Chapter 28
Eighteen months later.
The courtroom was packed to capacity on the first day. Hale had adamantly continued his plea of not guilty. He’d demanded a trial and had also demanded to testify. It was, in Dr. Wheeler’s opinion, Hale focusing on controlling the courts.
She'd known they would be there. She'd known it, and she'd thought about it, but she still hadn’t been prepared for it when she’d walked in and saw the crush of people.
Sofia Moreno was in the third row on the left. Haven recognized her from the photograph in the case file. She was Lila's sister. She was sitting very straight with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the front of the room.
Robert Lane was two rows back. Michelle Avery's brother.
He'd called the task force three weeks after his release and had asked if he could do anything to help.
Haven had taken that call. She'd told him to come to the trial and be in the room and let the work they'd done mean something. He was here. He nodded at her when she came in. She nodded back. She watched him sit down. The older man and woman were undoubtedly his parents. The resemblance to both of them was stark. Another man sat on the other side of Robert Lane’s parents.
She hoped it was his brother-in-law. She hoped the fractured family was healing.
The families of Dana Walsh, Rachel Iverson, Erin Caldwell, Hannah Cho, Nicole Duvall, Kara Bennett, Angela Porter, Grace Ellison, and Jenna Callahan had reserved seats. The St. Louis woman who was Adrian’s last victim was Karen Marsh. Her family had driven in from Missouri to be there.
Twelve dead victims. Their families had filled the left side of the gallery. She knew her mother could’ve been in one of those seats. That fact was never far from her thoughts.
Haven sat at the prosecution table beside the lead prosecutor, DA Patricia Voss, who was fifty-three years old and had been trying capital cases in Tennessee for twenty-two years. She had tried killers enough times to know exactly what it required and had prepared accordingly.
Marcus was in the gallery. He would testify on day two or possibly three.
He sat in the fourth row on the right side of the room and looked at the front.
They’d traveled back to Nashville together.
Being engaged to be married and living together, it made sense.
She glanced back at him. He was looking straight at her.
He winked and gave her a nod. She felt his support surround her with the warmth of one of his hugs.
The bailiff called the court to order.
Judge Harold Whitmore took the bench. She’d done her research on all of the participants. The judge was sixty-one years old and had spent thirty years on the bench, the last twelve of which were in the criminal division.
Adrian Hale was brought in.
He was wearing a suit. Gray. His attorney, Garrett, had clearly made decisions about presentation, and Adrian had agreed to them, which told you something. He sat at the defense table and placed a legal pad in front of him and a pen beside it, aligned precisely parallel to the pad's edge.
He still looked exactly like his photograph.
Haven looked at him for a long moment.
Then she looked at Patricia Voss.
“Ready?” Voss asked.
“Ready,” Haven said.
* * *
Marcus watched as Voss opened for the prosecution.
She was good. Marcus had read her case record before the trial had started and had known she would be, but watching her work was something else.
She stood in front of the jury box with the ease of someone who’d earned the right to be exactly where she was.
She laid out the state's case in the clean, methodical way of a woman who understood that jurors needed a story before they needed evidence.
She gave them the story.
Twelve dead women. Ten states, one Canadian province.
A geographic corridor running northwest to southeast across the American heartland.
A man who’d traveled that corridor for eleven years under the cover of legitimate employment, who’d selected his victims with deliberate precision, who’d staged each one with identical care, and who’d documented every detail in a field notebook that the state would enter into evidence.
She told them about the nail.
Not the details. The verification standard.
The fact that it existed and had been held back from every public statement because it was the thing that separated knowledge from claim.
She told them the jury would hear from law enforcement witnesses who’d seen it, documented it, and built a case around it that left no reasonable doubt.
She told them about Haven Stone.
The only surviving victim. A Nashville police detective who’d been attacked on the same trail system where the defendant had killed two other women. Who’d fought back. Who’d survived. Who’d identified the defendant in a personnel photograph after weeks of investigation.
She told them they would hear from Detective Stone directly.
The jury looked at Haven.
Haven looked at the jury.
Then Voss sat down, and Garrett stood up for the defense.
Garrett was good too, in a different way.
He was precise and careful, and his opening acknowledged the evidence without conceding the interpretation.
His client was a man of exceptional professional reputation.
A senior certified imaging technician with an unblemished eleven-year career.
A man who had been in these cities because his job required it.
Whose service logs documented his presence because his job documented everything.
Whose personnel file showed a man of methodical discipline and professional excellence.
He did not explain the field notebook.
He said the jury would hear from the defendant himself about the nature of his research, which was the word he used. Research. Marcus watched the jury hear that word. He watched their faces and thought about what Adrian Hale was going to say when he took the stand.
He was looking forward to it.
* * *
Day two.
She testified for four hours.
Patricia Voss took her through it chronologically.
The morning of the attack. The trail. The sound she'd heard.
The turn. The branch. She described the attack in the clean, sequential language of a detective giving a statement.
She described his gloves. His movement. The way he'd looked at her wrist.
The jury was very quiet.
She described the smell.
“Can you describe it for the jury?” Voss said.
“Cold,” Haven said. “Mechanical. Chemical, but not a cleaning product. Something elemental. Something that didn't belong on a running trail.” She paused. “I couldn't identify it at the time. I identified it later.”
“And what is that smell?”
“Helium coolant,” Haven said. “The coolant used in superconducting MRI magnets. It has a specific odor that transfers from direct service work on the equipment. Not from being near the machines. From opening them. From working on them.” She looked at the jury.
“The defendant works on them. It's his job. He carries that smell.”
“How do you know that smell?”
She described her mother’s cancer treatments. Then Voss asked her about finding the photograph of Adrian Hale.
She described putting her finger on it.
“Were you certain?” Voss said.
“Yes,” Haven said. “Not maybe. Not probably. One hundred percent certain. I had seen that face for less than a second in low light with a head injury. I had been certain for six weeks that my brain had remembered it correctly.” She paused. “It had.”
Garrett cross-examined for ninety minutes.
He was careful. He attacked the certainty of the identification. The conditions on the trail. The head injury. The six weeks between the attack and the photograph. He was professional and thorough. She answered every question directly, without elaboration, and with confidence.
“Isn't it possible,” Garrett said, “that your identification was influenced by the investigation? That after six weeks of looking at this case, you were predisposed to see the defendant in a photograph?”
Haven looked at him.
“No,” she said.
“You're certain.”
“I'm certain,” she said. “The same way I was certain on the trail that something was wrong before I could see him. The same way I was certain at 6:29 in the morning that what had just happened to me was not a robbery.” She paused. “I've been a cop for ten years. I know what I know.”
Garrett sat down.
Haven stepped down from the stand.
She walked back to the prosecution table and sat down and did not look at Adrian Hale and did not look at the gallery and did not look at Marcus in the fourth row.
She looked at her hands on the table.
The French manicure. Short oval. Fresh two days ago.
She took a breath.
She was done.
* * *
Marcus testified on day three. Voss took him through the investigation from the beginning.
The ViCAP hit. The Angela Porter file. The corridor map.
The eight cases that became nine that became thirteen, with one living through the attack.
Twice. He explained Guardian's mandate and its federal authority, the task force composition, and the methodology they'd used to build the case.