Death Before Coffee

Acknowledgements-2

“Good afternoon, Detective.” Crown Attorney Bridget Calloway glanced up at the officer in charge of her case and tried not to gasp. Mike looked more like an angry version of something the cat had dragged in than the level-headed police detective she knew him to be.

Mike nodded slightly to her.

“Detective…” She let the mystique of Mike’s title hang in the air just long enough for it to waft over to the jury box. “I understand that you have twenty-seven years of police service behind you, the last ten of which you have completed as a district investigator. Is that correct?”

“Yes.” Mike took a deep breath, tasting stale whiskey on his exhale. “That is correct.”

“And as I understand it, the matter that brings you here today involves a young child named Jessica Sanderson and a s****l assault causing bodily harm. Is that correct?” She pivoted on her heels to face the jury.

“Yes. That is correct.”

“And what specifically qualifies you to investigate s****l assaults involving children?”

Mike’s mind shot back to his life before Sal’s funeral, before his subsequent hurried transfer out of the squad, back to the time when he felt on top of his game.

He cleared his throat, nodded subtly to the jury, and listed off a number of what were considered, even in policing circles, a very impressive series of courses, experiences, and job titles. He glanced occasionally over to the jury, whose members seemed to be hanging off his every word. He smiled slightly; he was still that guy every woman trusted and every man wanted as a buddy.

He finished reciting his credentials and concluded, “And the courts have given me Expert Witness designation as a result of my years in the Juvenile Prostitution Task Force, where I dealt exclusively with sexually exploited children.”

“Very good, Detective. Do you see in the courtroom today the person responsible for s****l assault causing bodily harm on a minor?” Bridget let her words linger.

“Objection,” the greasy mouthpiece seated behind the defence table mumbled, half-rising from his chair. The defendant seated next to him inhaled loudly, his newly pressed shirt and too-short tie expanding with him.

“Sustained. Rephrase, Ms. Calloway,” the judge sighed, not lifting his eyes as he continued typing on the laptop in front of him, seemingly oblivious, or so Mike hoped, to the condition of the officer in the witness stand beside him.

“Of course, Your Honour.” Bridget nodded, knowing that she had already succeeded in planting the seeds of guilt in the jurors’ minds. “Detective O’Shea, do you see the man your investigation identified as the accused perpetrator of the s****l assault causing bodily harm in the courtroom today?”

“Yes, I do.” Mike felt his jaw clench and his tongue pushing hard against the roof of his mouth, any and all traces of a night spent emptying a bottle to fill a void dissipating. “The gentleman in the white shirt with the red tie seated behind the defence table.”

“You are referring to the accused, Gregory Sanderson. Is that correct, Detective?”

“That is correct.”

Bridget switched gears. “Now, Detective, s****l assault causing bodily harm is a particularly heinous crime—”

“Objection.”

“Sustained. Watch your step, Ms. Calloway,” the judge cautioned as he peered at Bridget over his reading glasses and the screen of his laptop.

“Of course.” Bridget smiled. “Detective, tell us how you came to lay the charge you did.”

“On Wednesday, February 13th of last year, as a result of my regular duties as a detective, I was made aware of an incident involving a twelve-year-old girl who visited the school nurse’s office with stomach cramps.”

Mike paused to take a breath. Bridget stepped away from her podium and walked towards the jury as if to join them for the unveiling of some dark secret. Just as she came within whispering distance of the front row, she stopped, turned to face Mike, and furrowed her brow.

“Is that common, Detective?” she asked, as if chatting with Mike over an early-evening cocktail. “I mean, is it common for the police, a detective, no less, to be called to a school about a twelve-year-old with a belly-ache?”

Bridget glanced at the jury.

“No,” Mike continued. “The school also called an ambulance and the youngster was taken to The Hospital for Sick Children. After further investigation at Sick Kids, doctors confirmed that the young girl was in the early stages of labour.”

Bridget glanced over her shoulder at the jury, seeing the looks of disgust, horror, and empathy that she had hoped Mike’s disclosure would elicit. Then tilting her head slightly to one side, she locked eyes with Mike, wordlessly cuing him for his next line.

“The child, Jessica, gave birth to a baby girl seven hours later,” Mike obliged her. “On February 14th.”

The crown attorney returned to her podium, poked at the notes in front of her, and waited for the jury to absorb the full impact of the emotional trigger Mike had just pulled.

“A Valentine’s Day baby. I see. Is that all, Detective?”

“No. Doctors at Sick Kids also determined that the victim, that is, Jessica Sanderson, had also contracted genital herpes.”

An audible gasp from the jurors overrode the chugging of the dying air conditioning unit.

“I apologize for jumping ahead, Your Honour, but…” Bridget paused. It was late afternoon, and she wanted to give the jurors all night to stew over Mike’s next answer. “Detective, what did your subsequent investigation reveal about the health status of the accused, Gregory Sanderson?”

Mike looked directly at the jurors one by one before looking over to the judge and then to Bridget. “That the accused, Gregory Sanderson, the victim’s father, also has herpes.”

The entire jury box recoiled as if the words were as foul as the smell of a full johnny-on-the-spot on a scorching August afternoon. Mike glanced at defence counsel, surprised he had not jumped out of his seat with objections. Instead, the mouthpiece pushed a yellow legal pad over to his client, who nodded like a frantic bobblehead.

Good, Mike thought, glaring at Sanderson. You’d better f*****g panic, you piece of s**t.

Bridget waited for the jury to digest this latest revelation and to quiet down before continuing.

“Detective, was the s****l assault of Jessica Sanderson your—the police’s—first encounter with Gregory Sanderson?”

“Objection. Relevance?”

“Yes, Ms. Calloway. Relevance?” The judge lowered the screen of his laptop as he angled his glasses down his nose to look at the prosecutor.

“No,” Mike replied, not waiting for Bridget to respond.

First encounter? No f*****g way. A series of late-night vehicle stops with young girls with Sanderson in his car on file. A report from Children’s Aid that had come through the school. Two or three domestic incident reports that gave no reason for the argument between husband and wife. A s****l preference for young girls? Unproven. A s****l preference acted upon with back-page ‘escorts’? Unproven. That s****l preference expressed closer to home? Absolutely.

“Detective O’Shea. I am going to pre-emptively caution you now—”

“My apologies, Your Honour,” Mike mumbled. It was Chelsea Hendricks all over again. Supply and demand. Was this fucker just feeding the demand, or did he create that demand in the first place? Which part of that equation was f*****g his own daughter about? He wouldn’t be the first shithead to put his little girl out.

Not my job any more. Made very clear after I got the boot.

Beads of sweat crawled down Mike’s chest and stomach. His collar tightened, and he stretched his neck to wriggle free from its constricting grasp.

Bridget said something that Mike did not hear. He flashed back to the interview room with Gregory Sanderson and his lawyer—the same mouthpiece sitting beside him now.

“I am suggesting to you that these traffic stops with known prostitutes are as a result of your s****l activities with these underaged girls. Is that a fair suggestion?”

“I don’t know.”

“My client choses to remain silent.”

“I am suggesting to you that you have been having s****l relations with your daughter for some time now.”

“I have no comment.”

“My client will not be answering that question.”

“Given your knowledge of prostitution and your s****l activities with your daughter, Jessica, I am suggesting that you are grooming the child—”

“My client vehemently denies any such suggestion, Detective.”

“Tell me about Malcolm.”

“This interrogation is over, Detective O’Shea. You’ve got my card. Any and all communications with or about my client will go through me or my office. Let’s go, Greg.”

Mike re-emerged into a silent courtroom, all eyes on him, anticipating a response to something. The air conditioner was useless against the heat of too many people in too small a room. He gasped for the air that was smothering him as his mind’s eye saw Malcolm pull the trigger, smelled the gunpowder over the fumes in the underground garage, felt the warm oozy pieces of Sal’s brain in his hand instead of the cold grip of his service revolver.

“Detective O’Shea, Ms. Calloway was asking you…?” The judge looked over his shoulder at Mike for the first time today.

“I’m sorry.” Mike tried to pull some saliva into his dry mouth, forcing his shoulders down again, feeling his undershirt sticking to his body. “Can you repeat the question?”

“What led you to believe that the accused, the father of the victim, also fathered the victim’s child—his own grandchild?”

“Your Honour…” The mouthpiece finally rose from behind the defence table, straightened his tie, and smoothed back the gelled strands of hair strewn across his high forehead. “I find Ms. Calloway’s line of questioning to be highly prejudicial against my client. In fact, I find Ms. Calloway’s conduct—”

“Mr. Reiner,” the judge began, “I am going to suggest to you that this is neither the time nor the place to begin questioning your colleague’s conduct. I have listened to both of you for the past few days arguing like children over what has been shown to be irrelevant or insignificant points of law. I understand that the good detective is the first of many witnesses to be called, and he’s already following your leads. I have no interest in watching either of you—or you, Detective—prance around for the remainder of our time together. Now, it would appear that this officer’s testimony will be more involved than I had been led to believe before we launched into this trial.”

The judge furrowed his unruly eyebrows and glared at Bridget before the deep creases in his forehead unfolded. He turned back to the defence counsel. “While we had anticipated that this trial would be completed in a two-week span, I would suggest that we will be lucky to get through the detective’s testimony before end of day tomorrow, which will put us quite behind schedule. Having so said, looking at the time now and the faces of our jury members, I’m going to suggest that we recess for the day and begin again, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at ten sharp tomorrow morning with Detective O’Shea continuing his evidence. Court adjourned.”

With that, the judge slammed his laptop shut, stood up, and disappeared through a door behind the bench into his chambers.

“All rise,” the court clerk called out as quickly as she could.

Chapter Four

3:20 p.m., Thursday, August 23, 2018As always, Mike accompanied Bridget to the Crown offices, a ritual developed over their years of shared trials. Usually, there was energy—electricity, even—between them that those inclined to gossip said went beyond the intellectual. Truth be told, the closest they’d ever come to meeting outside of work was at the annual Crown/Police Christmas parties, where well-oiled lawyers and coppers with bad haircuts surrounded Bridget, no doubt hoping to score a little extra Christmas cheer. The drinks were too expensive for Mike’s liking, and the lawyers and cops were too cheap for Bridget’s liking. Neither stayed long. Neither even said hello to the other.