Chapter Three
Karen Wyatt walked into her penthouse and placed the takeout order of pad thai on the kitchen counter.
Her license to practice law had been restored shortly after Harry Schmidt had cleared her name.
In the three years since she had restarted her practice, the publicity from her case had drawn enough clients that she had been forced to hire three associates.
Karen was thrilled to be practicing law again, but after a day in court with Oscar Vanderlasky, a candidate for the Idiots’ Hall of Fame, she had started thinking of a new career as a travel agent or dog walker.
Karen sighed. The trial would be over soon, and she was going to win.
She didn’t have another case scheduled for court until next month. She would survive.
Karen fixed her dinner. Vanderlasky would start calling witnesses in the morning.
She was tempted to review her notes when she finished eating, but she knew she was thoroughly prepared and she decided to relax with a romantic comedy on Netflix.
By the time the movie ended, she could barely keep her eyes open.
Fifteen minutes later, she was in bed, and soon after she pulled the covers up, she was in a deep sleep.
The nightmare wasn’t new. It was one of several with a recurring theme that she had experienced periodically since she had been released from prison.
Sometimes she was a bird in a cage who beat its wings against the bars in a futile effort to get out.
This night, Karen was a child who was trapped in a closet that no light penetrated.
She pounded her little fist against the door, she screamed for help.
No one came, and the walls seemed to be closing in.
She couldn’t breathe, and that’s when she shot up in bed, her heart pounding.
It didn’t take a Sigmund Freud to figure out the origin of Karen’s nightmare.
Spending a year in prison for a crime you didn’t commit would play havoc with anyone’s psyche.
The experience left scars that could cripple a person, unless she believed Nietzsche’s proposition that things that don’t kill us make us stronger. Karen embraced that assertion.
She wanted to rest in her bed to recover from her nightmare, but she couldn’t relax.
She walked into her kitchen and poured ice water from the filter in her refrigerator into a tall glass.
She carried the glass into the spacious living room of the $2 million penthouse she’d purchased with a small part of the multimillion-dollar settlement Harry Schmidt had gotten her.
Harry didn’t have to work too hard to get the city to cave.
He sensed that everyone Karen was suing wanted her sordid tale buried and forgotten.
The main reason Karen had purchased this penthouse was the large living room with its floor-to-ceiling windows that provided a view across the Willamette River to the snow-covered slopes of majestic Mount Hood.
After a year shut up between the concrete walls of a tiny cell with no view of the sky or stars, she needed these constant reminders that she was a free woman.
Karen looked out at the lights that illuminated Portland.
There was a full moon and enough stars to make the sky look like a tapestry that celebrated the majesty of the universe.
She savored the view while she finished the water in her glass.
By the time the glass was empty, she had relaxed enough to believe she would be able to sleep.
She returned to the bedroom and got between the covers.
Then she turned off the light on her nightstand, hopeful that she would get the rest she needed to be fit enough to eviscerate the case Oscar Vanderlasky was going to present to a jury in the morning.
For many years, the Multnomah County Courthouse had been an eight-story, gray concrete building that occupied a block in the middle of downtown Portland.
The courthouse had been constructed between 1909 and 1914, and it had been abandoned in 2020 after a new, modern, seismically safer building was constructed near the west end of the Hawthorne Bridge.
The new location gave visitors and the courthouse staff a view of boats cruising the Willamette River and the majestic snow-covered slopes of the Cascade Mountain Range.
The courtrooms in the old courthouse featured high ceilings, ornate molding, marble Corinthian columns, and daises of polished wood.
The courtrooms in the new building had none of the grandeur or historic character of the old courtrooms. They had flat, dull, brown wooden desks with clean lines that could have been bought at IKEA and were built for function, not form.
Attorneys could charge laptops or phones in outlets in their counsel tables.
Videos and evidence were presented to jurors on wall-mounted screens.
Deputy district attorneys Oscar Vanderlasky and Muriel Lujack were already seated at the counsel table closest to the jury box when Karen entered Judge Leo Cohen’s courtroom with her client, Laurie Post.
Many DAs would have refused to charge Post, the victim of an abusive boyfriend.
Vanderlasky had gleefully prosecuted Post as soon as he learned that Karen was representing her.
He was part of a group of prosecutors and police officers who tried to make Karen’s life miserable ever since she had exposed corruption in the police force and DA’s office.
Karen had always wondered if Vanderlasky was involved in the frame that had sent her to prison.
If Karen had looked up WASP in the dictionary, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see a picture of the square-jawed, blue-eyed, blond Vanderlasky attired in a blazer and school tie.
The pompous prosecutor had gone to Stanford on a tennis scholarship, where he had excelled on the court and received mediocre grades in class.
His parents, alumni and major donors at the University of Oregon, had pulled strings to get him admitted to the law school, where he had finished near the bottom of his class.
Vanderlasky was an egotist who thought he was a genius and blamed his failures on everyone but himself.
In fact, he was not very bright, and he was lazy and sloppy when he prepared a case.
Karen was counting on these character traits.
If Vanderlasky was true to form, he was sure to have overlooked the significance of the fact that the lamp in Laurie Post’s living room was not plugged into the wall socket when the police arrived at her apartment.
Muriel Lujack was a stark contrast to Vanderlasky, who had a sliding scale when it came to moral issues, assuming that he even thought about right and wrong.
The young prosecutor viewed moral issues as black and white and was as severe in her dress as she was in her view of good and evil.
From a distance, Muriel could be mistaken for a nun.
Her everyday attire was a black jacket, a straight black skirt that reached her ankles, and a white blouse that buttoned at the neck.
Muriel’s straight, black hair fell to her shoulders and she used the bare minimum of makeup.
The young prosecutor was so thin that some people suspected that she was anorexic.
The truth was that Lujack had no interest in food and felt that time eating was time wasted when she could be working on her cases.
In a lengthy stretch of her strict Catholic upbringing, Muriel had seriously considered joining a convent, but she had changed her career goal in her last year of parochial school when she decided that she could best combat evil and protect the good by prosecuting criminals.
Yesterday, a jury had been impaneled to hear Laurie Post’s case.
After Karen and Vanderlasky made their opening statements, the prosecutor had called the EMTs who had responded to Laurie’s 911 call and the police officers who had arrived at the scene.
Vanderlasky’s last witness had been a doctor who testified that Ian Mowry, Post’s boyfriend, had lost sight in his left eye and sustained a blow to his forehead that was consistent with being struck by a thick brass lamp that both sides had stipulated had been used to strike Mowry.
During Karen’s cross-examination, the doctor agreed that the blow could have been received when Mowry was sitting on the ground, if the blow had been delivered by a woman who was a little over five feet tall.
Judge Cohen’s bailiff signaled the judge that the parties were in the courtroom. The judge took his place on the bench. Moments later, the jurors filed in and took their seats in the jury box. Karen watched them and was pleased to note that several jurors looked at her client and smiled.
“Call your first witness,” Judge Cohen told the prosecutor.
“The State calls Ian Mowry,” Vanderlasky said.
The door to the hall opened and the witness walked in. Mowry, a bodybuilder, was wearing a black eye patch and a tight shirt that showed off his narrow waist and massive chest. Karen felt that he would look right at home at a professional wrestling arena.
Mowry took the oath, then sat down in the witness-box.
“Mr. Mowry, what is your profession?” the DA asked.
“I’m a bus driver.”
“Are you working as a bus driver right now?”
“No.”
“Why is that?”
Mowry glared at Laurie Post. “She put my eye out. I can’t drive with one eye.”
“By ‘she,’ do you mean the defendant?”
“Yeah.”
“How did that happen?”
“Me and the defendant was arguing. She got out of control and hit me with the lamp.”
“State’s Exhibit Five?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go on.”
“Well, it stunned me, and I sat down. And that’s when she stabbed me in the eye with her finger.”
“I imagine that must have been horribly painful.”
“I was screaming my head off and rolling around on the floor. There was blood all over.”
“What have the doctors told you about regaining the sight in your eye?”