Just Take My Heart - Mary Higgins Clark [24]
When she was on the stand, Natalie's mother, Alice Mills, testi?fied that Natalie kept a spare key inside a fake rock in the backyard of the Closter house. “Gregg knew about that rock,” she swore. “He bought it for Natalie. When she lived with him, she was always los?ing or forgetting her apartment key. That was why when she moved to Closter, he told her she'd better have a spare key around, or she'd find herself locked out on a cold night.”
Alice Mills's next remark was stricken from the record but it had been heard by everyone in the courtroom. She had started sobbing and, looking at Gregg, had cried: “You were always so protective of Natalie! How could you have changed so much? How could you have hated her enough to do that to her?”
The next witness was a clerk from Brookstone with a copy of the sales slip showing that Gregg had paid for the rock with his credit card.
The medical examiner's testimony was unemotional and specific. From the position of the body, he believed that Natalie Raines was attacked as soon as she walked in the door. A lump on the back of her head suggested she had been grabbed and thrown down on the floor, then shot at close range. The bullet just missed her heart. The cause of the death was internal bleeding.
“If she had received immediate help after she was shot, could she have been saved?” Wallace asked.
“Absolutely.”
That night the panel discussion on Courtside centered on Emily Wallace.
“The look she gave Aldrich after that last question to the medical examiner was pure theatre,” Peter Knowles, a retired prosecutor, commented. “What she was telling the jury was that after Aldrich shot Natalie, he could still have saved her life. Instead he left her to bleed to death.”
“I don't buy that,” Brett Long, a criminal psychologist, said force?fully. “Why would he take a chance that somebody else might hap?pen to come in after he left and get help for her? Aldrich or whoever shot her thought she was finished.”
That was exactly what Michael had been thinking. Why didn't I say it first? he asked himself. Was it because I don't want to offer Gregg even the slightest support? Am I that sure he's guilty? Instead of agreeing with Brett Long, he said: “Emily Wallace has the gift of making every juror feel as though she's in an intimate conversation with him or her. We all know how effective that is.”
At the end of the second week of the trial, viewers were invited to register their opinions of Gregg's guilt or innocence on the Court-side Web site. The number of hits was overwhelming and seventy-five percent of them voted for a guilty verdict. When a panelist on the show congratulated him on the response, Michael remembered Katie's bitter comment that he would probably get a bonus for his coverage of the trial.
As each day seemed to tighten the web around Gregg, Michael felt a deepening sense of having abandoned his friend and even helping to sway public opinion against him. How about the jurors? he asked himself. Members of the jury were supposed to avoid news coverage of the trial. Michael wondered how many of them watched his show every night and if they would be influenced by the polls.
Was Gregg watching Courtside after he got back to his apart?ment? Somehow Michael was sure that he was. And he also won?dered if by any wild chance Gregg was having the same reaction he was to Emily Wallace—that in an unsettling way, there was some?thing about her that reminded him of Natalie.
Just Take My Heart
16
Zach knew he had made a mistake. He should never have been sitting on Emily's porch watching television when she got home that night. Immediately, a worried look had come into her eyes, and she'd been very cool when she thanked him for taking care of Bess.
He knew that the only reason she hadn't changed their arrange?ment yet was because of her trial,