I turn him over to Dylan, who continues to take the same approach to what he considers tangential testimony. He doesn’t want to get too far into the nitty-gritty of it, fearing that would give it credibility, and worse, relevance.
“Mr. Willis, that was quite an adventure you went on.”
“I guess…”
“Discovering the body of a known mobster like that, it must have been frightening,” Dylan says.
“It was, but I handled it.”
“Obviously. Now that it’s over, and you can look back on it, what does it have to do with the Paterson fire that was set six years ago?”
I had told Sam that Dylan would lead him down this path, trying to get Sam to give a tortured explanation of how Loney’s death could possibly relate to Noah’s guilt or innocence. But the quick flash of panic in Sam’s eyes makes me fear that in the pressure of the moment he’s going to forget the plan.
He doesn’t.
“I’m afraid I haven’t given that any thought,” he says. “My job was to analyze the phone records, and try to track down Mr. Loney. I wasn’t told to work on any theories. That’s above my pay grade.”
It stops Dylan in his tracks; he wants to attack the relevance but can’t, since Sam didn’t testify to it. He tries to come at it from a few other angles, but Sam is ready for him, and deflects it.
All in all, it’s a tour de force performance, and I don’t even have to ask any additional questions on redirect.
I am not at all happy with the quality of our defense, or where we stand in the trial as we reach the end. We’ve thrown a bunch of stuff on the jury wall, but at this point there is little chance that it stuck. I’m going to have to explain what it all means during my closing statement, and hope that we can get to that elusive reasonable doubt, at least in some jurors’ minds.
Where I think we have been successful is in casting doubt on the Butler statement recounting Noah’s “confession.” It should be clear by now that Noah barely knew him, and would have been very unlikely to have confided such a monstrous secret.
Working against us, of course, is the fact that Butler’s statement is corroborated by other evidence, most notably the DNA on the paint can. That is simply not something that we have been able to effectively rebut.
Closing statements will be tomorrow, and I head home to do some preparatory work. Laurie is not there; hopefully she’s out either solving the case or, if not that, maybe getting some sexy lingerie to please her man.
I take Tara and Bailey for a walk and then settle in to read through the files for what seems like the five- millionth time. Laurie comes home at around nine o’clock. I don’t see any Victoria’s Secret bags, so hopefully she solved the case.
The look on her face says that she just might have.
“I’ve been at the hospital,” she says. “Seeing Jesse Briggs.”
“How is he?”
“Not good. He’s not going to leave there, and he knows it. The doctors have stopped treatment.”
“That’s too bad,” I say. “But why were you there?”
“I’ve been finding out as much as I can about his daughter and her baby, but I needed to know something else, and I knew he could tell me. She moved back to Paterson a few months before the baby was born.”
I nod. “I know. Tony told us that when we were at Taco Bell.”
“Good memory,” she says. “But do you know where she moved from?”
“No.”
She smiles. “Delaware. Dover, Delaware.”
“Well, you’ve now heard all of the evidence,” Dylan says.
“I know that it wasn’t easy. Sometimes lawyers like me have a tendency to speak more than we should. My wife often says that I take five sentences to say something I shouldn’t say in the first place.”
He pauses to smile, so the jurors will know he’s joking, and a few of them return the smile.
“And it wasn’t just long and sometimes dull; some of it was difficult to watch and hear. I know that, but there was no way around it. You are the triers of fact, and you needed to know the facts.
“Now you do.
“Every fact in the case points to Noah Galloway as the arsonist, as the mass murderer. He bought drugs from the dealers in that building. They cut him off, and he became furious. He knew how to mix the chemicals. His DNA was on the murder weapon. He confessed the crime, in detail.
“It couldn’t be clearer.
“And how does the defense respond? Not with evidence, because they have none. So they talk about other murders, which have nothing to do with this case. One of the murdered people called Danny Butler. That’s it, yet they try to create an entire defense around it.
“You’ll notice at no point did Mr. Carpenter offer a theory as to why these evil-doers framed Mr. Galloway, or why they planted all this evidence, but then waited six years to reveal. Or even who has been doing these killings, or what they have to do with this trial.
“So when I say that you’ve heard all the evidence, I mean that you’ve heard all that relates to this case, and a heck of a lot that doesn’t.
“I thank you for your patience, and I especially thank you for your service. All I ask is that you continue to exercise your best judgment, and keep your eyes on the true facts. And then follow those facts to justice.”
I stand even before Dylan sits down; I don’t want to let his words sink in too deeply. “There is much that I don’t know,” I say. “I wish I knew more, so that I could tell it to you, and everything would be clear.
“Unfortunately, life doesn’t usually work that way, and trials almost never do. So all we can do is go by what we know at the time, and what we think that could mean.
“The prosecution would have you believe that Noah Galloway, a man who never committed a violent act in his life, decided one day to ruthlessly burn twenty-six people to death. And why? Because he had a grudge against three people.
“They would have you believe that instead of killing those people, perhaps with a gun, Mr. Galloway somehow carried in a mixture of napalm, in so many cans that it would have been impossible for one person to hold. Then he went through the building, spreading out this mixture, risking detection at any point. And then he set fire to the building, in the process burning up all the drugs they say he was so desperate to have.
“And then what did he do with the cans? Leave them to be incinerated and destroyed in the fire? Not according to the prosecution’s case. No, they think he carried at least one out and left it a few blocks away, with his burned skin on it.
“But if that wasn’t a crazy enough thing for him to do, their theory is that he then confessed the crime in minute detail to a relative stranger, for no apparent reason. And that stranger, drug-addicted himself and not very bright in the first place, remembered every single detail, so as to be able to repeat it six years later.
“And now, six years later, people are continuing to die. Noah Galloway sits in a prison cell, as airtight an alibi as one could imagine, while people involved in this case continue to die.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it makes no sense. What does make sense is that Noah Galloway has been made a fall guy. I can’t tell you why right now; I expect that someday I’ll be able to. But your job, and even my job, is not to find all the answers. It’s to judge the guilt or innocence of one man.
“Noah Galloway is an exemplary citizen, who overcame a terrible problem and has helped countless others overcome theirs. His is a comeback and a story to be celebrated. He deserves our thanks, not our condemnation. And justice, true justice, demands that he be set free.
“Thank you.”
When I finish, Noah shakes my hand, and even Hike nods his approval. I hear Judge De Luca say that court is concluded early for the day, and that he will issue jury instructions tomorrow.
But I’m only half listening, and I’m out the door as soon as he finishes talking.
I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.
Laurie got the call about an hour after Andy left.
It was from Alex Bauer, and the fear in his voice was evident. He was standing in his den, pacing as he talked.
“They’re coming after me,” he said. “Somebody has stepped in to replace Loney.”
