Chapter 31: Yu's Trial
If Shana noticed Cam was uncharacteristically quiet at the mess table that evening, she didn't say anything, and Cam did her best to force a cheerful smile to her face. It wasn't really hard; the story behind Courtney's bright pink hair had by then made its way around base and they all, even Cam, found it hilariously funny. Apparently Courtney and Frank Talltree had been involved in planning an (unspecified) prank on an (also unspecified) Joe; they were in the middle of planning when Wayne saw them whispering together, made the wrong assumption, and in a fit of jealousy, tipped some temporary pink hair dye into Courtney's shampoo—with clearly visible results. Fortunately, this time the dye HAD washed out (although Courtney still swore she saw hints of rose in her blond tresses) and Wayne was taking the precaution of sitting as far away from her in the mess hall as he could.
But all of that was forgotten as Shana related the adventures they'd had on their honeymoon. There was an undercurrent of hostility when she related what Siobhan had said about Cam, Charlie, and Snake Eyes, only to be drowned in a roar of laughter and approval when Charlie told them about Shana flinging her plate in Siobhan's face. Then came the discoveries at the bed-and-breakfast, and Allie, never a one for ghost stories, shivered as Shana told the story of the wine bottles shattering on the cellar floor.
The discovery of the identity of the ghost, where Shana had found the body, where her head had been discovered, and what had eventually been found out about the way she'd died, had every Joe in the room spellbound, and even Clayton listened, despite having heard most of this already. The story of the horses got smiles from the Joes; Snake Eyes' adventure with the kid and the candy wrappers in the forest had them all hysterical with laughter, and Shana's eventual decision to give the running of the bed and breakfast over to the caretaker got general approbation. "Because," Allie grinned cheerfully at Shana, "Now that you're married, you have to start thinking about kids, and kids require a lot of money," at which statement General Hawk nodded emphatically.
Everyone laughed—it was no secret that despite what he'd formerly thought about kids, he was plainly enamored with his, and scarcely three days went by that didn't see him—well, not exactly sneaking, but certainly acting as if he didn't want to be seen—heading out to Manhattan to see Liv and Auggie, and every time he went there was something else tucked in a bag; a stuffed animal, a soft teething toy, a pair of earrings or other jewelry for Liv, cases of diapers and formula. Despite Courtney's assertion that she didn't want to babysit and had no motherly skills whatsoever, she occasionally went along to babysit Auggie for the evening while Liv and Clayton went out with Alex and Ettienne.
Then their arrival at the cabin, their story of the paintball war, and how Cam had won it by playing dead. Duke proclaimed loudly that now that he knew the trick, no one was going to be able to pull that one on him, at which statement Shana just smirked knowingly. Then their encounter with the poachers in the mountains, Cam's warning, their decision to split and send the guys to recon the area while the girls kept an eye on the poachers; Charlie and Snake Eyes' discovery of the poacher's camp, their observations, bringing back the park rangers to apprehend them. Clayton narrowed his eyes as Shana related how they'd used the bond they had to communicate and stay in touch, and he pondered the different ways that could be used to the Joes' advantage on a mission.
Shana's ploy to keep the poachers unaware of her was a source of great amusement for the Joes, who all knew that 'silly' was not a word that could ever be appended to Shana. The discovery of the wolf cub in the crate brought angry mutters from these hardened soldiers, who while they had no problems killing an enemy aggressor, couldn't stand the thought of hurting a harmless baby animal.
Snake Eyes produced his cell phone now and passed it around; he'd taken a number of pictures of Shana with the wolf cub they'd named Timber. Shana, sitting on the floor, holding the cub and a baby bottle of puppy formula; Shana picking him up and cuddling him; Shana, curled up on the couch asleep after a midnight feeding, with the cub curled up against her side, his nose resting on her arm; Timber running happily down the hallway floor with Shana's cover in his mouth, Shana chasing him a few steps behind, and Cam and Charlie holding each other to keep from falling over laughing at the far end of the hall behind Shana. Timber chewing on Shana's boot, Timber rolling all over a freshly-made bed, Shana dumping him into a bath.
"Oh, yeah?" and Shana produced her own cellphone. Snake Eyes on his hands and knees, teaching the cub to stalk and pounce (on the same cover that Timber had so gleefully appropriated); Cam and Charlie trapping mice and dropping it in a playpen with Timber in it so he could learn what was prey and how to kill it; then, at the end of the week, two days before they were scheduled to leave and come back to base, a video obviously taken by Cam of Shana handing Timber to the wildlife rescue people. She was crying; Snake Eyes looked sad; and Timber was howling. His heartbroken wails were audible even after he'd been packed into the transport truck and Shana had handed them a generous donation check for their help.
"They said they'll rehabilitate him and release him back into the wild, so he's going to be okay. I just…I'll miss him," Shana sniffed, and Cam put a comforting arm around her. "I know I shouldn't get so upset about a wild animal, we knew it was only temporary, but I'm going to miss the little guy."
"We understand," Clayton said gently. "As soldiers, we're in the business of taking lives, not saving them. We don't get an opportunity to do that often, so it's nice when we can even if it's got four legs instead of two."
It wasn't until after mess and the two couples were heading back to their shared quarters that Shana braced Cam over her quietness at dinner. "You were kind of quiet at dinner. Did Doc find anything wrong?"
"No, everything was fine, he said that I was doing really well and if I weren't military he would recommend I skip surgery and just wait for my skin to stretch naturally. He was glad I wasn't taking as many of the pain pills as he thought I should, but he also told me if I was in pain, I shouldn't hesitate to take one."
"So that's good news. So why so quiet at dinner? You hardly laughed and I think I saw you smile maybe once."
Cam shook her head. "It's nothing. I guess I'm just tired. Jet lag and all. I'll see you tomorrow, Shana."
As Shana had passed the physical fitness tests the day before (and groaned the next morning at how stiff and sore she felt—Sergeant Slaughter's drills seemed even harder than she remembered from before they'd left for the Congo!) her next day started with a check of the duty roster to see what she was scheduled for, and then it was a whirlwind of duty schedules, recruit training, and personal physical training with Snake Eyes. It wasn't until evening mess that she realized she hadn't seen Cam the whole day.
Snake Eyes seemed tired from the day's activities too, so when they went back to their quarters that evening it was a quiet cuddle instead of…what they usually did. "Did you see Cam at all today?" she asked him. "Or Charlie?"
Snake Eyes shrugged. I saw Charlie briefly. He said that since Cam isn't ready for active duty, Doc was having her stay in relatively good shape with some gentle exercises in the gym. I know she was there for part of the morning, and then Alex came to get her to discuss something about the upcoming trial. She didn't seem happy about it, and Charlie said she spent the rest of the day in their quarters working on written testimony. According to Stalker—I spoke with him this morning on the morning run through the base—he said Alex managed to track down and has evidence against thirty of the pedophiles who molested Cam.
"Thirty?" Shana tried—and failed—to wrap her head around that. "Jesus, Snake Eyes, I can't imagine—thirty people. Can you imagine what that must have been like for Cam, being fifteen and locked in a basement knowing that thirty people have paid your guardians to hurt you? My God."
And those are only the ones that Alex managed to track down and who have charges enough to stick. Over the last few weeks while we've been on our honeymoon, she and the rest of Olivia's unit have been very busy matching names and bank account numbers in Cam's uncle's ledger to Leo Yu's client files at the travel agency and then hunting down the people attached to those names, getting search warrants, and looking for child porn or any possible evidence that they were involved with what happened to Cam. I'd say she's done incredibly well.
"Yeah, can you imagine what it's going to be like for Cam, having to stand up in front of a courtroom full of strangers thirty times and have to tell them every lewd, disgusting, horrific, sickening detail of what happened to her? If I were Alex I'd try to get a closed courtroom—after Leo Yu, there's going to be a media circus around each one and the courtrooms are going to be packed—and I'll bet there will be some perverts who are there just to hear the details."
Snake Eyes froze. Shana felt him stiffen, waited a couple of minutes for him to tell her what was wrong. When he didn't, she poked him. "Sweetheart?"
His hands flashed. I wonder if Alex will be keeping an eye on the courtroom. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that others who hurt Cam, people who Alex hasn't caught, may attend the trials; for one, just to see what happens to the ones who did get caught; and two, to hear those disgusting details rehashed. Can Alex have plainclothes detectives sitting in the gallery?
Shana's eyes widened. "You know, that's a good idea. Also if they are trained to read body language and kinesiology, they'd recognize how to tell when someone is getting really uncomfortable…and it sure as hell is going to be easy to spot who's getting a hard-on listening to her describe what they did to her. The kind of person who would rape a helpless, underage innocent child is definitely the kind of sick son of a bitch who would sit in a courtroom and relive the entire thing while listening to her testify." The she said, quietly, "But every person who gets caught is yet another person that Cam will have to testify for, and it might never end. This is going to be hard enough already—when is it going to become too much? She's an incredibly strong young woman, but even she has limits. Is this trial going to hit hers…and what will happen if it does?"
It was those sobering thoughts that ran through Shana's mind a couple of days later when she left the base to attend the first day of Leo Yu's trial. Cam had spent the evening before at Alex and Liv's apartment while they walked her through the trial procedure and tried to bolster her confidence and sagging spirits. It was clear to everyone who knew her now that she was definitely not herself; Alex had said that it was normal for victims testifying in a trial to be nervous going in and that she would be okay as the trial progressed, but Shana still wanted to keep an eye on her friend.
And, with her FBI classified training in kinesiology, she was also curious whether Snake Eyes' thought that people who had hurt Cam but hadn't been caught would attend the trial. She'd explained all of this to Clayton and Allie, and they'd all agreed to let her trade one duty shift with Allie and one with Courtney to allow her to attend at least the first day, a measure of silent support. Charlie would be attending that afternoon, having been unable to find someone to trade morning duty shift with. Flint had been remorseful; he'd lost track of time, hadn't realized that today was when the trial would start and so hadn't been able to ensure that Charlie was off. But he promised to take it into account and was, in fact, going to be busy that afternoon rewriting the duty roster so that Charlie would be able to have either the morning or the afternoon or both off duty for the rest of the week. Alex was estimating the trial would take about that long, but she also cautioned that cases like these could take up more time and some unexpected twists, and the defense lawyer that Leo Yu had was (in her terms) a 'sleazebag who will do anything for money' named Lionel Granger. She'd apparently butted heads with him over past cases, and while she disliked him personally as well as professionally, she did grudgingly admit he was good at his job and he might come up with some surprises for her.
So Charlie was going to be there this afternoon. In the meantime, as Shana sat down on a bench at the very back of the courtroom, she kept a careful eye on the people filing in, looking for someone who exhibited signs of nervousness, anxiety, anticipation, fear, any of the other emotions someone who was guilty and had not been caught would feel on going into a courtroom where their victim was. She'd worn civilian clothes—she didn't want them to peg her for one of Cam's friends/supporters by wearing her fatigues or anything that indicated her military affiliation and rank, so her dress consisted of her Class B slacks and a nondescript plain white Class B blouse with all rank, insignia and decoration removed. She didn't see anyone who appeared guilty or stressed, so she turned her attention to the actual trial.
The jurors, having already been questioned and empaneled, came in and filed into the jury box, then the judge came in. A taller older woman, with blond hair, piercing blue eyes and a no-nonsense crispness to her body language and demeanor, she stopped behind the desk nameplate that read 'Elizabeth Donnelly' and nodded curtly to the courtroom as they all rose at her entrance, then said, "You may be seated."
The courtroom sat, and Alex stood up. "Ladies and gentlemen of the court, thank you for coming. We are here today to try the defendant, Leo Yu, on multiple charges of child endangerment, child pornography, both making, possessing and distributing; sex trafficking of a minor and child prostitution. You will hear testimony from his victim, Cameron Arlington, currently an active-duty serving member of the US Army, based at Fort Hamilton here in New York, how he and his sister and brother in law conspired to deceive authorities into giving them guardianship of a vulnerable ten-year old orphan of an active duty Air Force Captain, then isolating and withdrawing her from normal life with the eventual goal of keeping her in sexual captivity and obtaining money from a huge ring of increasingly more violent pedophiles who paid exorbitant amounts of money to torture, rape, and photograph themselves and each other performing a variety of heinous sex acts with someone who could not, under any stretch of the imagination, be considered to have been a willing participant in the activities nor have the attained the age necessary in order to give informed consent. And what they did to her were things that no living human being would have agreed to. Mr. Yu's trial is only the first in a long string of trials; in gathering evidence in this case, the prosecution has found enough evidence to track down and initiate prosecution proceedings against no less than thirty of Mr. Yu's clients—he has been employed as a travel agent for a small New York travel agency and careful vetting of the agency's clients brought to his attention those who shared the same despicable taste he had for molesting children.
"Mr. Yu booked clients for a 'vacation getaway' of anywhere from a couple days to two to three weeks to a secluded retreat in the Western New York mountains. Here his sister and brother in law maintained the retreat and 'luxury commodities available for the discerning traveler'. That luxury commodity was Corporal Arlington. Prosecution will introduce into evidence a travel brochure for that western New York retreat; in it is listed such seemingly innocuous activities like hunting, fishing, camping and hiking, but Corporal Arlington's testimony will explain what these activities really were, and we have no doubt that you the jury will find this just as disturbing as the prosecution has."