“Mr. Popovic, call your next witness,” Judge Maldonado said.
It had been a long trial. This was day nine. Neither side had wanted to leave a sliver of room for mistake. The prosecution had a parade of officers, crime scene technicians, and the coroner himself. The defense had rebutted with a separate parade of officers, and forensic experts. I couldn’t imagine who else was left.
“I call Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Lorraine Pope, to the stand.”
There was a collective gasp in the gallery. It was rare for a defendant to testify. Even more rare for a well-heeled, well-represented defendant to get on the stand, much less one who was a lawyer. These kinds of people mostly knew better.
With every question Pope answered, she would open herself to the scrutiny of Nicole Long and Liam Brody. It would take nerves of steel for Pope to manage that. I knew this was real life-and-death stuff, but I couldn’t help but lean forward, putting my elbows on my knees, ready for a show.
I’d never heard Pope speak outside of a press conference, and I wanted to know if what her mother had said was true. That she’d be able to spin murder, death, and destruction as brown sugar and roses. I was here for it.
After she was sworn in, Pope remained standing and turned to the jury.
“I want to thank each and every one of you for your service, and possibly your vote for me when I ran for this office. I’ve relied on juries to seek justice for years and your sacrifice is appreciated.”
Liam Brody’s and Nicole Long’s heads were together as they whispered fiercely. They broke apart, saying nothing. Probably didn’t want to alienate the jury when Pope had said something nice and, at least on the surface, neutral.
Popovic continued after his client sat ramrod straight in the seat. Her tailored, fitted suit, wide-wale brown corduroy, somehow made her appear warm without being drab. The white mock turtleneck was spotless and smooth.
“Ms. Pope, can you please tell us where you currently work, and how long you’ve been there?”
“I’m the Cuyahoga County prosecutor. I was elected in two thousand four in a special election to complete the term of the attorney general, over there, Liam Brody, when he stepped down from office.”
Politics in Ohio was practically incestuous. All the power brokers were inextricably entwined.
“Are you married? Have a family with children?”
“No.” Pope composed her face into the very picture of remorse. “If I have a single regret, it’s putting my career above my personal life. Losing my sister three years ago brought that home, but my biological clock had run out.”
“How would you describe your job?” Popovic asked. It was a classic prosecutor’s question. They loved to ask it of cops, making them out to be the bulwark between peace and chaos. Pope’s counsel had taken a page out of that playbook. I had to wonder if she’d orchestrated her entire testimony.
“I run the largest legal department in the county,” she said with confidence. “We have three hundred fifty employees in five divisions. Two hundred-plus attorneys, and over one hundred support staff.”
“Criminal prosecution isn’t your only job?” Popovic asked. His question implied his client was far too busy to be ordering hits.
“It’s one job. Our civil division is the county’s in-house law firm. Family law handles abuse and neglect complaints, and enforces child support. Juvenile law manages criminal matters of minors. Criminal and special investigation focus on felony prosecution of active cases as well as cold cases. The divisions are further divided into fifteen different units.”
“That’s a big job.”
“Yes, it is. I set policy and rely on each division’s head to manage the day-to-day operations.”
Most politicians portrayed themselves as in touch, one of the people. Pope was doing her best to show that she was not in the trenches where life-and-death decisions were made.
“Are you involved in deciding on whom to prosecute and for what?”
“For the most part, no. I don’t have any more hours in a day than other people. We had sixteen thousand seven hundred cases last year, and the numbers were down. In our busiest year, two thousand six, we had nearly twenty thousand criminal filings.”
“By my back-of-the-envelope math.” Popovic’s voice was folksy. “That’s about sixty cases a day.”
“On a slow day,” Pope quipped.
I looked from her to the jury. They were nodding. Maybe they didn’t see that as glib as I had. Nearly one and one half percent of the county’s population was being indicted every year.
“Let’s turn our attention to some of the wild accusations that have come from the prosecution during this trial.” Popovic tossed a glance at the prosecution table. “How did you know Ja Roach?”
“Before I was elected as the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, I’d worked for fifteen years in the prosecutor’s office. Before that I was in the city of Lakewood law department.”
I could feel my eyebrows going up. She’d completely and masterfully deflected the question with a résumé-like list of her career achievements. It was suddenly dawning on me how slippery she could be.
“Who was your boss in Lakewood and when you first got to the county?”
“It’s always been Liam Brody.”
My mind tried to figure out the strategy. Was she blaming the attorney general or making some other deflection. In the pause, it quickly dawned on me that it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the blame on responsibility wasn’t staying with her. Fucking brilliant. Fucking sociopathic. Anna Moretti had been dead on…which had made her just…dead. I didn’t quite know if crazy people knew they were crazy, but Pope had swiftly shut down any talk of subjecting herself to psychiatric examination, even when being declared crazy could keep her out of prison and away from death row.
“Now, back to Roach. How did you know him?”
“Jabari Roach, called Ja, was stopped by a Lakewood officer some years ago. His car had drug paraphernalia, but no drugs as he’d consumed them. Since he was a user, not a dealer, bringing him into our confidence seemed like a good idea to get a handle on the growing drug problem in Lakewood. I met and interviewed him then.”
“Did he provide good intel?”
“He gave us the names of several of the small-time sellers. We were able to buy-bust our way up the chain and nearly eliminate Lakewood’s dealer problem. It became known that if users wanted to score drugs, Lakewood wasn’t the place to come for that.”
The one juror from Lakewood nodded in a self-satisfied manner as if he’d single-handedly removed the scourge from the small city. It was like Pope was magic. The jurors knew, had to know deep down that she was a murderer, but some of them were still being swayed by what she was saying.
“What did Roach get in exchange?” Popovic asked.
“A bullet in the head,” Nicole Long said under her breath just loud enough for those of us in the first row to hear.
“We did what we usually did in those cases,” Pope answered Popovic, “dismissed the charges against him.”
“He got preferential treatment?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Users, addicts need drug rehabilitation more than they deserve prosecution. I’ve been an advocate of the drug courts and deferred disposition in cases like his. It was just on an individual basis. He was never arrested for anything after he became a confidential informant. He wasn’t a danger to the community.”
“You heard the testimony of the Cleveland Heights police detectives. Did you, as they say, order the murder of Ja Roach?”
“No. I would never do that,” Pope said. I almost believed her, so convincing she was.
“What about Wayne Cooley?”
“Wayne Cooley was one of my closest childhood friends. My younger sister, Sarah Rose, was best friends with his younger sister, Tyisha Cooley, so he was often around.” A small tear escaped from the corner of her eye which Pope smoothed away with her thumb. “He was a great guy. Graduated college. Lived out in Brooklyn. I was devastated by the random act of gun violence that caused his death. It’s the exact thing I’ve worked against my entire career.”
“What about Sarah Rose Pope?”
Lori Pope closed her eyes, put her hand across them, hung her head. Was quiet for a solid minute. No one in the courtroom dared to breathe.
“When I was six years old, my little sister, Sarah Rose, was born.” Pope’s voice was quiet before her volume came back to normal. “It was such a big deal for my dad because my little brother had died of crib death. She was a huge bright spot in his life. She was the first baby for my stepmom too.”
“Did you get along with your sister?”
“There was a big age difference, so we didn’t play together or anything. But I loved her. Loved doing things like make special treats for her. She loved when I made french fries from scratch.”
“Did your sister have any problems?”
“She was an addict, heroin mostly.”
“How did that affect you and your family?”
“She never made it to college, so she was back and forth with Dad and Dot until they moved to Arizona. After that, my sister was always on the move.”
“Was she sometimes homeless?”
Pope closed her eyes as if she were saying a silent prayer. When she opened them, she looked directly at the jury and nodded, then said “yes” out loud for the court reporter.
“She never lived with you?” Popovic asked.
“I learned early on with my mom and working in criminal law that tough love is needed for addicts, otherwise we enable them.”
“Earlier the detectives testified that you had a hand in your little sister’s death. Is that true?”
Pope shook her head slowly and looked around the courtroom as if she were the most misunderstood person on the planet.
“Not at all,” she said so softly that everyone leaned in. “Like so many addicts in Ohio and the rest of the Midwest, she died of an overdose. The detectives weren’t even there. Sarah OD’d at the house of her best friend, Tyisha Cooley. It was particularly tragic because my sister was all set to go to rehab the next day. Unfortunately that ‘one last binge’ phenomenon is one that sometimes has tragic consequences.”
“But you prosecuted Cooley for the crime?”
“While we have sympathy for addicts, we don’t condone other people injecting them with drugs. That’s what happened there.”
“Let’s turn our attention to a man named Malcolm Pointer. Do you know who he is?”
“There was earlier testimony that he was the boyfriend of someone who’d once been prosecuted by my office, is that right?”
I watched, almost with a sense of wonder, as the county prosecutor gaslit the jury, the room, probably an entire nation watching on Court TV. She’d gone from protesting testimony about other murders committed in her name or at her direction to garnering sympathy for being the unintended victim of addicts and police overreach.
“Did you have Malcolm Pointer murdered?” Popovic asked as he methodically addressed all of the earlier accusations.
“How could I? I don’t even know who he is. I’ve never met him. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been in the same room with anyone by that name.”
I’d have bet what was left of my pension that no evidence existed of any contact between the prosecutor and Pointer. She’d perfected the art of distancing herself from years of dirty deeds.
“Lastly,” Popovic started, “there were some pretty egregious allegations that you had an entire family murdered. Father, Ermano Fernández; mother, Liberdad Saldaño; and their children, Placido and Quirita. Did you order Thomas O’Callaghan to kill them?”
“No. Never.” Her headshake was so emphatic that I almost believed her bull. Pope straightened up, slipped off her blazer and hung it on the back of her chair. If it was possible, she looked even more vulnerable with a delicate gold watch, and tiny gold studs more visible. Pope crossed her legs, furrowed her brow, sat forward. “I was told that this was a murder-suicide. The father shot the two children, their mom, then himself. My office wouldn’t get involved with a case like that once the coroner makes a determination. It’s a tragedy for sure, but not a mystery that needs solved, nor is there anyone to prosecute. The perpetrator gave himself a death sentence.”
“Can I ask you about your mother?” Popovic’s voice was soft, carefully modulated to elicit sympathy.
Pope put her hand over her nose and mouth. Her face started turning red, and she waved her other hand in the air.
“What do you need, Ms. Pope?” Judge Maldonado asked as taken in as anyone in the room, except me and Logan and Nicole Long.
“Water. Tissue, please. I’m so sorry.” She covered her face, wiped at her eyes. I couldn’t see things close up so well without cheaters, but I didn’t need glasses to see that her eyes were as dry as the Sahara. It was an act, albeit a very convincing one. When Pope had “composed” herself, Popovic resumed his direct examination of his client.
“Tell us about your mother, Anna Moretti.”
“She was born in nineteen twenty-nine. She came from a big family. She always said she wanted a big family of her own.”
“Did she?”
“Just me and my brother.” Long pause. “He died as an infant, probably SIDS, though no one called it that back then. She never had any more kids. Unfortunately, she was afflicted like my sister and Jabari.”
“Afflicted as in addiction?”
“Yes.” Tough love Lori Pope came back as she interlaced her fingers and put her hands on the wood ledge before her. “For my mother, it was prescription drugs at first, then heroin later. Even after my father divorced her and remarried, I tried to help her. I paid for her to go to rehab maybe six or seven times over the years.”
“You loved your mother?”
“Yes.” Heavy sigh. “Of course. Despite all of her flaws, she was my mother.”
“On the night of January second of this year, did you murder your mother?”
Pope sat back so quickly, she hit the witness chair with a smack.
“No. Never.” Vehement headshake. “Of course not.” She was like an actor aspiring to win an Academy Award.
“Why were you at her apartment?”
“This is so embarrassing. I’m one of the top law enforcers in the state, and my own mother breaks the law.” Pope paused. Everyone held their breath. “Almost every year that I can remember, my mother…overindulges…on New Year’s. I always call her on the first to make sure she’s okay. She didn’t answer that day or on Saturday, so I drove over.
“To keep her off the street, I pay for the apartment and have a key for emergencies. I opened the door, called her name, didn’t hear anything. I ran to her room to check on her. She wasn’t breathing.”
“Detective Logan said you had fabric in your hand. Can you explain that to the jury?”
“When I was a kid, Momma always used handkerchiefs. Like the frilly ones. I…this is so stupid in retrospect…I wiped her face, there were flecks of something on there.” Pope shook her head as if reliving this moment was pure torture. “I didn’t want her to be found like some addicts I’ve seen. I didn’t have anything really from my childhood. My mom didn’t save anything with so many moves. My dad got rid of stuff when he married Dot. I just wanted a single nice thing to remember her by.”