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Amanda and Joy were positively awestruck when they saw Sean and Mary Eileen coming out of Bean There. Joy immediately unleashed her smartphone, an Android with an excellent camera, to take some pictures. Amanda started texting Chronicle headquarters with the bulletin...”Mary Eileen Sullivan arrested in Detroit. State police found her working in a coffee shop. She put up no resistance. Not a shot fired.”
“Oh my God, is Sean bringing her to this car?” Joy said.
“We should be so lucky. Good, God! This is huge,” Amanda fairly screamed in Joy’s ear.
It was the story of a lifetime for both women. They were in on the arrest of St. Isidore’s most notorious female serial killer. Joy and Amanda had found Mary Eileen at the same time state police arrived on the scene, so they could reasonably claim to have discovered Ms. Sullivan. Esther would have no problem making that stretch of journalistic license; both women were sure of that.
Thoughts of selling the story to a publisher and maybe even getting a movie deal ran rampant through their minds as Joy and Amanda watched Mary Eileen walk toward them with her hands behind her back. Sean was apparently holding her by the handcuffs. His fellow officers followed them. No one showed any signs of a struggle.
There was a bench seat behind Joy and Amanda that would have been perfect for Mary Eileen, but St. Isidore’s favorite reporters didn’t get that lucky.
A state police squad car, called by Sean from inside Bean There arrived to transport Mary Eileen back to a jail cell in Detroit. She would be processed, a lawyer would come, and the legal proceedings would begin.
When Mary Eileen did get back to St. Isidore there was little doubt as to her guilt or innocence. As a matter of fact, she not only confessed to Sean after he read the Miranda warning to her, Mary Eileen apologized.
“I know what I did was horrendous and wrong. I felt so miserable like I couldn’t go on,” Mary Eileen said. “I would have ended it all, but I didn’t have the courage to kill myself.”
The only question was, whether she knew what she was doing when she killed two men and disposed of their bodies, or if Mary Eileen had lost touch with reality and the difference between right and wrong.
Should prosecutors and the members of the jury feel a measure of pity for her as they might for anyone who suffered severe mental and emotional problems that left them incapable of functioning as a rational adult? Or should they consider her to be a cold, calculating, man-hating, serial killer?
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JUST AS IT WAS THE story of a lifetime for Joy and Amanda, it was to be the court case of a career for St. Isidore County Assistant Prosecutor Patricia Fry.
Chief County Prosecutor Peter Logan could have taken the case himself, but with a woman on trial for her life, he felt the cause of justice — getting a conviction — would best be served if a woman handled the prosecution.
“It’s mine?” Patricia Fry said. She was amazed to be getting the most famous, or infamous case in St. Isidore County’s history. The only thing that beat it was the kidnapping of a young girl by a former high school teacher. The case never went to trial because police shot the suspect to death.
The case of Mary Eileen Sullivan was much different. While it was true there was no doubt that she was guilty, Mary Eileen had already confessed, Patricia knew that her lawyer, a sixty-seven-year-old wizard of the law, Michael Morris, could always throw her a curve ball and enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Why am I getting this case? Patricia knew the answer without asking it aloud. Because I’m a woman, she thought. In a way that’s insulting because if the suspect were a man and not a woman, I’d still be on midnight drunk tank duty.
“Of course, Logan could be setting me up to fail,” Patricia told her BFF and roommate, Allyson.
“He is a pig. There’s no doubt about that,” Allyson replied. She and Patricia were on the same team — two women trying to make a career first, and a name for themselves second, in the St. Isidore County Prosecutor’s Office. Both women were in their late twenties, Allyson was twenty-nine, Patricia was a year younger. And they were both from the Detroit area. St. Isidore seemed like such a second-class pop stand compared to the Motor City.
“But this is where we start, and we move up from here,” Patricia would say whenever Allyson got down about it. Their classmates, most of them from the University of Michigan School of Law, had gone into either corporate or private practice, hanging out their own shingles. Allyson and Patricia had one more thing in common. They were raised by cops.
“They’ve got bad guys here, too,” Patricia would remind her roommate. “We can do good work here.”
And now she had a chance to do good work. Patricia could send a double murderer to prison for the rest of her life.
“I’m still worried this is going to be a lose-lose situation.”
“How?”
“The best I can do is what everyone expects; life in prison without parole,” Patricia said. “They just want a woman to put a woman behind bars. With me at the table, the defense won’t have a chance to play the sexual discrimination card.”
“So, cool. What’s wrong with that? Use it to your advantage. You are woman, go ahead and roar.”
“But if by some fluke Sullivan gets off, I am total burnt toast.”
“That is true, girlfriend. That is true.”
I could complain, and maybe I should, Patricia thought, chewing on her lip, but then where would I be? The answer was painfully obvious to her, back in Midnight Court with human vermin that were worse than homicidal; they were boring.
So, instead of complaining about the unfairness of being singled out to prosecute a woman just because she was female, Patricia sat literally on the edge of a chair in front of her mentor’s desk two days later, and like any good student waited for him to speak.