The wags never understood what Crandall did with Jake and nitpicked it regularly long after the verdict. The Pug talk went like this: Why in hell did old Potter make that kid out to be anything other than walking, talking dog shit, something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe? Wasn’t he there? Didn’t he shoot them kids and Aunt Lotty himself? Potter’s getting old. He never would’ve let up on scum as putrid as that when he was younger.

The truth of the matter was Crandall made Jake out to be sympathetic because he could and the jury needed to believe that to believe anything else Jake had to say. I tried to explain it in print at the time, but Marley had decided the kid was as offensive as everyone said and cut the explanation and most of the quotes from the story about his testimony.

When Crandall called Jake on day six about mid-morning, the door just off the jury box opened but nobody came out. We waited through a long, tense moment before we heard the metallic clatter chain links make when shackles come off.

With the cuffs and leg chains still tinkling in his hands, Moze finally steered Jake by the shoulders through the door and aimed him toward the witness box. Seated beside Crandall, Wood scowled at his deputy’s faux pas. No one doubted the fact Jake was a criminal would come out shortly, but why lead with that fact when jurors’ first impressions count for so much?

Jake moved forward with a stoop-shoulder shuffle as though he were still chained. He focused entirely on making the 20-foot trip between the door and the box.

The greasy, rodent-brown, shoulder-length hair he had in his mug shot was gone, buzzed down so close now you could see his pasty scalp. A volcanic acne atoll had erupted on one gaunt cheek.

Someone had taken a couple of tens from the prosecutor’s discretionary account and bought him a long-sleeved, white shirt and black, cotton slacks at Wal-Mart. Moze or Jake had buttoned the shirt up to the neck, but it was too big, the pants were too short, and both bore the sort of deeply cut wrinkles that said the clothes had come out of the plastic wrap no more than an hour before.

As he shuffled, there were winks of white socks above the tops of faded blue Chuck Taylor’s. Probably the shoes were the only items of clothing he could call his own. He made me think of photos of refugees who have fled civil war.

Jake pulled himself up outside the box and swiveled his head, blinking, uncertain. He glanced at the Defendant, who had tried to eye-fuck him from the moment he came through the door. Jake’s gaze jumped off him like it’d stepped on a toad.

He scanned the gallery, but if he were looking for his mom, he wasn’t going to find her. Or any other friendly face, for that matter.

His court-appointed defender, an unreasonably young woman in a black pantsuit and green cotton blouse, slipped into the courtroom through the same door Jake had come through and took a chair that had been placed near the witness box for her. She draped Jake with an expression of unctuous concern, no doubt more for the jury’s benefit than his, but Jake wasn’t wasting any energy on her.

Instead, his eyes found Wood’s and settled there. Wood smiled and nodded to him, and the panicky trace that had lapped at the edge of Jake’s haunted eyes disappeared.

Wood’s wife, Alice, had told me they’d talked a lot on the long drive back from Florida. She said Wood had spent a little time with him each day since then and a little more time on those days when he was the only juvenile in the cellblock. She said Wood thought the boy might be lonely.

I thought Wood probably thought more than that. He certainly would know better than to talk about the crime outside the presence of the boy’s attorney, but he also would know the value to the State’s case of earning a needy boy’s trust and he would recognize that, as a calm, honest, and upright man who was going to spend a good deal of time with the boy anyway, he might be the guy for the job.

Wood had only to tip his head to Jake to prompt him to enter the box and raise his right hand. Reardon noted it by a cocked eyebrow.

Everybody in the room who’d ever watched a cop show or a lawyer show knew the first thing Reardon would use against Jake was his plea agreement. Reardon said as much in his opening. With all his years as a real prosecutor, Crandall knew it better than any of us.

The common tactic is to address the issue either at the beginning or the end of the witness’ testimony. Put it at the beginning and you’re betting the jury will forget it after they hear the rest of what the witness has to say. Put it at the end and you’re betting that the jury will ignore it after hearing whatever came before.

In his blunt, short-road way, Crandall dealt with it at the beginning. Jake had no more than got his name out before Crandall asked, “Why’re you here?”

Jake rocked side to side arranging his cheeks. His eyes darted around the room a time or two before he leaned toward the microphone. Looking at a spot on the floor in front of him and speaking in a husky voice, just above a whisper, he drawled, “’Cause I said I would.”

Still standing at the state’s table, Crandall tucked his chin deep into his jowls. He may have been suppressing a satisfied smile.

Jake didn’t directly answer the question, but the first words out of his mouth implied he was someone who kept his word. If you were trying to persuade 14 people they could believe a teenage boy who was about to admit he had killed three children and shot an old woman, it was a decent start.

“Did you participate in killing Timothy Crawford, Emily Russell, and Kyle Russell?”

Jake cleared his throat.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

From one side and in front of me, I heard Naomi moan.

“Did you also participate in shooting Lottie Nusbaumer?”

Jake had not lifted his eyes from the floor.

“Yes,” he said. He cleared his throat again. “That’s so.”

There was no one present to moan for Lottie.

Crandall then walked Jake through the criminal charges he had been arrested on and the criminal charges he had pled guilty to and the sentences he was likely to receive when he had completed his testimony—55 years for each murder count. In exchange for his testimony, Crandall had dropped any charge related to Lottie, agreed to let Jake serve his time for each of the murder charges concurrently, and—the real key to the deal—chose not to seek the death penalty.

“The charges against you were reduced and the sentences you received are less than they could have been because you made a deal with my office, right?”

‘Yeah.”

“My end of the deal was to recommend a reduced sentence. What’s your end?”

“Come here. Talk.”

“Talk truthfully, right?”

The boy nodded distractedly as though he was rethinking the deal.

“You have to answer out loud, Jake. Is that ‘yes’?”

“Yes.”

“You think you’ll ever get out of prison?”

Jake looked at his hands as he rubbed the fingertips of one over the palm of the other.

“Probably not,” Jake said.

With his elbows on the armrests, Jake interlaced his fingers in front of him, and his thumbs pushed against each other, bending back and forth as though wrestling. In the way he watched them, he might not have known which one would win.

“I do,” he said, “I don’t ‘spect it’ll be till I’m old.”

Finally, he lifted his eyes to Crandall.

“Like you,” Jake said with a perfectly straight face.

The gallery split between gasps and titters. Given the circumstances, no one expected the boy to be cheeky, and more than a few obviously thought the remark disrespectful, if not of Crandall then of dead children and Lotty.

But Crandall wanted—needed—the jury to like Jake. He cocked his head and gave Jake a rueful grin, gently acknowledging in a way the jury could see that from the perspective of someone as young as Jake he was, indeed, old.

Crandall’s gesture and Jake’s straight face premised Jake in the jury’s thinking just the way Crandall wanted him premised: Young, impressionable, if not impulsive, and truthful.

Crandall’s reaction was part of a pattern a couple of us who knew him well had seen developing throughout the trial. He was consciously reining himself in.

He still knew what he wanted to do and how he was going to do it, and he still moved toward his goals in straight lines. But he was suppressing the aggression, rounding off the bluntness, and abandoning the hyperbole. He had, for once, dialed back the presence that impinged on your awareness when he entered a room and that threatened to engulf you when he turned his attention on you.

In many ways, it felt like he was stepping to one side, so that the jury could focus on the witnesses. Dill would have said he was the actor become director.

Crandall marched to the defense table and pointed at the Defendant.

“You know this man?”

The Defendant had not taken his eyes off Jake’s face since Jake had entered the courtroom, and if he had blinked in that time, I missed it. Jake must have felt it. He would only glance in the direction Crandall pointed.

“Yeah,” Jake said, one word strained through tones of disgust and shame.

That Jake answered with only one word was a measure of how well Crandall had prepped him. Every lawyer tells his client that when he testifies he is to say no more than is necessary to answer a question.

The rules are: “Answer honestly and to the best of your ability, then shut up. Do not elaborate, guess, or speculate. Do not offer an opinion unless you’re asked for one, and do not give it until you know whether I will object.”

And every lawyer will tell you that if the impulse to talk grabs him it’s hard to make a teenage boy shut up. In that situation, as a rule, they’re worse than teenage girls, probably because teenage boys tend to be dumber and less mature and because they have the idea that telling the truth means leaving no thought unspoken.

They seem to think that if they get it all out the listener can sort out what’s worth believing and what’s not. Most boys either don’t know or can’t be bothered to figure it out.

Still, Jake answered with one word and waited. And Crandall, instead of inviting Jake to blurt out his whole story by asking “how?”, asked, “When did you first meet him?”

“When I was fourteen,” Jake said.

Crandall had decided to take things chronologically. It was another wise move, since Jake’s story of the relationship’s development would tell the jury a lot, not only about Jake and whether he was to be believed, but also—and more to the point—about the Defendant. Neither Crandall or I would say so, either to jurors or readers, at the time, but later we would admit that even as perverse as it was Jake’s story amounted to no more than a true tale about the extent to which we yearn for love.

They had met through Jake’s Uncle Don, a boy himself at the time, no more three or four years older than Jake. Jake finally looked at the Defendant and said, “He used to sell Donnie . . .”

“Objection,” Reardon said, coming to his feet perhaps a little too quickly. “Approach.” He barked it as a command, not a request, and Secrist scowled.

“. . . dope,” Jake finished, looking now at the jury.

“Hush,” Secrist told him.

The words “irrelevant,” “prejudice,” and “mistrial” could be heard from a visibly angry Reardon at the bench. Crandall smiled at him and then turned to Secrist and murmured. They argued for a couple more minutes before Secrist, visibly annoyed, shooed them back to their tables with the backs of his hands.

“Overruled.”

He leaned over to Jake.

“Young man, when either of those two lawyers says ‘objection,’ stop talking. Immediately. You don’t talk again until I tell you to. You understand that?”

Jake nodded.

“Say it out loud for the record.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Secrist repeated. “Let’s make it ‘yeah, judge’ or ‘yeah, your honor’ from now on. You understand that?”

“Yes, judge.”

Secrist nodded to himself. He shook back the draped sleeve of his robe, so he could pick up his pen.

“You can talk when Mr. Crandall asks his next question,” Secrist said to Jake and pointed to Crandall.

In response to Crandall’s question, Jake said he had seen his uncle buy drugs from the Defendant on numerous occasions. Jake said he used to see the Defendant quite a bit after his uncle invited the Defendant and his then pregnant companion to live with him. The Defendant, Jake said, had been kicked out his parents’ house for knocking her up.

“How old was his ‘companion’?” Crandall asked, seemingly indifferent to the course way Jake described the pregnancy.

“Objection.” Reardon called. “Irrelevant.”

“Overruled. You can answer,” Secrist said to Jake.

“My age.”

“And how old did you say were at the time?”

Crandall turned to Reardon anticipating another objection—asked and answered was my bet—but Reardon knew that there is always a risk of annoying the jury by objecting too much.

“Fourteen,” Jake said, when Crandall turned back to him. “We was in the same grade.”

“And this girl is now the Defendant’s wife, is that correct?”

“Yeah.”

Crandall had walked us all the way through the mine to get to that nugget. He was already at work chipping away at the credibility of the witness most likely to provide the Defendant with an alibi.

Uncle Donnie eventually kicked the Defendant, his lover, and their newborn child out when the Defendant refused to pay rent, either in drugs or cash, Jake said. Not long after that, the Defendant went to prison for the sale of controlled substances. When he returned, he went to live with his parents again. The lover was now his wife—they had been married in the prison so that the Defendant could have what Jake described as “a couple of sex visits”—and she and the baby had been taken in by the in-laws already.

“When he got out, his old man put him to work on the farm,” Jake said. “But he wasn’t much on manual labor. He liked supervising better’n actual work. Said he needed somebody to help with the farm work, so he asked me. I said sure ‘cause I didn’t have no money.”

But Jake said he wasn’t paid in cash. The Defendant gave him a room in one of the barns to stay in when he needed it and all the drugs he wanted.

“He said he’d teach me how to be a man. He said since he’d been to prison he knew what it took.”

“And how did he do that exactly?” Crandall asked, his eyebrows raised, his face open, receptive, and innocent as if he had not already read or heard the answer a dozen times.

“Well,” Jake said, sighed, and ran his hand across his stubbly scalp, not knowing quite where to begin. “The first thing he did, I reckon, was work my ass off.”

The room’s tension released in laughter. Reardon jumped to his feet to object, but Secrist singed the laughter with a napalm scowl and told Reardon to sit down.

Jake told a tale of the Defendant working him ten, twelve hours a day at all sorts of thankless tasks on the farm. To keep him going, the Defendant fed him uppers or PCP. To help him sleep or to spark his appetite, he got grass. On weekends, they partied with LSD or PCP.

“’Said he wanted to see my reactions to different kinds of dope so he could better serve his ‘clientele,’” Jake said. “You know, so he could recommend what kind of dope was best to use for a particular kind of high or to suit your mood.”

He talked mostly to Wood, but here he paused to look at the jury.

“’Serve his clientele.’ He talked like that. Them big words in that whispery voice. It was all crap, him making me out to be some kind of lab rat for his fucking cli-en-tele.”

Reardon stood, but before he could speak, Secrist said to Jake, “Mind your language,” and pointed Reardon back to his chair.

“Where was the Defendant when you were working on the farm?” Crandall asked quickly to get things back on track.

“He said he was developing leads and making sales. He said he was trying to grow the business, and . . . “

“Which business?”

“The dope business. What other kind of business we been talking about?’ said Jake, clearly annoyed by the interruption.

Wood stared at Jake, and Crandall pursed his lips. Jake bit his and looked at the floor.

“He said he was trying to grow the business,” Crandall repeated to Jake. “And?”

“And he said he was doing that so there’d be enough business for the both of us when he brought me in, like a partner or some such.”

“Did the Defendant do anything else that you took to be part of your education in how to be a man?” Crandall asked to move on to another area.

“Oh, yeah,” Jake said. “There was reading to do. Like I’m not too tired and strung out already.”

“Reading,” Crandall repeated, pointing him down the path again.

“Yeah. He gave me books to read. Said they’d help shape my thinking so I could act like a man when the time came.”

“What books did he give you?”

“In Cold Blood was one. Helter Skelter was ‘nother.”

Crandall looked at the jury. The difference between the clouded expressions of three or four of the jurors who obviously knew the books and the blank expressions of the rest was stark.

Crandall dipped his chin to his chest for a moment, then raised it.

“Those the only two,” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I don’t read good. It takes me a while. ‘Specially when I’m wore out and fu . . . screwed up.”

“Did you read the two books?”

“Most of them, yeah.”

“What’re they about?”

“Objection,” Reardon said. “Irrelevant. Rule 402. Hearsay.”

Reardon obviously had anticipated this part of Jake’s testimony. To avoid tipping off the jury by stating it plainly, he had cited by number the rule of evidence that relevant testimony may be excluded if its prejudicial effect to a party outweighs its probative value. I know because Janelle later pulled a copy of the state’s rules of evidence out of her saddlebag to look it up.

It was a reasonable guess on my part that Crandall did not know exactly what Jake was going to say but Crandall nonetheless considered the risk of proceeding with the line of questions worthwhile when it became obvious the jury did not know the subject of the books. Whatever Jake was going to say obviously was significant to both men.

“Goes to motive and bias, Judge,” Crandall said. “And, as Mr. Reardon has previously noted, those are always relevant.”

“Overruled,” Secrist said.

We all looked at Jake, who seemed confused. He said to Secrist, “I can talk now?”

Secrist smiled and nodded.

“They’re about people killing people for the hell of it.”

Reardon rolled his eyes. Crandall gave the jurors a sidelong glance to measure their reaction, then dipped his chin into his jowls again. He apparently considered it a better answer than he had any right to expect.

Crandall said: “Earlier you said the Defendant told you the books would help shape your thinking so you could act like a man when the time came. What did you take that to mean?”

Jake rocked side to side as he had in his first uncomfortable moments on the stand. He said in a soft voice, “’Sounded to me like there was going to be a damn test.”

Without being asked, Secrist called a break for lunch. Everybody in the room knew we were down to it, and the next stretch was going to be long and almost certainly rough.

Nobody ever found out whether the rip-off story was true, but nobody cared much either. The story served its purpose.

Jake began the afternoon session by telling how he came to steal the shotguns he had bought the ammunition for. He said the Defendant had appeared in his room one night about 3 a.m. and showered him with acid tabs, hits of speed, PCP packets, and dime bags of grass.

“Shit, hundreds of them.” Jake said. “He said he’d ripped off the dope guy.”

That brought Reardon upright.

“Objection. Hearsay. Irrelevant. Move to strike.”

“Motive, bias, admission against interest,” Crandall said sarcastically. “How many more you gonna need, Judge?”

It was a taste of the old Crandall; he must’ve thought things were going well.

“A civil tongue and a respectful tone, Mr. Crandall,” Secrist said. “Overruled.”

“Who’s the dope guy,” Crandall asked, just to rub it in a little more.

“The guy who sold him his stuff,” Jake said in a tone that suggested he was talking to a simpleton.

Crandall held Jake in a long, baleful gaze to rein him in. Finally, he asked, “What does the Defendant stealing from his dealer have to do with how you came to be in possession of shotguns?”

“He told me . . .” Jake was comfortable enough on the stand now that he looked at the Defendant and stuck his chin out at him. “He told me the dope guy would kill him when he found out, and we had to protect ourselves.”

“What is the name of the dope guy?”

“I don’t know. He never told me. I don’t even know if he did what he said or if he just bought a bunch of stuff and dropped it on me to make him look like he was big time.”

“But you believed him at the time, did you not?” Crandall rode in quickly.

“Yeah.”

“And what did you do?”

“He said we had to get us some guns, so we broke into some houses until we found a couple of shotguns. Or maybe I should say I broke into the damn houses, since he made me go in. He’d only scout out the places, then drive me there. Said there was less chance us getting caught if it was only one of us went in.”

Jake turned to the jury.

“When you’re fu . . . stoned, that kind of crap makes way more sense than it should,” he said sagely and shrugged.

A couple of jurors stared, then looked away. They didn’t seem like the kind who would appreciate a life lesson from a kid like Jake.

The night before Halloween, about nine, Jake said, the Defendant fed him some PCP—he called it “dust”—waited for it to kick in, then threw him a stocking cap.

“One of ‘em that has holes for your eyes and mouth,” Jake said. “Red. His’s black. He was holding the guns. Said we’re gonna trick or treat. I said it wasn’t Halloween and anyway I was too old for that shit, and if I was, then sure as hell he was.

“He smiled that creepy smile he puts on when you cross him and said I misunderstood. Said he heard the dope guy was on the move, coming to get him. Said the dope guy knew I was his right-hand man. The dope guy’d take me out too just to teach others you couldn’t steal from him and get away with it. We needed more guns, he said.”

They stole Jake’s mother’s car. The Defendant told Jake they needed a car the dope guy wouldn’t recognize. Jake thought now that it was more likely the Defendant just wanted another way to pin what they were going to do on Jake.

Not until they were in the car, driving around in the country, looking for a house to rob, did the Defendant tell him what trick or treating meant: They would only break into houses that looked occupied. If the people had guns—the treat—they’d take them and leave the occupants alone. No guns, and the occupants got the trick—they died.

“I got to know you got the balls to pull the trigger if the dope guy shows,” Jake quoted the Defendant as saying.

“What was your reaction to that?” Crandall asked.

“Jittery as I was then, it seemed like a good question,” Jake said. “I was curious about it myself.”

They drove around in the country for an hour or more. Every time Jake would point out a place he thought was a good one the Defendant waved it off.

“I thought then he was just being careful,” Jake said. “Now? I think he was just plumb scared.”

Jake turned to the jury.

“I mean he hadn’t eaten any dust to buck himself up like I had.”

The presumption of this second life lesson went over no better than the first one had. Sensing trouble Crandall stepped between the jury and Jake, then walked away to draw their attention away from each other. He parked in front of the defense table to remind everyone whom they were talking about.

“How did the Defendant pick the place where you finally stopped?” Crandall asked.

“I don’t know. He just finally sighed and said, ‘stop here,’ so we did.”

“You could have stopped sooner, or you could have stopped later?”

“Well, yeah.” Jake said uncertainly.

“Lotty Nusbaumer’s just happened to be where the Defendant”—Crandall pointed at him—“finally managed to screw up his courage.”

“Objection,” Reardon called. “Speculation. He can’t know what was in . . .”

He stopped himself. The end of that sentence would have been “my client’s mind.” If Reardon had finished it, he would have admitted his client was present at Lotty’s place.

Crandall turned to Reardon so that only Reardon and those in the gallery could see him and flashed Reardon a smirk.

“Withdrawn,” he said.

Reardon scowled, which was his second mistake. Crandall had harpooned him, then Reardon let himself call attention to it. I can’t remember Reardon offering another objection during Jake’s testimony after that.

The Defendant looked at Crandall with the mildly curious, predatory gaze. Admiration or hatred could have run behind it, but how would you know?

They pulled the car far enough up the driveway that no one on the road would see it. They backed in so that the car would be ready to go and the license plate would not be exposed to the road. The Defendant had removed the bulb from the overhead light so that it would not come on when they opened the doors. He told Jake to leave the doors open when they got out so that they wouldn’t make noise and they could get away quicker.

“He’d thought of everything,” Jake said, with more admiration than Crandall liked. Wood cleared his throat, and Jake looked sheepish.

The Defendant finally gave Jake one of the shotguns as they left the car. The Defendant peeked in the picture window and apparently the sight of an old woman and children made him feel better about his choice.

“When he come back,” Jake said, “he told me, he said, ‘Looks like a trick house for sure’ and for the first time that night, he was smiling.”

They crept up to the front door. The Defendant carefully tested the knob and found it unlocked. He stepped back and told Jake to pull down his mask.

“’Go in, turn right,’” Jake quoted the Defendant in a husky whisper. “’Shout at them. Tell them to freeze or you’ll blow their fu . . . blow their heads off.’ He had his hand on my shoulder, and he was shaking me, trying to get me jacked up. Then he pulled me up them stairs so’s I was first and in we went.”

Jake’s attitude became musing.

“Them kids. They didn’t have a clue what was happening. Not a clue. The old lady did. She started to get up, and I told her sit the hell still.”

“What happened then?” Crandall asked to pull him out of his funk.

“It’s hard to remember.”

I suspect he meant it was unpleasant to remember, not that he could not remember. Crandall suspected so, too.

“What happened then?” he asked again, more gently.

Jake offered up bare facts. They put them on the floor and told them to shut up. The Defendant told Jake to take a look in the other rooms to make sure there was no one else in the trailer. When Jake returned, the Defendant was holding the shotgun on them and eating an apple he’d picked off the table.

“He was eating an apple?” Crandall asked incredulously, interrupting Jake to underscore the cold-bloodedness of the act and remind the jury they had heard evidence of an eaten apple previously from one of the techs.

Jake only nodded. The Defendant asked the old lady if she had any guns in the house, Jake said. When the old lady said no, he said, “Well, we’ll just see,” and went to look for himself. When he returned, he looked at Jake, shrugged, and shook his head.

“Then, he said, ‘time for trick or treat.’ He put the barrel of his gun to the back of her head and told her she didn’t have the treat we were looking for so we’d have to trick her. He looked at me and he said, ‘Jake, take off your mask.’”

Jake shook his head.

“Even in a haze, I didn’t ‘preciate him using my name, and I sure as hell didn’t want to take off that mask. I mean, I’m standing on one side of them and he’s on the other, kind of at their feet, and that old lady and one them kids was looking over their shoulders back at me. They got big, buggy eyes. The girl, she’s wimpering.

“’Jake,’ he said, ‘get her off. We’re going to make it real. You won’t be wearing a mask when the dope guy comes.’ I said, ‘You going to take off yours?’ and he said, ‘Sure.’ So I took her off and I stood there blinking and gulping and looking at them. Then he said, ‘You ready, Jake,” and I said, ‘Yeah, I reckon.’ And he said, ‘Do it,’ and we did it.”

Crandall let that hang in breathless silence for a long, long time.

Then he said quietly, “Did what?”

Jake swallowed. He stared at the floor in front of the box and swallowed again.

“Shot ‘em.”

“How many times?”

“I don’t know.” He looked up at Crandall annoyed. “I unloaded both barrels of a double-barrel. I felt the blast from his gun on my arm, that’s how wired I was, so I know he shot, too.”

Jake was talking fast, some anger boiling off him.

“He said load up. He said we got to make sure they’re down. He said shoot ‘em again. And this time, you little bastard, he said, open your damn eyes, he said, and you aim, he said. So I did.”

“And did the Defendant shoot then, too?” Crandall asked quickly.

“His gun was smoking when I finally looked at him.”

He cocked his chin at the Defendant.

“And the son of bitch,” Jake said, “he was still wearing his mask.”

“Do you know why he did not remove his mask?”

“Hell, yes. He told me. He said he wanted to make sure I’d go through with it. Said if they knew what I looked like I’d have to kill them, so, you know, they wouldn’t tell. Said besides you always show your face when you’re trick or treating and you’re going to trick them. Only fair.”

Jake shook his head. There were differences in the ways his mind and the Defendant’s mind worked that he still just could not believe.

“’Course, he didn’t pull his off until we was done,” Jake said after a time.

Crandall had wound him up and now just let him go.

“The old lady was twitchin’. He said, ‘Finish her.’ He had to shout. I couldn’t hear shit after all that noise. And his gun, his smoking gun, he was pointing it at me, so I shot her again. When I was done, he hooked his thumb under the bottom of his mask, dragged her back over his head, and shook out his hair like a girl. He took a big breath, and while he was putting another shell in his gun, he had kind of glassy look on his face for a second, like he’d just shot his wad. Then he pointed the damn gun at me again. ‘Gimme your weapon, Jake,’ he said. ‘Time to go.’ He wasn’t trusting me one bit.”

Crandall spent another hour or so with Jake, walking him through the details of picking up the shells, fleeing, disposing of the guns, and running to Florida. Crandall wanted just enough detail to corroborate the testimony of other witnesses. And probably to camouflage the landmine Jake had exposed.

Jake fulfilled the promise Reardon made in his opening. Without saying so directly, he told the jury that no one but him could say who the second person in that double-wide was. Not even Aunt Lotty would be able to describe her assailant with cross-proof certainty if he had not removed his mask. It explained why Crandall had not sought the death penalty. Telling jurors that if they convicted they would have to impose the death penalty tended to make them even more cautious about convicting, and Crandall apparently was concerned enough with Jake’s credibility that he would not freight it with the needle’s specter.

I had my lede. I knew it as soon as I heard it, but I did not then dare lift my eyes from my pad for fear of giving it away. Secrist called for a break. I snuck a peak at Janelle and the rest of the clans. If they knew what they had heard, they were playing it as cool as I hoped I was.

The jurors were having a hard time leaving the box. A couple remained seated, staring hard at Jake. The others had stood, all of them grim and drawn. They were waiting patiently on their colleagues to rise so they could all file out. Standing at their respective tables, both Reardon and Crandall watched this moment with interest. As the two finally rose and the jury left, Reardon winked at Legs.

The practitioners of the fine art of cross-examination generally agree that a lawyer should always ask yes-or-no questions to which he already knows the answers. One school of thought among those practitioners, however, refines the theory further.

Those lawyers hold that questions should be framed so that the witness must always answer in the affirmative and should be posed in series of three. Each series should focus on a single issue or theme, and each question in the series should produce a new fact. It’s a theory based on psychological studies of how we—jurors at any rate—are wired to perceive, and its aim is to make it easier for jurors to absorb and understand evidence.

Those of us among the clans who care enough to know this sort of thing generally agree the theories of cross-examination are a little like different schools of Buddhism. You can’t say with any degree of certainty what will carry a juror to enlightenment. It had become apparent, however, that Reardon was a disciple of the 3-yes dharma.

“So,” Reardon began. He remained seated at the table, not giving Jake the respect of rising to address him. “After you killed three children and shot Lottie Nusbaumer, you ran to Florida. Is that correct?”

Crandall objected on grounds of relevance and exceeding the scope of direct examination. Reardon stayed in his chair, showing no more respect for Crandall than he did for Jake. He said it went to bias and Jake’s motive in testifying and offered to subpoena Jake to return, if that’s what Crandall wanted.

Secrist agreed with Reardon. The objection worked to Reardon’s advantage, as I’m sure he knew when he asked the question in a way that was sure to produce the objection. It allowed him to repeat a question from which nothing good about Jake could be drawn.

“You killed three children and shot Lottie Nusbaumer. You admit that. Yes?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you ran to Florida.”

“With him.” Jake raised a lazy finger in the direction of the Defendant but did not look at him directly.

“You ran to Florida. Yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“And you were arrested in Florida.”

“Yes.”

“Three charges, correct?”

“Yeah.”

Jake looked to Wood and Crandall for help, but they were not looking back.

“One charge was related to possession of drugs and two related to soliciting oral sex with a church deacon near Disney World,” Reardon said. “True?”

Before Crandall could get to his feet, Secrist said, “Answer the question, young man. Then move on, Mr. Reardon.”

“Charges related to drugs and homosexual sex,” Reardon was again quick to repeat. “Yes or no?”

Jake could not have been dumber.

“I needed money,” he said.

“You needed money? To buy more drugs? To go to Disney World?

“Objection,” Crandall called, standing and glaring at Jake.

“Opened door, Judge,” Reardon replied.

“Go through it quickly, then close it,” Secrist said. “Now.” He pointed to Jake.

Jake saw there was nowhere to go. He did not answer. Reardon let the silence linger as the answer.

“So to get money for something,” Reardon continued finally, “you asked a church deacon if he would pay you to perform oral sex. Correct?”

Chastened now, Jake looked down and whispered, “Yeah.”

“And those charges were dropped when you agreed to come back to this state to face the charges against you for killing three children and shooting an old woman. Is that correct?”

“Yeah.”

“And you escaped with your life by testifying here today. True?”

“True, yeah.”

Reardon looked at Jake for a moment, then at the jury. He looked down at his legal pad, then nodded once to himself. He apparently had completed all the items on his checklist for round one: break Jake of the impulse to spar, train him to answer all questions in the affirmative, hold Crandall at bay, and poison at birth any notion a juror might entertain that Jake was a good and therefore credible boy.

Reardon finally stood. He walked around the table and hitched a cheek on the corner so that Jake’s eyes were drawn away from the jury and its view of his client was blocked.

“You were in Lottie Nusbaumer’s trailer on the night before Halloween?”

The question seemed too easy to Jake. He looked at Wood, sensing some trick. Wood remained inscrutable.

“Yeah,” Jake said finally.

“When you went into that trailer, you had a loaded shotgun in your hands?”

Jake shrugged. Hadn’t he already said that?

“Answer the question out loud,” Reardon ordered.

“Yes,” Jake said, in the testy, no-shit hiss that teenage boys do so well.

“And during nearly all the time you were in that trailer you had a loaded shotgun in your hands. True?”

“Yeah, true.”

“That was a gun you had stolen, was it not?”

Crandall had heard the rhythm Reardon was starting to develop and didn’t like it. “Asked and answered,” he growled from his side of room.

“Indeed, it has been,” Reardon said, smiling at Crandall to underscore his point.

“I believe you said it had been stolen by you, did you not?” Reardon said to Jake before Secrist could respond. “You stole all of the guns that were involved in this murder. Wasn’t that your testimony?”

Jake waited for a nod from Secrist.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You lined the children up on the floor?”

The change in direction caused Jake to blink. His eyes roamed left and right, while he tried to figure where Reardon was going. A fact, however, is a fact, he finally decided, and said, “Yes.”

“You put Lottie Nusbaumer on the floor beside them?”

Jake was not as simple as some took him for. It’s doubtful he knew why he didn’t like how things were going, but he did know he had not heard the Defendant’s name in any of Reardon’s questions.

He said, “I’m not the only one in the room, you know.”

“Answer the question, yes or no. You put Lottie Nusbaumer on the floor beside them.”

“Yeah, I reckon.”

“You reckon? You weren’t there?”

“I said I was.”

“You said you were there,” Reardon repeated.

“Your honor,” Crandall began, coming to his feet, “counsel has now adopted the role of the court reporter, repeating back to the witness what he has just said.”

“An important fact bears repeating,” Reardon responded.

“And now he’s testifying,” Crandall said.

“Mr. Crandall, I didn’t hear a specific objection, but whatever it was, it is now sustained. Sit down,” the judge said. “Mr. Reardon, move on.”

“And all three children and an elderly woman were on their stomachs, were they not?”

Jake looked at Wood again, then at Crandall, who remained as impassive as Wood.

“The answer?” Reardon prodded.

“Yeah. I said it already.”

“And it’s correct to say they didn’t have any guns or other weapons in their hands?”

“Yeah, that’s correct.”

“And it’s also correct to say they weren’t threatening you with harm?”

“That’s so, too.”

“And even though they were lying the floor and even though they had their backs to you and even though they presented no threat of harm to you, you emptied both barrels of a double-barreled shotgun into their backs and the backs of their heads?”

That was a question Jake had been waiting for.

“I didn’t look where I was aiming,” he said, too quickly for his own good.

“You looked at them when you were done, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And you saw wounds in their backs and the backs of their heads, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I did.”

“So it’s true to say you hit them when you shot at them.”

“Yes,” Jake said softly.

“And then you reloaded your shotgun?”

Crandall slapped his palms on the table to stop Jake from answering, then pushed himself wearily to his feet. By now, Crandall had figured out what Reardon was doing. He was recasting the whole series of events so that it would appear only Jake had carried out the killings.

“Judge,” he complained, “we have been through this at length, and the witness has not contradicted himself or any other previously introduced evidence. This cannot be impeachment. Asked and answered, if you want a formal statement of grounds.”

“Your honor,” Reardon said, “I need only a few more questions to complete this line. If the court will indulge.”

Secrist looked at the jury for a long moment, apparently trying to decide whether he would remove them from the courtroom so that he could hear the attorneys argue. “Approach,” he ordered, and the three whispered, occasionally in fury, for several minutes.

Jake stared at Legs’ legs with kind of a dreamy smile on his face until Wood cleared his throat. So far as I could tell, the Defendant had not moved or taken his eyes off Jake since he entered the courtroom.

“Overruled,” Secrist said as the attorneys stepped away, Reardon serene, Crandall flushed and puckered.

“Answer the question,” Secrist said.

“I don’t remember what it was,” Jake said.

Secrist cocked his head at Reardon, who ran a finger down his yellow pad.

“You shot the victims once with both barrels, did you not?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you reloaded your shotgun?”

“Yeah.”

“And you emptied your gun—both barrels—again. True or false?”

“True.”

“You say there was another man in the room with you when you shot three children and an elderly woman?”

“Your client, yeah.”

Reardon ignored it.

“When you were talking with Mr. Crandall, I didn’t hear you say that you told that the second person that you didn’t want to shoot those people, did I?”

“Say that again.”

“During your earlier testimony, you did not say that you told that second person ‘I don’t want to shoot anybody.’ You didn’t say that, did you.”

“No?” he said, as though he was unsure.

“When this second person told you Lottie Nusbaumer’s place was a ‘trick’ house and when he told you what that meant, you didn’t say to that second person ‘maybe we shouldn’t do this.’”

“You heard me say I was jittery on dust.”

“Yes, we all heard you say that you were jittery on PCP. You liked the drugs, didn’t you?”

It was a classic cross-examination question: no answer would benefit Jake. If he said no, after telling the jury how much of the Defendant’s dope he had consumed, his credibility was blown. Yes was probably true, but admitting it to this crowd did him no favors. He stuck with the truth.

“I did,” he said. “Then,” he added in the hope of mitigating it.

“Then,” Reardon repeated. “Then was when you were holding a loaded shotgun and you could have pointed it at that second person and shot him, but you did not, did you?”

“He would’ve shot me.”

“Answer the question. That second person didn’t look at you all the time. True or false.”

Jake shrugged. “True.”

“Which means at some point, you could have shot him. True or false.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t remember.”

“Well, you managed to shoot three children and an old woman. True?”

“Yes.”

“So obviously you were capable of shooting another human being?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Yeah, I suppose,” he said, as though that made perfect sense now that it had been brought to his attention.

“But you did not shoot that second person. True?”

“Yeah,” Jake admitted.

“And if you had, wouldn’t those three children and an old woman be alive today?”

“Objection,” Crandall said. “Calls for speculation.”

“No,” Secrist said quickly. “No, I don’t think it does. Overruled. Answer it, young man.”

Jake looked at the floor and blew some air out his nostrils. He raised his eyebrows and cocked his head.

“Yeah,” he said, at last. “Prob’ly they would.”

Crandall was on his feet as soon as Reardon said he had nothing else. He nearly sprinted toward the defense table.

“Who was the second man in that trailer?” he thundered.

Jake blinked and said, “Him.”

“Him?” Crandall said incredulously. “Him?” Crandall pointed at the Defendant.

“Yeah,” Jake said enthusiastically, snared in Crandall’s passion.

“You mean the Defendant?” Crandall asked.

“Yeah, him.”

“And isn’t he the one who told you there were no guns in that trailer?”

“Yeah.” Jake’s answer was less enthusiastic and more uncertain.

“And isn’t he the one who told you Lottie Nusbaumer’s place was a ‘trick house.’”

Jake shrugged. “Sure.”

“And isn’t he the one who said if there were no guns in the house you stopped at you and he would have to kill everyone inside?”

Reardon had started to his feet, but Secrist motioned him to sit down.

Jake nodded again enthusiastic and willing to give himself over to whatever course Crandall set.

“That’s what he said.”

Crandall paused, looked at the jury, looked at the Defendant, then looked at Jake. In a voice that was soft and full of regret, he asked, “Did he tell you there was a .22 caliber rifle in that trailer?”

Crandall had wound Jake so tight he opened his mouth to answer as soon as Crandall began the question. When he actually heard the question, though, nothing came out.

His eyes bugged, and his mouth opened and closed, like he’d gagged on a fish bone. He tipped his chin down, and his eyes receded deep under his brow. From out of that cave, he sighted Crandall with a look of cold hatred. Once more, he had been used.

But Crandall bet there was more to it. He stood between Jake and the Defendant, looking back, taking it, letting it build. Then he stepped away, so that Jake’s look fell on the Defendant, who, for once, blinked.

“No,” Jake rasped.

He stared at the Defendant, then he swallowed so he could speak more clearly.

“No, sir. That fucking weasel did not.”

A few of us among the clans who’d covered a trial or two gathered at a diner most evenings after we’d made our calls and filed our stories. It had settled into a routine, since most of us had stopped drinking and there was little else to do without a family on a weeknight in the Bluff.

Janelle liked to join us and ask questions. She seemed to think it was a J-school seminar, one served with fried catfish, a tangy vinegar slaw, and a little iced tea.

That night, after Jake testified, she asked us what we thought, particularly about that part at the end. We tossed it around for a while until the black-raspberry pie arrived, then we summed up: It might’ve been the most truthful piece of testimony we’d ever seen.