It was my father’s turn now. He stood like Stevens, but crooked because of his years, and looked a little comic because he didn’t fit inside his clothes. “Well,” he said, “I guess I could say that my client, Betsy Harvey, is a wonderful person who never did anyone any harm. I guess I could reverse course on what you just heard from the other defense attorney and toss her husband under the bus. I could say that, on returning home from work each night, Delvin Harvey brutalized his adopted daughter while my client, Betsy, tried to stop him. I could say that Betsy was a victim, like Abigail, of the abusive, violent Delvin Harvey. I could say she cowered while he did the dirty work. I could point out that, in Delvin’s view of things, the man is always master of the house and the woman always plays second fiddle. I could assert that, due to his self-avowed and self-professed theology of male authority, Delvin has nowhere to hide and can’t pretend he’s not responsible. I could tell this Delvin-is-the-culprit story, but even if I do, the lawyer for Delvin will still stand up and, as you’ve heard, present a lot of evidence that Delvin is a fine, upstanding person whose wife went down the wrong track while he was away at work all the time, leaving her responsible for the home and the children. And of course the prosecutor over there is going to say that Betsy and Delvin are equally guilty. So be it. Story on story. Story after story. Not just two stories, in this case, but three, because these two defendants are being tried jointly. These two defendants are codefendants. The judge has joined together two trials, because the charges involve a merged set of facts. Because the circumstances cannot be separated. Not because they compose one story, but because three stories should be told side by side: the story of one defendant, the story of the other, and the story in which they are joined, by the prosecutor, as mutually guilty, as guilty in tandem. I thought of objecting at the outset to this. I thought of asking for a separate trial for my client. But, actually, I think the judge is right. These three stories should be told side by side. So—cutting to the chase—let me tell you what my story is. My story is that my client, Betsy Harvey, is guilty. Yes, I’m her lawyer, but I’m saying she’s guilty. Guilty in a way that deserves not just censure, not just retribution, and not just punishment, but, more than all of those, guilty in a way that compels her to make amends, to put things as near to right as they can be, which, as we know, can’t be done, because a girl is dead and never coming back. Do you hear me? The girl who died, Abeba Temesgen, is never coming back. The transgression committed cannot be uncommitted. I’m telling you my client is guilty. Guilty of an outrage against humanity and of a moral wrong. Guilty of mistreating and abusing a child. Guilty of bringing Abeba Temesgen here from Ethiopia and treating her with utter contempt. Guilty of letting her die of hypothermia. Guilty of hatred, anger, enmity, rancor, pride, selfishness, heedlessness. Guilty of self-seeking self-regard, of self-serving self-centeredness, of self-absorbed certitude, of maniacal self-confidence, and of an inexcusable abuse of parental powers. Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, my client is guilty of multiple horrors, this is undeniable and can’t be argued with. Look,” said my father, “you should condemn somebody if they’re patently evil, and condemn them thoroughly, without compunction or adulteration. But—and here’s what I’m getting at—you shouldn’t condemn them in a court of law, because there’s no law against being patently evil, there’s no such charge as ‘patently evil,’ there’s only whatever charge is at hand—in the case of my client, homicide by abuse. Homicide by abuse. Homicide by abuse. There’s a cause-and-effect relationship in that charge. It speaks to a death that’s caused by abuse. The one thing has to cause the other. There can’t just be abuse and death; there has to be abuse that causes death. Which can be proven in some cases but not in this one, where there’s abuse and death but not a causal connection. Now, you can say that I’m playing a trick on you with this. That if I say, ‘Well, Abigail Harvey was abused, horribly abused, but that’s not what she died from, that’s not what caused it,’ you can say to yourself that I’m just another lawyer who doesn’t care about right and wrong and just wants to get his client off the hook by any means and no matter what. No. That’s not right. I don’t want my client off the hook at all. I want my client to suffer and pay. I want her to be punished and condemned. It’s just that we’re going to have to find a way to do that without finding her guilty of homicide by abuse. Why? Because if we say what she did is close enough, or ‘sort of,’ if we say she was evil and jail her for that, the law gets bent a little to one side, and when it gets bent like that, we begin to have trouble. The law gets bent, a maniac comes along—a dictator or a tyrant who wants to crush people—and the maniac puts that bent law beneath his fist. He presses down, he presses again, he keeps on pressing until the law is flattened, and then we have a country without laws.”

  My father swiped at his nose with a forefinger. “This is a tough one,” he said. “We want to do the right thing. We don’t want to insult the memory of Abeba Temesgen. We don’t want to say that the life of Abeba Temesgen meant nothing and can be taken with impunity—no, we don’t want that. I don’t want that. That’s the last thing I want. What I want is justice. I want it understood that my client did terrible things, awful things, things that cannot be excused in any fashion, and I want her to make amends for that for the rest of her life, and to do nothing else. I want her life to be about amends, I want my client to do nothing but make amends, tangible, real, explicit amends with the work of her hands and by the sweat of her brow, but I don’t want to mow down the law to get it done, and in the end I’m going to have to argue that, while Betsy Harvey is guilty of evil deeds, and of crimes, she isn’t guilty of homicide by abuse.

  “I mentioned crimes,” said my father. “Yes, my client is guilty of crimes. She is guilty of child abuse. She is guilty of first-degree assault. She is certainly guilty of first-degree manslaughter. All of those charges have been made in this case, alongside the charge of homicide by abuse. I don’t contest those charges in the least. If those were the only charges in this case, we wouldn’t even be in this courtroom together. I would have pleaded guilty on behalf of my client—given that she’d let me—and, outside of court, worked for the right sentence. It’s homicide by abuse that’s the problem here. It’s homicide by abuse that I don’t believe happened. Anyway, the state is going to have to prove that the actions of my client are in accord with the language of the homicide-by-abuse statute, and that what she did fits the definition of that crime in no uncertain terms, and I don’t believe the state can do that. My client is guilty of a lot of things, but not of homicide by abuse.”

  * * *

  —

  I mentioned earlier that, each morning of the trial, I collected my father at his home in Seattle. That isn’t true: it didn’t happen on all seven days. On the morning after his opening statement I didn’t do it because we’d checked in the night before to a motel called Pipler’s, between Mount Vernon and Burlington. We stayed there because, after his statement, my father went to the jail with Betsy Harvey to speak with her about her defense, and this meeting between them was longer than expected—in fact, it went on for more than two hours—and after that it didn’t make sense, to me at least, to drive home. I’d waited for my father behind the courthouse on a cobblestone promenade, or a municipal plaza, or something having elements of both—anyway, a place with shade trees and benches. The afternoon heat there was beginning to fade. In storefront windowpanes, late sunlight shimmered. I sat with my elbows on my knees, watching pigeons and turning over in my head, among other things, something Lincoln Stevens had said—that the closet in which Abeba had been locked was shorter than a coffin, and that the light switch was outside. This kept coming back to me, accompanied by a seething I tried fending off. I couldn’t do it, though, and eventually got up and moved to a bench in the lee of a cold-storage facility with a view of people fishing and of fields beyond the river, and then I walked some more and finally went to wait for my father in the front seat of my car, with the door open to let out the interior heat, and while I was there I remembered how Abeba had told Elsabet Tesfaye that the boy near Shashamene herding a donkey with a stick, the one who’d given her and her father water and chunks of goat meat, was proof that not everyone is bad.

  Our motel room was thin-walled, shag-rugged, and popcorn-ceilinged. Its air conditioner condensed noisily and wept, and its windows rattled when a truck blew past on the nearby freeway. Its twin beds were separated by no more than eighteen inches. We sat on them, eating chow mein from a grocery store. I said, during dinner, “What do you think?,” and my father answered, “Well, first, the main thing is how completely sad it is. But even so, you have to go forward. The prosecutor, Stevens, he’s no slouch. Meanwhile, Burris, the attorney for Betsy’s husband, she has in mind innumerable motions. I told her that if she wanted to do that I wouldn’t say no, I wouldn’t whine or cry, I wouldn’t sit there in the courtroom shaking my head. I told her she should do whatever she thought she should do, and she said, ‘I’m going to do that anyway.’ ” My father ran his plastic fork through his chow mein. “You don’t play games with Pam Burris,” he told me, dead earnest about this cautionary dictum. “If you play games with Pam, you lose.”

  We turned off the lights a little after ten. Five minutes later, my father said, “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had a case once for a guy who killed four people at a Christmas party,” he said. “He was a used-car salesman. He went by ‘Buster.’ One of the first things I did when I took the case was interview his wife, who was nineteen or twenty. She had a boy with her, about three. She was pregnant. I remember she told me that Buster, the week before, had run over the family’s puppy without meaning to, cried like a baby, and then buried it in their backyard. Is this okay? Me talking like this?”

  “Sure.”

  “When Buster was seventeen,” my father said, “he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother. After that, he dropped out of school, enlisted in the army, and got sent to Germany, where he drank like a fish until they booted him. He went home and ended up living on the streets for a while, and then he stole a car and served jail time. One way or another, though, he pulled himself together enough to get the used-car job, get married, and father a child. But then he started drinking again and looking for fistfights. The holiday season came, and that got Buster and his wife at odds, because Buster hated the holiday season. Still, he agreed to go with his wife to this party. It was a neighborhood party, right across the street. People were drinking and dancing in a basement. Buster got drunk and acted like a jerk, to the point that his wife went home and went to bed. Eventually, a fellow at the party felt provoked to say to Buster, ‘Take your hands off my wife and don’t ever touch her again.’ ”

  “I see.”

  “Anyway, this guy and Buster went at it. Then a whole slew of guys took Buster out onto a patio and beat him up. So what does Buster do? He goes home, loads a rifle and a pistol, and comes back, bare from the waist up. Then he goes down into the basement, and with his rifle in his right hand and his pistol in his left, he fires into the dancers. And he kills two. And he wounds two more. Then he strolls away down the middle of the street and knocks on someone’s door and yells, from their porch, ‘This is Santa Claus, trick or treat, let me in.’ That kind of stuff.”

  My father paused for emphasis. “I ended up claiming Buster was insane,” he said. “I said that at the time of the shootings he was laboring under a defect of reason deriving from a disease of the mind. I said that, due to this, Buster didn’t know what he was doing when he shot four people, and didn’t know that it was wrong. I argued that he was too insane to even form an intention to kill people. I argued that the charges should be dismissed and that Buster should go to a mental institution. The prosecutor wasn’t having any of it. He wanted the death penalty. He said, ‘How can there not be intention in this case? The defendant got angry during a neighborhood Christmas party, went home, got firearms out of his closet, loaded each, returned to the festivities, took aim, and killed people. He wasn’t crazy. He was angry with people and wanted to kill them.’

  “I called psychiatrists to the stand,” said my father. “One said that while Buster was in the service he came unhinged because he couldn’t take the regimen. Another said Buster’s parents had been absent from his life and that this plus guilt over killing his brother had made him self-destructive. Well, that just led the prosecutor to call his own psychiatrists, who all said it was obvious that the defendant was just a drunk who’d gotten angry and shot people. So two stories. Mine—Buster got dealt a bad hand in life and went crazy. The prosecutor’s—simple, plain, cold-blooded murder.

  “Anyway,” said my father, “let’s face it. Nine out of ten times, the person charged with the crime actually did what they’re accused of. Like I told you a long time ago, it’s not like on television, where the lawyer pulls a rabbit out of a hat to prove who the killer was. Mine is a profession where winning ten percent of the time is a good track record. Sometimes—most of the time—the facts are against you. You don’t have a case. But of course, if clients think there’s any chance at all, even the slightest, they want to go to trial, and they want you, as their attorney, to pull out all the stops. So you end up doing the best you can while knowing, from experience, that it’s useless, it’s hopeless, and that if you’re going to take any satisfaction from your work, it’s going to have to come with losing. Anyway, the jury found Buster guilty on every count. The judge gave him four life sentences. The good thing is, he didn’t get the rope, which I was afraid of—that they’d execute Buster. The whole thing was sad. To tell you the truth, a lot of things in my work are sad. It’s sort of a sad world to have to move around in.”

  * * *

  —

  Day five. Lincoln Stevens put witnesses on the stand. It emerged from their testimony that Delvin and Betsy Harvey had, over time, pieced together their own religious program. Dissatisfied with every church they’d tried, they’d come to identify with no denomination. They’d practiced, instead, a personal religion cobbled together from books they’d ordered, videotapes, and audiocassette sermons. They were apocalyptic, meaning they believed that the world will end soon in a bloodbath, and that afterward all those who haven’t taken Jesus as their savior will go to hell. They believed that the fires of hell burn as real flames, and that heaven is a physical place—that both heaven and hell take up space in the universe. They believed that males are ordained by God as heads of households and females as their “helpmeets.” They believed they shouldn’t spare the rod, and in their home kept a manual devoted to stern child-rearing. It called for swatting children as young as six months with wooden spoons; it called for swatting them if they tried to crawl off a blanket on the floor; it called for striking children with rulers, paddles, lengths of plumbing line, and tree branches; it called for cold-water baths, outdoor sequester, and the withholding of meals; it called for pursuing punishment until a child was “without breath to complain”; and it cited Scripture as the basis for all of this.

  One state witness was a young woman named Annelise Kolb who wore a tightly braided pigtail over her right shoulder and a large pair of bottle-bottom eyeglasses. Annelise Kolb said that when she met Betsy Harvey, Betsy was no more than twenty-five years old. She was talkative, Kolb said, and had a voice heard easily across a room. Kolb was twelve at the time. She’d gone with her mother to a baby shower hosted by a woman named Sarah Tolt. Sarah Tolt’s father was a pastor in Mexico. Both of her parents were missionaries, and all nine of her siblings were missionaries, too, in Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Sarah Tolt, Annelise Kolb said, was charismatic. She hosted events regularly in her living room, and her events were well attended. She was older than most of the women by fifteen years or more, and had eight children who were well behaved. Soon, said Kolb, “my mother, Betsy Harvey, and a number of other women who went to these things started dressing like Sarah Tolt, in what they called modest clothing. Like skirts or dresses to their ankles. Jumpers. Tunics. Long-sleeved tops. Stuff I had to wear until I got away from all of that.”