“Yes!”
I keep my foot on the gas.
“And isn’t the real reason you came here today, Brooke, because at long last, you saw a chance to get even with him for doing that to you?” I say. “Humiliating you that way?”
“Objection!” Katherine Welsh says.
Now she’s the one who has raised her own voice.
“I’m not only objecting to that question, I’m objecting to this entire line of questioning, which has only served to put a cooperating witness into the line of fire,” Welsh says. “And embarrass her.”
“Sustained,” Judge Horton says, before telling the jury to ignore my last comment, and that it is being stricken from the record.
“I respectfully withdraw that last question, Your Honor,” I tell him.
“Too late,” Horton says, disgustedly. “You are completely out of order, Ms. Smith.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
But I’m not looking at the judge.
I’m looking directly at Brooke Milligan.
EIGHTY-ONE
KATHERINE WELSH TRIES TO clean things up as best she can once I sit down, leading Brooke Milligan into answers about how revenge had nothing to do with this, how she was just looking out for a friend.
Brooke says, “It was like he had her under some kind of spell.” Then she pauses and exhales and says, “I knew the feeling, at least until I came to my senses.”
But I can see in Welsh’s body language, because if you do this long enough you have to be able to read the room, that she knows the damage has been done. She was blindsided by a prior relationship between her witness and my client that she clearly had known nothing about. Maybe her own investigator hadn’t gone as deep as Jimmy had, or simply hadn’t asked the right questions, or enough of them.
I know the jury isn’t going to stop thinking of him as a predator, for having had sex with a seventeen-year-old virgin, whether that age was legal in the great state of New York or not. Now, because of Brooke Milligan’s testimony, he was a predator times two.
I’ve at least limited my own damage, to my very own client, as best I could, as much as I absolutely hate the way I just did it. Whether the jury members will believe that Morgan Carson feared, maybe even for her life, the consequences of breaking it off with Rob Jacobson is another matter entirely.
In the afternoon session, Welsh calls a couple of witnesses who testify to having also seen my client with Lily Carson in the weeks leading up to the murders, just to add more spice to the sauce. The last is a woman named Julie Barry, who’s attractive enough that she gets me wondering how, if Rob Jacobson spent so much time in Garden City during the period in question, he missed hitting on her.
Maybe if he’d known her back in high school, the way he’d known Lily Carson, she would have had more appeal for the sonofabitch.
By now I have given up on trying to understand his obsession with mothers and daughters, and all other women who somehow ended up under the spell Brooke Milligan described, including my own sister. But I just keep telling myself—or perhaps rationalizing with myself—that he isn’t going to be judged here on being a serial man-whore, just a serial killer.
Katherine Welsh waits until the end of her questioning of Julie Barry to ask if she was aware that Lily Carson had accused Rob Jacobson of sexually assaulting her after being his prom date in another lifetime for both of them.
“I frankly had no idea about that,” Julie Barry says. “She just said they’d dated briefly and that it had ended rather badly. She tried to convince me that he had changed, despite their history.” She looks over at Rob Jacobson. “Obviously he hadn’t.”
“Objection,” I say, not even bothering to get up.
“Sustained,” Judge Horton says.
“Your witness,” Katherine Welsh says.
“Yes,” I say, keeping my voice low as I pass her table, speaking loud enough that only she can hear. “She certainly is.”
“Ms. Barry,” I begin, “did you find it at all surprising that Lily had reconnected with an old high school flame, even after she told you that their prior relationship had ended badly?”
“Surprising?” she says. “I really didn’t, to tell you the truth.”
I smile. “Always a good thing.”
