Chapter 3: Prosecution Statement
Clayton couldn't see Alex's face, but he could read the tension in her shoulders, in the rigid line of her back, as the defense stopped talking. According to his understanding of civilian law, the prosecution would now present its side of the story; would introduce all the evidence and testimony that proved that Kennedy knew what he had done, that Cam and Shana had truly suffered under his hands, and then once they were done the defense would cross-examine the prosecution's evidence and witness testimony, then would present everything they had that would counter whatever points the prosecution would present. The case would go to the jury and the jury would return a verdict.
It didn't keep him from being furious. That the defense would paint Shana as a scheming, money-hungry individual looking for a husband was so far from the truth—especially not Damien! And she had a gold band around her finger, Snake Eyes' engagement ring—that would be interesting when Shana brought it up, how was the defense going to refute that?
But what really made him angry was the way they had portrayed Cam. To be completely fair, yes, he could see how someone who didn't know her could get that impression, but the assertion that she manipulated people around her, attracted attention, that she was a blind follower who didn't know how to think on her own, that she would have deliberately sought to re-enter the world of sexual slavery just because it was familiar and comforting—how could any reasoning, thinking, logical human believe that this was something any woman wanted, that any human could want? And the bit about Walker 'getting the wrong idea' because of her 'mixed body signals' was bullcrap. Alex had been there—she and Olivia actually were the first people to have arrived there after Cam was attacked, she had seen the blood and broken glass and there was absolutely no way anyone, after seeing the CID photos of the studio, would be able to say 'it was a misunderstanding' and she 'wanted it.' That argument just infuriated Clayton—no one looking at Cam now could say that she'd wanted any of this to happen.
He would look up the military's rules about officers testifying in civilian federal court cases and talk to Lieutenant General Johnson, but he didn't see a reason why he couldn't testify himself as a character witness. And as far as her early childhood at Osan—was it too late to ask if Art and Annie Hammond could appear? And Jack? The defense's assertion that she was a loner with no close friends could be refuted by the Hammonds' testimony, as was the defense's reports about Cam's childhood. Although they'd never actually talked about it, Cam looked back at her time at Osan as some of the happiest of her life and if her father had been that callous, surely she wouldn't have been that happy…and surely Art and Annie Hammond would have known.
And Cam was happy on his base. She'd formed friendships, found love, there was no reason for her to have tried to 'escape' her military service to go back into the seedy underworld of human trafficking. The defense's whole idea of the case was preposterous and he fervently hoped he would be allowed to testify, just to defend Cam and paint a different picture of her than the jury was currently getting.
And Kennedy's wheelchair made him furious. How many times had Clayton frozen the drone's video on Kennedy standing there on that rock ledge watching as Rosa dropped Cam into the ocean and Shana screamed? He didn't need the chair. While the sounds of Cam's incoherent screaming just made Clayton sick to his stomach, and the sounds of Shana begging Kennedy to please leave her alone made Clayton want to shoot the bastard, it had had the opposite effect on Kennedy himself. Cam's screams inspired him to new heights of cruelty and Clayton wished there was an option for the death penalty. Kennedy deserved no less.
"The prosecution calls Master Sergeant Shana O'Hara as its first witness."
Alex left the room for a moment, came back with Shana, looking every inch the perfect soldier. She took the witness box, was duly sworn in, and sat down.
"Can you please tell us, in your own words, what happened to you." Abbie's voice was briskly professional, but her smile was warm and sympathetic.
And Shana started talking.
She left out the fact that Alex, too, had been on that mission to rescue the children in the Congo; left out the fact that those children had been Alex's crusade to begin with. She told them only that they were on a humanitarian mission in the Congo to rescue children kidnapped by rogue militia intent on keeping them from testifying for the ICC; told them about their plans, their splitting up to search. For the first time now Clayton heard about their cooperative efforts in the village as Shana made it a point to tell them that Cam and Alex had come up with the idea of teaching the villagers to defend themselves, their efforts to secure the village with roadblocks and the villagers' idea of toll roads. One of the jurors snickered as Shana described making signs for tourists to slow for children so the villagers could have more time to hawk souvenirs.
Then she launched into the discovery of the children, where they'd found them, that it was in the middle of a monsoon and their desperate attempts to escape. For the first time Clayton heard how they'd escaped, the events that led up to the decision to cut the bridge, and the confused moments after she'd first gone in.
"I tried to hold on—Snake Eyes tried to hold on," she said now, her voice soft. "But everything was soaked by the rain, and was harder to hold onto, and I just fell. The water wasn't particularly cold, but I lost my sword and my gun after I went in the water, and there were a lot of rocks and debris under the surface that I collided with. I hit my head on one of those, and that's the last thing I remember before waking up to find myself on the bank, and one of the rogues was performing CPR. I looked past him and I could see Snake Eyes, he was trying to get to me, but he'd had a rough time in the river too and I could tell he wasn't quite coordinated. And they shot at him to keep him away from me, then threw me in the back of a pickup and drove away."
She told them about arriving in Kinshasa, about being taken to the abandoned hospital that served as the sorting point for the human trafficking operations in Africa. Mindful of the fact that the previous summer's activities in the Congo were classified, she didn't let on that she'd known Sandra personally or that the other woman had been carrying a grudge because Sandra had thought Shana had 'stolen' her boyfriend. She instead chalked up Sandra's drug injections as efforts to break Shana, to turn her into a slave.
"I killed her." And she went on to tell the silent courtroom about her escape attempt; how even drugged into compliance, she'd been desperate enough to try escape, had been successful enough to kill Sandra by breaking her nose and driving the pieces into the woman's brain.
Clayton winced as she described the retaliation afterward by the guards who caught her; beaten, battered and injected with a fresh round of drugs before they packed her into the cargo transport bound for Amsterdam. She outlined the hazy recollections she'd had of the time in the container, and Clayton felt his eyes sting as she described in soft tones the two women who had helped her as best they could on the first leg of that journey, stretching to the furthest extent their chains would allow, cleaning Shana with scraps of cloth dampened with their own scanty ration of water, working cramps out of her arms and legs when muscles locked from being chained for so long in one position. And then she told a completely silent courtroom about Mathieu.
"He tried to save me. He tried to hide me. And even when that failed, when he couldn't do it, they gave him the option of keeping silent and they would give him part of the money they got for bringing me in. And I saw that he was tempted, but he couldn't do it, and they killed him. Shot him, right in front of me." Her voice broke. "I never knew who he was, really. Did he have family waiting for him at home? Did they ever know what happened to him?"
Abbie's voice too, was husky as she picked up a sheet of paper. "The officials in Amsterdam wanted to eliminate all traces of your journey so they had the ship, the Mokata, sunk on its way back to Africa. There was a man named Mathieu on the cargo vessel's roster, a young man, twenty-eight, with a young son in the hospital for what they thought might be childhood cancer. The money must indeed have been a temptation, Shana, but he couldn't do it. Not even for his son."
"Oh." Shana bowed her head, fighting tears, and as Clayton looked up at the jury he saw a couple of the jurors' eyes weren't quite dry either.
The judge broke the silence. "Do you need a moment, Master Sergeant?" he asked…remarkably gently, for a judge.
"No. No, I don't. I'll be fine." Shana took a deep, shaky breath and then squared her shoulders. "We got to Amsterdam and I was put in a concrete room with three other women, all beautiful supermodel type girls. They kept me chained and drugged, didn't let my arms go even for a moment. And on the day of the auction, I guess they thought I might try to fight them so they told a guard to go and bring what they called 'damaged meat' to the room...and when the guard came back he had Cam." Clayton couldn't imagine what she and Cam had felt that first moment when they laid eyes on each other. For Shana, seeing a familiar face after a month in captivity had to have been a relief…and for Cam, well…Clayton was starting to suspect that the kind of friendship Olivia and Alex shared was mirrored in Cam and Shana. Very, very close, sisters by choice if not by blood.
"I…I was so relieved…but I was scared, I didn't know if she'd been captured in the Congo like I was, but it didn't matter, she was there and we hugged and she told me we had to stay together. It didn't really hit me at the time that she must have had a plan, all along, although looking back now I see all the clues were there, and I should have picked up on it. I would have picked up on it if I hadn't been drugged out of my mind. But they held a knife to her throat while they handed me soap and told me to get myself clean. Can't offer the buyers dirty merchandise. Then they threatened me while they told Cam to wash; at that point they figured out that they could use us against each other and I guess they decided to take advantage of that. When it was my turn to go to the auction block, they started to drag me out, and I fought…I had to stay with Cam, even drugged I understood that, and she fought too. They shocked us…" she drew in another shuddering breath. "They shocked us with cattle prods, but I kept fighting to reach Cam, and she kept fighting to reach me, and they stopped when Damien Kennedy told them they should allow us to remain together because Cam was damaged meat and not worth anything, and this way they could sell us both as a 'package deal'." Clayton tried to hide his anger at what Cam and Shana had been called, but the sudden restless shifting from the sea of blue in the first three rows testified that he wasn't alone in his anger. "He even said that it might be 'fun' to use us against each other…and then he paid two hundred fifty grand for both of us. He said that he hadn't come with the intention to buy any slaves, so he would pay our warehousing and storage fees until he could make arrangements for our transport to wherever he lived. A couple of days went by, and he finally came in with a set of military uniforms, told us to put them on, and drugged us into a deep sleep, saying his plan for getting us through customs was to say that he was taking soldiers home for a burial."
Abbie stirred here. "Let the record show that the prosecution here logs in Exhibit A, a copy of the customs officials' records from Amsterdam. Mr. Kennedy has, in the last five years, taken eight 'soldiers bodies' home for burial in his private plane. We will also log in here Exhibit B, a record of all the flight plans logged into the Amsterdam airport for that private plane. On the dates recorded by customs officials for body burial, the flight plans for Mr. Kennedy's private plane were not to the US or other countries; they were to Fiji, likely to his private island."
Clayton glanced quickly over at Kennedy. Had he looked just a second later all he would have seen was a grim, impassive mask; but in that one unguarded second, the man's face showed sheer, raw fury. Uh huh. Caught. Can't refute official government records, can you? But this created another problem for Clayton; Kennedy was pissed, and when rich powerful men were pissed people got hurt. Or killed. Would Kennedy have the money to buy off a hitman to try and take the girls out? I think Shana's recovered enough to try and defend herself from a ground attack, but Cam's still vulnerable. And neither one of them would be able to protect against a sniper on a rooftop. I wonder if the Feds have thought of that? I'll have to speak to Ms. Carmichael after we're done.
"We woke up in cells underground, each one of us in a separate cell, though there was a barred door in between them that could be opened if they decided to let us in with each other. Which they did—when Rosa Capelletti injected Cam with sodium pentothal we discovered she was allergic to barbitol-type drugs because she went into anaphylaxis. I…" her voice broke again. "That was the longest ten minutes of my life, performing CPR on her to keep her breathing until the drug wore off enough for her lungs to take over. Thank goodness they only gave her a small dose that only lasted those ten minutes. If they'd given her any more she wouldn't have made it."
The undercurrent of anger in the room was strong now, even if the faces of the Joes was impassive. Even some of the jurors looked sick. No one dared disturb her as she fought her way through her increasingly difficult testimony; their escape and three days spent hiding on the island; their attempt to steal his boat and leave, only to be captured again; the way he'd chosen to punish them. Shana's voice broke again as she told them about Kennedy's threat to have Cam whipped with barbed wire, her belief that he couldn't possibly be that cruel, her absolute shock and horror when she found out that yes, he was that cruel and he could and he did, and then she broke down and cried as she told them that she'd picked up a whip and whipped her friend to keep her from being hurt anymore by the barbed wire. "I didn't want to…I didn't want to. Oh God, I really didn't want to. She was in so much pain, she was hurting and all I could do was hurt her worse but I had to do it because they would have killed her with the barbed wire…"
The judge said, quietly, "Let's call a recess for lunch." And the moment the gavel fell, the door to the courtroom opened and Snake Eyes darted in. The courtroom froze as he ran up the center aisle, ignoring everyone and everything, and took Shana in his arms, cradling her, stroking her hair and holding her close. She leaned on him, sobbed unashamedly on his shoulder, ignoring the wet spots her tears would leave on his dress blues, and the jurors stood up quietly, carefully, and filed out of the jury box.
Clayton stood as Abbie Carmichael did, and said quietly, "Ms. Carmichael, could I speak to you for a minute?"
She looked him up and down, noted the stars and gold braid, then said, "Will you order me in the brig if I say no?"
The ripple of nervous laughter from the Joes broke the tension on the prosecution's side of the gallery and even Clayton felt his lips twitch a little. Even Shana, wiping the last of her tears with a tissue Alex handed her, managed a watery smile. "No, I won't put you in the brig. You're as bad as Olivia with all that sass, you know that?"
"We're all SVU alumni. Had to have it to get into the SVU, it was a requirement." Abbie quipped, then sobered. "What's on your mind?"
"Did you see Kennedy's face when you told the courtroom about the flight plans for his private plane?"
Abbie tilted her head. "What would you suggest, snipers on the roof?"
He blinked; she'd made that jump faster than he would ever have given her credit for. "I don't know. I just want to make sure nothing…bad…happens during this trial." Vivid in his memory was the image of Gaviria trying to strangle Alex in the Congressional hearing room back at the White House—and Shana defending Alex.
Abbie raised an eyebrow. "I did look into getting you a permit for your people to wear weapons—you're military after all—but I couldn't manage it. Let me talk to the Feds, though, and we'll see what we can manage." She gestured to the door. "Let's take advantage of this break and have a chat with the FBI Field Agent who is here with the forensic anthropologist who's testifying to the bones under the fishing platform."