"Pickard, Nancy - The Whole Truth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pickard Nancy)

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Raymond

The courthouse in downtown Bahia Beach, Florida, seems a pale, cool place to hold the evidence of so much passion. Divorces. Rape. Murders. Arson. Assault. Abuse of all kinds, by all sorts of people, upon all sorts of people. Daily, it parades past these bland, blond walls of the Howard County Courthouse, in Florida's Twenty-first Judicial Circuit. This is a place of stark contrasts and painful paradoxes, of quiet ironies and violent surprises. Outside the long narrow windows of the courthouse, the south Florida sun burns hot enough to scorch a tourist's skin, but inside, it's all shade and air-conditioning.

My fingertips feel dipped in ice water as I write these words.

They seem to promise a surprise or shock of some kind, although nobody in this courtroom is expecting one. We're expecting the jury to deliver a guilty verdict today, and we're all expecting to troop back in here in a couple of weeks to hear this same jury recommend the death penalty.

And yet, my own words seem to foreshadow something else.

Strange, but I don't have any idea of what that could be.

For the ten days of the trial of Raymond Raintree for the kidnapping and murder of Natalie Mae McCullen, I have scribbled notes with stiff, cold fingers. Now, as we await the verdict, I press

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my fingers into my palms to warm them, before moving my pen again. I'm not using a laptop because the soft tapping of fingers on keyboards drives the judge crazy, and so she has forbidden computers.

Judge Edyth Flasschoen's courtroomЧnumber three, second floorЧis especially chilly, because she keeps the thermostat turned down exceptionally low. It's so cold in here I can smell the air-conditioning, a metallic aroma that gets up in my nose and stays there until I overpower it with garlic for lunch from one of the restaurants down on Bahia Boulevard. The judge takes good care of her jurors, though: no air-conditioning blows directly on them.

High on her bench, seated in her brown leather chair on rollers, the judge taps her microphone with a pink fingernail. She's a tough old broad, sixty-two years old, with a beauty-shop hairdo and the metabolism of a Florida mosquito. When I interviewed her for the true crime book I'm writing about this case, she said, "It's always too damned hot to suit me. I could go naked under my robes, and I'd still sweat like a pig in the brush."

"Get this show going," she commands her bailiff now.

Along with other spectators, I am seated on the back row behind the prosecutor's table. Picking which side to sit on each day has felt like choosing sides of the aisle at a wedding where nobody wants to sit behind the groom. The benches behind the defendant are full, but the people seated there look uncomfortable to me. Nobody wants to be mistaken for being sympathetic to Ray Rain-tree.

Judge Flasschoen is glaring at the defense team.

"I'm warning you in the audience and you attorneys up front, there will be no outcry over this verdict, whatever it is. You understand me?" Leanne English, the lead defense counsel, is getting the brunt of this lecture, which doesn't seem quite fair given that she hasn't done much to prevent the flow of justice toward conviction. If the only obligation of a defense team is to force the prosecution to prove the charges, then Leanne has succeeded admirably. Nevertheless, the judge is wagging a manicured finger at her. "Contempt
of court is no empty phrase in my court. You want your own trial? You want to experience what it's like to be a defendant? We can arrange that, for anybody who doesn't sit still and keep quiet."

Leanne, a trim little redhead in a crisp black suit, nods.

The jury hasn't liked her, but they've loved the state's attorney, Franklin DeWeese. He is a tall, handsome black man with an ingratiating manner and a name that oozes political promise. The prosecutor has performed superbly in this trial. He focused the jury's attention on the evidence that pins the defendant to the crime, and he distracted them from the two troubling questions that remain unanswered: No motive has ever been established, and nobody knows who the defendant really is.

Ray Raintree is a man without an identity.

In a country in which most people worry about how easily the facts of their lives can be accessed by strangers, Ray seems to have spontaneously generated out of thin air. Computerized criminal records haven't identified him, nor have fingerprint matching or DNA testing, either. He has no past that anybody including me, has been able to find. This is not good news for a true crime writer with a book due on her editor's desk in two weeks.

In his closing arguments, Franklin emphasized, "It doesn't matter who Ray was or where he came from prior to the murder of Natalie Mae. It doesn't matter who Ray said he was after he killed her. The only thing that matters is where he was and what he was doing at the moment she died. At that moment, he could have been president of the United States in a former life, and it wouldn't matter. He could have turned into a Nobel Prize winner the next day, and it wouldn't matter. Ray can call himself anything he wants to, but if he is the one who murdered that childЧand he isЧwe are all of us going to call him a killer. That's who he is. Ms. English will try to convince you that you need to know his motive for killing her, but I promise you the law does not require you to know why he did it. You only need to know that he did it. And you do know that, because we have proved it beyond any reasonable

 doubt. He kidnapped that child, he killed her, and he mutilated her body. That's all you need to know, in order to convict him."

He convinced me, and probably the jury, too.

But that's not going to fill the middle of my book with facts, and it makes me feel uneasy to think that my home state may execute a man with no identity. I don't know exactly why this should worry meЧbeyond my personal concern about my bookЧbut it does.

The jury foreman is rising to his feet, with a paper in his hands.