Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(72)
Author: Patricia Briggs

When the prosecution was done presenting its case, the defense began.

They’d spent the last week guiding the jury through the hell that had been Les Heuter’s childhood. It had almost been enough to engage Charles’s sympathy. Almost.

But then, Charles had been there, had seen the calculation on Les Heuter’s face when he shot his uncle. He’d been planning this defense, planning on blaming his ills on the dead. His uncle had been wrong; Les Heuter was smart.

Heuter sat in front of the court, neatly groomed in slacks, shirt, and tie. Nothing too expensive. Nothing too brightly colored. They’d done something with his hair and the clothing that made him look younger than he was. He explained to the jury, the reporters, and the audience in the courtroom what it was like living with a crazy man who’d made him come help him clean up the country – apparently Travis Heuter’s name for the torture and rape of his victims – when he was ten years old.

"My cousin Benedict was a little older than me," he told them. "He was a good kid, tried to keep the old man off my back. Took a few beatings for me." He blinked back tears and, when that didn’t work, wiped his eyes.

Maybe the tears were genuine, but Charles thought that they were just too perfect, a strong man’s single tear to create sympathy rather than real tears, which could have been seen as weakness of character. Les Heuter had hidden what he was for more than two decades; playing a role for the jury didn’t seem to be much of a stretch.

"When Benedict was eleven, he had a violent episode. For about two months he was crazy. Tried to stab my uncle, beat me up, and…" A careful look down, a faint blush. "It was like a deer or elk going into rut. My uncle tried beating it out of him, tried drugs, but nothing worked. So the old man called in a famous witch. She showed us what he was, what he must have instinctively hidden. He looked like a normal boy – I guess the fae can do that, can look like everyone else – but he was a monster. He had these horns, like a deer, and cloven hooves. And he was a lot bigger than any boy his age should be, six feet then, near enough.

"My aunt had been raped by a stranger when she was sixteen. That was the first time we realized that she’d been raped by a monster."

His lawyer let the noise rise in the courtroom and start to fall down before he asked another question. "What did your uncle do?"

"He paid the witch a boatload of money and she provided him with the means to keep Benedict’s ruts under control. She gave him a charm to wear. She told him if he carved these symbols on an animal or two a month or so before the rut came to Benedict, it would stop them. She’d intended for us to sacrifice animals, but" – here a grimace of distaste – "the old man discovered that people worked better. But now the witch knew about us, and we had to get rid of her. My uncle killed her and left her on the front lawn of one of her relatives."

It was a masterful performance, and Heuter managed to keep the same persona under a fierce cross-examination, managed to keep the monster that had helped to rape, torture, and kill people for nearly two decades completely out of sight.

His father was nearly as brilliant. When his wife had died, he’d abandoned his son to be raised by his older brother because he was too busy with public office, too consumed by grief. He’d thought that the boy would be better off in the hands of family than being raised by someone who was paid to do it. He had, he informed the jury, decided to resign from his position in the US Senate.

"It is too little, too late," he told them with remorse that was effective because it was obviously genuine. "But I cannot continue in the job that cost my son so dearly."

And throughout the defense’s case, the Heuters’ slick team of lawyers subtly reminded the jury and the people in the courtroom that they had been killing fae and werewolves. That Les Heuter thought that he was protecting people.

When Heuter told how his uncle portrayed the werewolves as terrifying beasts, his lawyer presented photographs of the pedophile slain by the Minnesota werewolves. He was careful to mention that the man had been a pedophile, careful to say that the Minnesota authorities were satisfied that those involved had been dealt with appropriately, very careful to say that these were examples of the kinds of things that Travis Heuter had shown his nephew.

And, Charles was certain, no one on the jury heard any of what the defense attorney said; they only looked at the pictures. They showed photos of Benedict Heuter’s dead body. The body itself had disappeared a few hours after it had been taken to the morgue, but the photos remained. The photos showed a monster, covered in blood and gore, none of the grace that had been the fae’s in life visible in his death. One photo showed the bones of Benedict Heuter’s neck, crushed and pulled apart though they were as big as the apple someone had used, rather gruesomely, for a comparison.

Though the biggest monster in the room was sitting in the defendant’s chair, Charles was sure that the only monsters the jury saw were Benedict Heuter – and the werewolf who had killed him.

THEY WAITED FOR the verdict in Beauclaire’s office, he and Anna, Lizzie, Beauclaire, his ex-wife and her current husband. Charles wished that they could have accepted Isaac’s offer of a good meal instead – but Beauclaire had been insistent in that polite-but-willing-to-draw-a-sword-to-get-his-way kind of manner that some of the oldest fae had. Charles was pretty sure that it was Anna’s presence he wanted, and that he wanted her to be with Lizzie when Heuter was sentenced.

Because the lawyer surely knew, as Charles knew, that it would be a light sentence. The defense attorneys had earned their pay. They couldn’t erase all of the bodies that the Heuters had left behind, but they had done their best.

Beauclaire’s office smelled empty. The wall-to-wall bookshelves were clean and vacant. He was retiring. Officially outed as fae, his firm felt that it was in their best interest, and the interest of their clients, that he cease practicing. He didn’t seem too upset about it.

Charles’s nose told him that the rest of the firm were mostly fae – and that there were a lot of taped-up boxes in the hallway. Maybe they were planning on closing the firm altogether, reinventing themselves and going on. One of those gift/curse things about a long life. He’d "retired" and started anew a few times himself.

They played pinochle, a slightly different version than either he or Anna knew, but that was, generally speaking, true of pinochle anywhere. It kept them busy while they waited and kept the tension at a low sizzle.

There was no love lost between Lizzie’s parents, though they were frighteningly polite to each other. Her stepfather ignored the tension admirably and seemed to have decided it was his job to keep Lizzie entertained.