When Bryan first saw the cluster of news trucks outside the courthouse, he thought there was a hearing on the John Goodman case – the Palm Beach Polo tycoon who, on his way home from a festive night out at the Player’s Club in 2010, had plowed into a college grad with his $200,000-dollar Bentley, sending the kid’s car into a canal and killing him. Drama and cameras followed that man and that case around everywhere. First there was the 2012 DUI Manslaughter Trial Number One, which took too long, but finally resulted in a conviction, which didn’t last too long – a juror went to jail, but the defendant didn’t. Then the guy tried to adopt his girlfriend to save his millions. Then came the circus of a retrial in 2014 and a very recent second conviction, followed by more motions. Every time Goodman or one of his very expensive attorneys whined – which was a lot – there was a news camera around to catch it. That’s what Bryan figured all the hullabaloo was about as he followed the morning crowd into the courthouse.
Then he got off the elevator on ten and realized that unless they had moved the Goodman case to courtroom 10F, or some celebrity was also having an Arthur hearing with Judge Cummins, all those cameras were likely there for the State of Florida vs. Derrick Alan Poole.
With the exception of certain serious and violent felonies, most crimes in Florida had scheduled bond amounts that a defendant could post upon arrest to get out of jail. Non-bondable offenses, however – such as murder, kidnapping, and armed burglary – required what was known as an Arthur hearing, an evidentiary hearing akin to a mini-trial, to determine if ‘proof was evident and presumption was great’ that a crime had been committed and that the defendant was the one who had committed it. If the state met that burden, then the judge could hold the defendant without bond pending trial.
It had been two weeks since Poole had been arrested. In Florida, except for first-degree capitol murder or juveniles being bound over for adult court, most crimes were formally charged by a sworn document called an information. Capitol murder and juvis moving up to the big time, however, were formally charged by grand jury indictment. Elisabetta was set to present Poole’s case on Wednesday to the grand jury, which convened only once a month, but Hartwick had strategically set down the Arthur before then because he knew once his client was formally indicted there was no way any judge in the building was going to grant him a bond. This was his best shot at getting Poole released before trial. Because an Arthur was more than a perfunctory reading of the arrest form to see if there was probable cause, it was also a way for the defense to take a peek at the state’s cards and see exactly what kind of case it had.
The Honorable Judge Delmore Cummins was a Florida native and a no-nonsense courthouse relic who had been sitting on a bench long before Bryan had gotten his badge. He was old even back then. Since Cummins was the only judge who handled Arthurs, and only on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, his calendars were always lengthy, but because he was so old and had no time left to waste, he was expeditious. He was also rather grumpy, and didn’t take kindly to breaking old-style courtroom decorum – he liked to see women in skirts and men in suits and he abhorred any technology that was developed after 1985. As Bryan made his way through a gallery that was normally empty, but today was full of spectators, he wondered if anyone had broken the news yet to Judge Cummins that there were a dozen cameras set up in his courtroom.
He found Elisabetta in the well, chatting with two other prosecutors. The calendar on the clerk’s desk looked thick. ‘Is this for us?’ he asked her quietly, looking around the courtroom.
‘Apparently,’ she answered as she rummaged through a file. ‘We’re on page sixteen.’
Bryan didn’t know why he was so surprised. Ever since he’d found the shack, the press had been calling. After Poole’s arrest, things had exploded like no other case he’d ever handled before. The task force had received requests for interviews and public records requests from every cable news channel there was: CNN, Fox, MSNBC. The PBSO public information officer had fielded calls from the Associated Press and Reuters, and even from London’s Daily Mail and Germany’s Der Spiegel. The media’s hunger for gory and salacious information was ravenous. It was like someone had cut themselves over shark-infested waters. The first couple of drops of blood had aroused a few members of the herd, but the continuous trickle of blood as details of the case were leaked had caused a violent feeding frenzy, which sent sharks from all over to come searching for any scrap of information they could gather. Fact, opinion or rumor – it was all the same to them. If an Arthur hearing – normally uneventful and unattended – was attracting this much attention from the media, Bryan could only imagine what would happen when it came time for trial.
Even though he had predicted it to some extent, it was Faith Saunders who had gotten caught up in the eye of the media storm and had absorbed much of its wrath, and for that he felt bad. Maybe a journalism professor could better explain the phenomenon to him, but in a world full of instantaneous news, with brutal crime and health epidemics and wars being broadcast live vying for everyone’s attention, every criminal case that Bryan had ever seen command and maintain headlines had an angle – a reason that it appealed to the masses. With O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, and Oscar Pistorius, he could see it was the celebrity as murderer that captivated. With Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, it was racial injustice and the faces of innocent black teenagers. With Dennis Rader and Jeffrey Dahmer and Bill Bantling, it was the unbelievable, shocking cruelty demonstrated by serial killers and the complete randomness with which they chose their victims. And then there were the cases like Casey Anthony, Scott Peterson, Jodi Arias, and Justin Ross Harris, where there was no readily identifiable explanation for why they became household names and had their cases broadcast live on Court TV. There were hundreds more murder cases like theirs that barely got mentioned in the local section. Something about the defendants or their victims or the circumstances of a case caught the fancy of the public and somehow kept it. Bryan could see that this case was demanding that sort of fanatical attention, and although he didn’t know why, necessarily, he did know that the media kept throwing whatever they could at the public to keep them fed. Once it got out that Faith Saunders had not reported Angelina’s abduction, but her cute little four-year-old had, everyone from Loni Hart to Nancy Grace to Sunny Hostin had set on her. Although Bryan had once dreamed of detective rock-star status in his plans for revenge against Audrey, he didn’t want to see this lady and her family destroyed as a result. It was obvious she had a drinking problem, she was scared, and she was caught up in something she never planned on getting caught up in. It was Bryan’s job to take the shots, not some poor mom who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and made the wrong decision.
‘Were you expecting this?’ he asked Elisabetta.
‘No,’ she replied softly. But for someone who’d handled media cases in her career before without blinking, she looked both nervous and a little excited, and Bryan didn’t believe her. He wouldn’t put it past Maleficent to be a closet press hound. He had his own reasons for wanting to see the case on the eleven o’clock news, after all.
She looked up from her file and studied him. ‘You look spiffy. Nice suit.’
‘It is Judge Cummins. I see you’re showing some knee.’
‘No reason to get off on the wrong foot with him. Did you lose weight or something?’
Bryan shrugged. ‘Working on it.’
‘Are you ready on this?’ she asked.
The courtroom door swung open before he could answer.
‘All rise!’ yelled the bailiff.
Judge Cummins shuffled to the bench, a scowl on his ancient face as he surveyed his courtroom. It was hard to tell if he was surprised by all the cameras or if the chief judge had given him a heads up that it was office policy to allow them in his courtroom and he was just mad that he was expected to comply.
Bryan was nervous. The case against Poole was good, but far from perfect. It was circumstantial, was what it was. He wished he had Ed Carbone in custody and a sample of his DNA to compare with the sample taken off the Yankee hat and fabric, but he didn’t. The task force had ripped apart what little they could find out about Carbone’s life, but there was still no sign of him. Most of the information he’d supplied on his volunteer form at Orange Youth fifteen years earlier turned out to be lies, including former addresses and his work history. There was no record of him attending Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin, Tennessee, which he claimed to have graduated from. A run of his social showed he had worked as a trucker for Central Freight in Memphis, Houston and Orlando, and had been briefly married for three months. Maldonado found his ex living in Little Rock: She hadn’t seen or heard from Carbone in a decade, but told detectives that he had lived in Mexico as a teenager with his mother’s family and was fluent in Spanish. The owner of Abe’s Scrap, where Carbone had last worked, said Carbone was a hunter and a survivalist, who had bragged of living in the Appalachians for months, like terrorist and Olympic Park bomber, Eric Rudolph, which potentially made finding him a challenge. Every state agency in Florida and the FBI were looking for him, but there had been no trace of him. It was as if the man had simply vanished.
‘The court has decided to call a matter out of turn,’ announced the clerk. ‘State of Florida vs. Derrick Alan Poole, page sixteen.’
Elisabetta gathered her file and strode confidently to the podium as the cameras began to roll. ‘Assistant State Attorney Elisabetta Romolo, on behalf of the state.’
‘Richard Hartwick for the defendant, Derrick Poole,’ said Hartwick, as he approached the defense podium.
‘Where’s the defendant?’ barked Judge Cummins.
‘On his way out now, Your Honor,’ replied the corrections officer.
The judge clapped his hands impatiently. ‘Well, let’s get on with this.’
Maybe it was a good thing all the press was here, Bryan thought as the door to the jury room swung open and a corrections officer escorted in a meek-looking Derrick Poole, clad in an orange jumpsuit and wrapped in chains.
Because with a case that was less than perfect, maybe with all those cameras watching it would make it that much harder for the judge to let a murderer go free …