“They do,” Tina said darkly. It continues to be Tina’s professional theory that most, if not all, of the young women who populated the hundred-seat Miami courtroom, giggling every time they caught a glimpse of the man they described to reporters as “fascinating,” “impressive,” and “possessing a rare kind of magnetism,” had experienced some form of sexual abuse in their pasts. Victims are always drawn to those men who remind them of their abusers. Not that the media ever took the time to explore the phenomenon of the courtroom groupies beyond asking a few bubblegum-smacking teenagers if they were there because they thought The Defendant was cute.
The worn marbled lobby was obscenely cold, a surround sound of striking heels. By day’s end, my sweat would freeze to a crackly film that I could scratch off with a fingernail. I hadn’t yet met the lone female professor in law school who would teach me to layer warmly even in the swamp of summer because the thermostat in government and office buildings is set to accommodate men in wool suits, men with higher metabolic rates all year round. You can’t concentrate when you’re cold, this unicorn would not tell me for another eight months. So I spent all day blowing into my hands and worrying the jurors might mistake my discomfort for the nerves of someone who was lying.
“Pamela!” It was Bernadette, waving. “Over here!” She was standing halfway up the central stairwell.
Tina and I turned to each other like steadies departing on the train platform during wartime. “I’m going to get in there and find a seat,” she said with an end-of-the-movie finality.
I didn’t dare say a word. I sensed the voice that would come out of me—childlike and lost—would demolish me. I just stared down at the fabric of my blue dress that I’d ironed and starched last night and again this morning and nodded with my lips smashed together.
“It’s normal to be nervous,” Tina said. “That doesn’t mean you don’t get up on the stand and do a good job.”
It was more than nerves, though. It was a fatalistic feeling about the world in which we tried to make our way. I once had a doctor tell me there are a certain number of catastrophically bad things that, statistically speaking, must happen every year to a certain number of people—rare diseases, freak accidents, and, yes, serial killer attacks. Little grains of tragedy carried by the wind. I could make peace with the idea that one of those currents happened to catch my corner of the world. But a brush with the improbable Defendant had amplified something about my everyday terrain that was proving harder to accept. Which was that guys like Roger did not arrive into our lives on the curve of some unfavorable wind. They were already rooted and ubiquitous.
Some nights I lay in bed sleepless and full of apathy, realizing that The Defendant could have gone anywhere in the country, done this to any other group of women, and the defense could likely raise reasonable doubt by pointing a finger at the Roger who already resided among them. Rogers were everywhere, reasonable-doubt scapegoats waiting in the wings for a case like this. There was not so much as a hair of forensic evidence linking The Defendant to the scene at The House. This was a capital punishment case, and a man’s life—a normal-looking, normal-seeming man’s life—hung in the balance.
“You’ve already done the hard part,” Tina said, referring to my pretrial testimony, which The Defendant’s team had moved to strike, calling me a “well-intentioned but unreliable witness.” I had pretended not to notice the way Mr. Pearl’s posture sagged with relief when Judge Lambert had ruled I could testify for the jury. Without my eyewitness account, all we had was junk science known as bite-mark analysis. Robbie had been bitten on her left breast and buttocks, and an odontologist was prepared to testify that only five sets of teeth in the whole world could have made those marks, of which The Defendant’s was one. The defense would call it guesswork, and they would be right. So right that, in the years since, many states have banned bite-mark analysis in criminal trials.
Bernadette called my name again, and I hurried to meet her on the stairs, shopping bags bouncing and rustling against my outer thighs. From up there, I could see everything and everyone beneath us, including Carl, sharing a bench with some colleagues, press badges hanging around their necks. They were sipping from Dixie cups and ribbing one another while they waited for the lobby to clear out before taking their place in the roped-off media section. Carl had been at the courthouse every day for the pretrial, and he would be there every day of the six-week trial that would have taken five if not for The Defendant’s colicky tantrums and spectacles. I was clenching my jaw in the way that made my neck string with veins, seeing Carl joke around like he was killing time before his favorite band took the stage.