Gravewriter by Mark Arsenault Page A

blue shirts, no guns for any defendant to grab. They escorted the defendants from the holding cells and patrolled the gallery. This morning, the gallery was nearly empty. Just ten people had decided this trial was interesting enough to visit. Billy guessed that one was a reporter from the Associated Press and that another was from the local daily. Billy noticed a sketch artist but saw no TV news camera. Not surprising—trials could tie up a film crew all day without any guarantee of good film for the six o’clock broadcast. TV producers preferred to cover crime, not justice; crime was more photogenic. The other spectators were in their early twenties, and overdressed—probably law students on an assignment.
    The stars of the production, the lawyers, sat side by side at their separate tables, surrounded by their props—legal pads, briefcases, and mounds of transcripts from depositions.
    Seated at the defense table was the man for whom all this was taking place.
    Billy was surprised at how skinny Peter Shadd looked, how feeble. Shadd rubbed his wrists. He was not handcuffed, but Billy knew from covering trials that defendants in custody arrived and left the courtroom in cuffs. Most judges agreed with defense lawyers that a jury must never see a defendant in chains—the image hurt the presumption of innocence.
    Billy stared at Peter Shadd. He wanted to catch his attention, but the young man was engrossed in a legal pad dotted with scribbles.
    What did Billy expect to see in the young man’s eyes?
    For the past thirteen months, Billy had not passed a mirror without looking into his own eyes to see what dark deeds he was capable of committing. If Billy could just look the kid in the eye …
    He caught himself absentmindedly rubbing his own wrists.

eleven
    â€œS o what does it mean when we hear that much of the evidence in this case is circumstantial?” asked the prosecutor, Ethan Dillingham. His voice echoed in the corners of the giant room. “It means that nobody saw the defendant commit the crime—that’s all.”
    He paused in his opening statement to let the jurors digest the point.
    â€œIt means that this man”—he pointed to Peter Shadd—”was cunning enough to take a gun and shoot the victim multiple times when there was nobody around to identify him as the killer.”
    Billy and the other jurors looked at Peter Shadd, who hunched over and shrank in his seat.
    â€œSo when Mr. Smothers, the defense attorney, attacks the state’s case as circumstantial, all that means is that there’s no eyewitness. What the state wants you to consider are the circumstances suggested by the evidence. Add it all up. All the evidence points to one man, the defendant.
    â€œLet me tell you what the evidence will show,” Dillingham continued. He paced before the jury, his left hand resting inside his jacketpocket, as if he were modeling his suit in a Brooks Brothers catalog. “Let’s start with the defendant himself.”
    Billy noted how he referred to Peter Shadd exclusively as “the defendant” to dehumanize him, a bit of subliminal psychology to undercut the jurors’ instincts for compassion, and the natural reluctance of ordinary citizens to send another human being away for life.
    â€œThe defendant is a longtime heroin user,” Dillingham said. “And we know he will do anything to get heroin, including robbing people at gunpoint. At the age of nineteen, he was convicted of four armed robberies, and he was rightly sent to prison for punishment and rehabilitation. Rhode Islanders thought they were safe from the defendant’s reign of terror, at least while his sentence was running.
    â€œWhile incarcerated—locked up, that is—the defendant met the victim in this case, Garrett Nickel, a killer of notorious reputation, who took the defendant under his wing, so to speak. The state is alleging that this unholy alliance