy dark hair looked wet, his forehead equally pleated in surprise at the events of his own life, and his face twitched as he turned toward Ryan the way boys turn toward big brothers. Brain damage from his encounter with an IED in Iraq manifested as symptoms of Tourette’s. He was twenty-nine years old, but his mother had chauffeured him to the arraignment, on fumes of gasoline, from the Veterans Affairs hospital where he was voluntarily seeking treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder.
For Michalik, the dividing line between lawfulness and crime was once clear, but this distinction had been erased during his tour of duty in the Middle East. When my grandfather Frank, a journalist for whom Francis was named, suffered his first stroke, his vocabulary talents powdered into the sides of his brain, and he’d stare at me ashamed when I brandished his transistor radio and all he could say was “phone book.” Michalik had suffered the stroke of combat. He spun the Rolodex of names for the campaign for which he had fought, but he wound up baffled, speechless, in a courtroom with bright lights. Was it the Iraq War or the War on Iraq or Operation Iraqi Freedom or the Second US-Iraq War or Gulf War II?
Ryan was bigger than Michalik but softer, a prizefighter in only one school-bus skirmish, decades earlier, but he was not afraid to sit beside this sniper educated in the school of firing hot bullets into the temples of insurgents’ heads, because Michalik, unlike the Malik Turners of the world, was afraid of himself. When police picked him up shortly after his return from Iraq for disorderly conduct—his first offense—he bellowed on a long exhale of booze, “You have no idea what it’s like to stare down the barrel of a gun and watch somebody’s head explode.”
When the IED exploded and knocked Michalik from his wits, killing a handful of his troops and the commander of his platoon, blunt force was written like code into this soldier’s head. His body would remember without any conscious effort the true impact of violence. Poor Wilson. Was he the most plausible victim when Michalik awoke, in the bruised hours of a winter night, in his ex-girlfriend’s bed? Did Wilson yawn and stretch, also awakened, on the same set of sheets where Michalik had tried to replace lives he’d ended in Iraq with desire, sex, and a new baby boy? A flashback to combat would explain the thud heard that night; terra-cotta flowerpots smashed to bits on Ziegler’s apartment floor; curtains pulled from rods, wrestled to the floor like ghosts; the large, wet bin, sticky with black cat hair where Molly lay lifeless before her burial inside the living room couch, not returned to the earth properly as cats should be.
Michalik’s crime nagged at Ryan from some kind of fathomless place inside him, not because of the violence but because the defendant and his alleged crime were intuitively incongruent. As spring thawed, Ryan planted the seeds of his strategy, hoping to use Michalik’s PTSD as a defense when up against the assistant district attorney prosecuting State of Wisconsin v. Joseph A. Michalik. A former army ranger, perhaps remembering his own service, this DA, although tough as pumice on crime, showed signs of empathy toward Michalik. When I met him grocery shopping one day, he pumped a gallon of milk in each fist and looked more like I’d imagined Michalik should—the face of America’s armed forces, fit, brawny, gritting his
