Chapter Twenty-Eight
Quinn raises his right hand, and the court reporter swears him in.
His gaze is fixed on the small table for the defense.
He’d planned on giving Randy Calhoon, his mother’s boyfriend at the time of her death, a hard stare.
But he’s taken aback by Randy, who is no longer the imposing cocksure man Quinn remembers.
Randy’s once long hair is now cropped short.
His face clean-shaven. And he’s shed some weight while sitting in jail pending trial.
But it’s more than his physical appearance.
Randy Calhoon is a beaten man. Diminished in every way.
The prosecutor takes Quinn through preliminaries, focusing on Quinn’s brief time in the army, his discharge after being injured while serving his country.
His return home to tend to his brother. His plan to go into law enforcement.
Griffin doesn’t mention that Quinn’s bad leg will likely disqualify him from the police academy, or that Griffin got him an interview next week for a job with a small private investigation firm that does work for the prosecutor’s office.
In only a few questions, Griffin paints the picture of a family destroyed by a monster and a grieving son who returned from battle to pick up the pieces. Quinn notices one of the jurors, a woman about his mom’s age when she died, dab her eye with a handkerchief. That doesn’t bode well for Randy.
“You know the defendant?”
“I do.”
“How do you know him?”
“He dated my mom.”
“You spent some time around the defendant?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like him?”
“Objection, relevance,” Randy’s lawyer says. Quinn didn’t realize that the young guy was the lawyer at first. He thought he might be an intern. He’s round-faced and wears a suit that’s too big for him.
“Overruled,” the judge says.
“No, I’ve never liked him,” Quinn answers.
“And why is that?”
The defense lawyer is on his feet again but sits when the judge shakes his head.
“I thought he mistreated my mom. Mistreated my brother.”
“How so?”
“He took advantage of my mom’s kindness. He would drink a lot and he’d shout at her, at all of us. My mom was behind on the bills and I don’t think he ever helped, but expected her to feed him, take care of him.”
“Did he ever get physical with you?”
“We had an episode when I thought he’d hurt my brother. There were bruises on George’s arm and I confronted Randy about it.”
“You said that George has an intellectual disability?”
“Yes.”
“Did George tell you Randy hurt him?”
“No, my brother is nonverbal.”
“So he couldn’t report the abuse himself.”
“Objection!”
“Withdrawn, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Riley, Quinn, I want to take you to May first, nineteen ninety-three. Do you remember that day?”
“Yes.”
“You sound pretty certain, given that it was two years ago. Two years ago to this very day, in fact.” Griffin looks over at the jury. “Is there a reason you remember it so clearly?”
“Yes, May first is my birthday.”
“Well, happy birthday, son,” Griffin says, pretending he didn’t already know. “How old are you?”
“I’m twenty.”
“Twenty years old,” Griffin says, as if he can’t believe everything Quinn’s been through at such a young age. “Other than it being your birthday, is there any other reason that date is memorable to you?”
“Yes.”
“Please tell the jury why.”
Quinn inhales. Tells the twelve citizens who are all staring at him about going to his house on that May night—a house that had been shuttered because it fell into foreclosure after his mother’s death.
“The defendant, her boyfriend, didn’t cover the mortgage?”
“He did not.”
“You weren’t able to pull the house out of foreclosure yourself?”
Quinn swallows. “No. When I got back from Somalia I looked into getting the house back, but it was already sold. And I didn’t have enough money anyway.”
“You were in a dangerous place out there in Africa. Didn’t the army give you combat pay?”
Quinn sees what Griffin is doing, trying to invoke sympathy from the jury, but he doesn’t like it. “We weren’t technically in a war, but I did get hostile fire pay.”
“And how much was that?”
“One hundred and fifty dollars a month.”
Griffin makes a sound of disgust. “So five dollars a day?” He pauses but doesn’t wait for Quinn to answer. “I can see why it wouldn’t be enough to save your family home.”
Quinn makes brief eye contact with Holly who is in the back of the gallery. She gives him an encouraging nod.
“Back to May first, two years ago, please tell the jury about that day.”
“I was leaving for basic training in a couple days and had nowhere to stay so I went to my old house. It was mostly cleared out because of the foreclosure. I looked in this old secret spot, a side attic, where my brother used to hide out. Mom used to call it the cubby.”
“And was there anything inside this cubby?” Griffin asks, skipping over the reason Quinn looked inside the cubby.
“Yes, I found a hammer.”
Griffin is standing before the jury now, displaying a clear evidence bag that has a hammer inside it. He dramatically walks over to Quinn, holds up the bag.
“Is this the hammer you found?”
“It looks like it. I recognize the tape on the handle. It was my dad’s. He’d used it to make me and George a tree fort.”
Griffin waits a beat, like he’s letting the jury imagine Quinn’s dad swinging the hammer to build the tree house as Quinn and George looked on in the summer sun. “Is there anything different about the hammer today from when you found it?”
Quinn looks at Randy, then the jury. “Yes. It no longer has blood and hair on its head.”