By Reason of Insanity (David Brunelle Legal Thriller Series Book 3) Read online

  BY REASON OF INSANITY

  David Brunelle Legal Thriller #3

  Stephen Penner

  Published by

  Ring of Fire Publishing

  By Reason of Insanity

  ©2013 Stephen Penner. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transferred without the express written consent of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity with real persons or events is purely coincidental. Persons, events, and locations are either the product of the author’s imagination, or used fictitiously.

  Cover image by Alvaro German Vilela.

  Cover design by Stephen Penner.

  DAVID BRUNELLE LEGAL THRILLERS

  Presumption of Innocence

  Tribal Court

  By Reason of Insanity

  A Prosecutor for the Defense

  Substantial Risk

  Corpus Delicti (coming 2014)

  Case Theory (Short Story)

  Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Short Story)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  First Epilogue

  Second Epilogue

  Preview: A Prosecutor for the Defense

  About the Author

  BY REASON OF INSANITY

  In addition to the plea of not guilty, the defendant may enter a plea of insanity existing at the time of the act charged.

  Insanity existing at the time of the act charged is a defense to the crime of murder.

  For a defendant to be found not guilty by reason of insanity you must find that, as a result of mental disease or defect, the defendant’s mind was affected to such an extent that the defendant was unable to perceive the nature and quality of the acts with which the defendant is charged or was unable to tell right from wrong with reference to the particular acts with which the defendant is charged.

  —State of Washington Pattern Criminal Jury Instruction 20.01

  Chapter 1

  “Holy Mother of God.”

  Dave Brunelle, King County homicide prosecutor, stepped into the bedroom of the West Seattle craftsman and surveyed the carnage.

  Seattle P.D. detective Larry Chen turned around from where he was supervising the processing of the scene. His large frame seemed uncomfortable in the small room. “There’s nothing holy here, Dave,” he said. “And it’s hard to see God at work in this.” He glanced around the room. “More like the other guy.”

  Blood spatter covered the walls, slashes of red reaching for the ceiling, their contents dripping to the floor. One side of the queen bed was absolutely soaked in blackish blood, the sheets and blankets cascading to the wooden floor in a scarlet waterfall. Three forensics officers were photographing the scene and collecting evidence, their camera flashes blasting the gore with a sickening strobe. The stench of death permeated the confines of the stuffy room.

  “You got the mother part right, though,” said Chen. “She was the mother.”

  “Who? The victim?” Brunelle asked, trying to wrap his mind around what his eyes were seeing.

  “Yep.” Chen gestured to the blood-soaked indentation on the bed. “This is mom’s room.”

  Brunelle stepped toward the bed and frowned. “So where’s the body?”

  “We had to get it out of here,” Chen said. “Some of the boys were getting sick.”

  Brunelle considered what could be so bad that seasoned police officers needed to have the body removed before they could finish their work. “What happened?”

  “Well, we’re still piecing it together,” Chen answered. He chuckled darkly. “So to speak.”

  Brunelle didn’t understand the joke. He shook his head at his friend.

  “Her face was hacked to pieces,” Chen explained. “With a hatchet. The medical examiner guessed at least twenty times, directly to the face. Probably started where the bridge of her nose used to be.”

  “Probably?”

  Chen shrugged. “There wasn’t much face left.”

  Brunelle looked up at the walls again. He wasn’t a blood spatter expert, but he’d seen enough to recognize a cast-off pattern. Blood flying off the blade as the killer pulled it back for another blow.

  “So, the medical examiner has been and gone already?” Brunelle asked. He tried to sound casual. He should have known Chen wouldn’t buy it.

  “Yeah. Sorry about that, Romeo.” Chen managed a smile at his friend, despite the circumstances. “But don’t worry. It wasn’t your Kitty-Kat. It was Perkins. He was all business. No flirting at all.”

  Brunelle nodded, suppressing his own grin. “Ah. Well, that’s good, I suppose.”

  “I thought,” Chen teased, “Dr. Anderson might’ve been laying next you when I called.”

  It was shortly after three-thirty in the morning.

  “No,” Brunelle answered. “We’re not quite there yet.”

  Chen raised an incredulous eyebrow.

  “Well, not every night,” Brunelle admitted.

  “Aha!” One of the forensics techs stood up and pumped a fist. She took a quick picture of something about two feet up the wall nearest the bed, then carefully peeled it off and held it up. Brunelle thought it looked like part of a smashed strawberry.

  “I told Ferguson we hadn’t found all of her nose,” she said. “Here’s the last bit.”

  Obviously not one of the cops who complained about the body, Brunelle thought.

  “So, you said she’s the mother?” he asked to distract himself from the forensics officer sliding the piece of flesh into a clear evidence baggie. “Whose mother?”

  “The killer’s,” Chen answered.

  “She was killed by her own son?” Brunelle questioned.

  “Daughter,” Chen corrected. “And yes.”

  Brunelle scolded himself for his sexist assumption. Not because it was sexist; because it was a jump to conclusions without adequate information. “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s the one who called 911,” Chen answered. “She was waiting for us when we got here. Opened the door and showed us right up to the bedroom and everything.”

  Brunelle’s eyebrows shot up. “Wow.”

  Chen surrendered another dark laugh. “Yeah. Wow is right.”

  “Where is she now?” Brunelle asked. “Waiting for interrogation back at the precinct?”

  “Oh, no.” Chen grinned. “She’s at Harborview.”

  “Harborview?” Brunelle asked. Harborview was the aptly named hospital perched on the hill above downtown Seattle.

  “Yep,” answered Chen. “She’s fucking nuts.”r />
  Chapter 2

  Harborview Medical Center was the premiere trauma center for not just Seattle, but the entire Northwest. It was the only Level I trauma center for Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho, and airlift helicopters could routinely be seen flying over the Seattle skyline to land atop the hospital, rushing the most injured patients in the region to the best help available.

  It was also the first stop for the mentally ill on their way to involuntary commitment, or criminal charges. Or both.

  Brunelle and Chen stepped into the main lobby. The waiting area was filled with all sorts of people nursing all sorts of injuries and ailments. Brunelle knew gunshots and stab wounds were mixed in with croupy kids and dehydrated seniors. Seattle P.D. routinely cross-referenced the Harborview emergency room records against reports of assailants who’d gotten away, but not before being shot and needing medical attention. A man in the corner, wrapped in a dirty blanket and rocking as he muttered to himself, reminded Brunelle why they were there.

  “Is she in the psych ward?” he asked.

  “Probably,” Chen answered. “I had a couple of patrol guys bring her. I imagine that’s where she’d end up. Nice lady, except for the crazy part.”

  “Except for the murdering her mother part,” Brunelle added.

  Chen grinned. “Yeah, that too.”

  The psychiatric wing was in the East Clinic, just off the Center Building that dominated the campus. It wasn’t a far walk, but the men hurried through the crowded hallways, navigating gurneys of moaning patients, distracted nurses, and residents darting to their next task. The elevator opened for the ninth floor.

  “Lingerie, auto parts, homicidal maniacs,” Chen quipped.

  Brunelle tried not to laugh. He was feeling serious, sometimes difficult around Chen. But he knew he’d be on edge until he could figure out what happened. He couldn’t begin thinking about how to present the case to the jury until he knew what to present. And Chen had steadfastly refused to fill him in on the drive over.

  “Trust me,” he’d said. “You’re going to want to hear it directly from her.”

  ‘Her’ was Keesha Sawyer. A thirty-something woman with short hair, a disarming smile, and an acute case of paranoid schizophrenia.

  She was in Room 914, flanked by two police officers and strapped securely to the bed.

  “Hello, Detective,” she said as Chen and Brunelle entered her room. “Who’s your friend?”

  “This is Dave Brunelle.” Chen gestured toward Brunelle. “He’s a prosecutor.”

  “Oh,” Sawyer said, tilting her head back to appraise him. “Are you going to charge me with a crime?”

  Brunelle nodded slightly. “We might. I was told you murdered your mother.”

  Sawyer smiled. She had a very nice smile. “I murdered her, all right. But it was justified.”

  Brunelle raised an eyebrow. “If it was justified,” he replied, “it’s not murder.”

  Sawyer cocked her head. “Is that right? Well, it was justified all right, so I guess it wasn’t murder.”

  Chen stuck a hand between them, then looked to the patrol officers. “Hey, did you guys read her her rights? I don’t want to have this conversation if you didn’t Mirandize her.”

  “No worries, detective,” one of the men replied. “I did it in the car, and again when we got here.”

  Sawyer looked up at the detective, apparently quite at ease with her limbs fastened to the hospital bed. “Oh, don’t worry detective. I want to talk. I want to explain.”

  Brunelle pulled over the one chair in the room and sat down next to her. “Okay. Explain.”

  Chen pulled a digital recorder from his pocket and placed it on the small tray-table between them.

  Sawyer looked at Brunelle for a moment. She seemed very sweet. Kind even. Despite what he’d seen earlier that morning, he was having trouble believing this polite, articulate woman could have hacked her mother’s face into oblivion. He didn’t fight the feeling. He knew the jury would feel it too. Which is why he needed to hear what she had to say.

  “I had to do it,” she started. “You have to understand that. It was justified.”

  “Was she hurting you?” Brunelle asked.

  Sawyer smiled broadly. That unhinged twinge from the corner of her eye spread to her mouth. Brunelle hoped she’d testify. The jury would see it too after just a few minutes.

  “She wasn’t hurting me, Mr. Brunelle. She was murdering me.”

  Brunelle raised his eyebrows. “Murdering you?”

  That’s a new one.

  “Yes, sir,” Sawyer replied earnestly. “Every night. She murdered me in my dreams.”

  Brunelle pursed his lips. He wasn’t a psychologist. He knew a fair amount about various psychoses, but it was from his experience as an advocate. The same experience that trained his mind to break down problems logically and present information linearly. He knew enough to let go of that instinct.

  “Explain to me,” he coaxed, “how you could be murdered every night in your dreams but still be alive. I don’t understand.”

  Sawyer nodded kindly at him, like a mother explaining something basic to a toddler. “I know, I know. She murdered me in my dreams, but I woke up alive in the morning. I was alive, but I wasn’t. I was undead. Do you know what the undead are?”

  Brunelle nodded. “Vampires and werewolves, right?”

  Sawyer frowned. “Vampires, yes, but not werewolves. Werewolves are very alive.”

  Brunelle nodded again. “Okay, okay. Sure. So vampires. She turned you into a vampire?”

  Not another vampire case, he hoped.

  “Of course not, silly,” Sawyer laughed. “Vampires aren’t real. No, she turned me into a zombie.”

  Brunelle’s eyebrows raised even higher.

  “Walking dead,” Sawyer explained. “She murdered me in my dreams so that when I woke up I’d be a zombie and she could control me.”

  Brunelle pressed his fingertips together and placed the index fingers to his lips. “And so that’s why you killed her? So she’d stop turning you into a zombie?”

  Sawyer shook her head again. “No. I can fight against it. I could stop being a zombie by dinner time. I really like dinner time. Do you like dinner, Mr. Brunelle?”

  Brunelle smiled at the sudden question. “Uh, sure. I like dinner.”

  “Do you cook for yourself, or is there a Mrs. Brunelle?”

  Brunelle shook his head. “There’s no Mrs. Brunelle.”

  “Not yet,” Chen whispered, but not nearly quietly enough.

  Brunelle shot him a glance, then looked back at Keesha Sawyer. “I eat out a lot,” he explained.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” Sawyer admonished. “You don’t know what they put in that food. I’ve been poisoned, did you know that?”

  “I didn’t know that, Keesha,” Brunelle responded. “I’m sorry about that. But can you tell me more about being a zombie. If you could fight it off, why did you have to kill her?”

  The smile occasioned by the conversation about dinner melted right off Sawyer’s face. It left behind a sorrowful, aghast expression. Wide-eyed, almost terrified. “The children,” she whispered.

  “The children?” Brunelle confirmed.

  “Yes, the children,” Sawyer answered. “She started to murder the children too.”

  “What children?” Brunelle asked, as if the woman really had been killing children. He found himself being sucked into Sawyer’s reality.

  “The children in our complex,” Sawyer explained. “The sweetest little children. They laugh and sing and play. Do you have children, Mr. Brunelle?”

  Brunelle shook his head curtly. “No, no children.” He glared at Chen before he could offer another ‘Not yet.’

  “That’s too bad,” Sawyer said. “I bet you’d be a great dad. How old are you, Mr. Brunelle?”

  “I’m forty-three,” he answered, although he wasn’t sure why he felt compelled to answer her questions.

  Sawyer shook her hea
d. “Tsk, tsk, Mr. Brunelle. You’d better hurry. Do you at least have a girlfriend? You’re a handsome man. I bet you have a girlfriend.”

  Brunelle glared again at Chen, who grinned but put his hands out to assure he wasn’t going to say anything.

  “Tell me about the children,” Brunelle pressed. “Not my children. The children your mother was going to murder.”

  Sawyer’s face went taut again. Brunelle realized the questions about wives and girlfriends might have been her way of avoiding the topic of her mother murdering the neighborhood kids. Too bad. He needed to hear what she had to say. Before some defense attorney got a hold of it and twisted it into whatever he or she wanted it to mean.

  “She wasn’t just going to murder them, Mr. Brunelle,” Sawyer explained. “She had already started. She murdered them all the night before. I saw them. They were zombies. They were too little to fight it off like I can. They couldn’t defend themselves, so I had to defend them. I wasn’t going to let her do it again. She was doing it. Going to them in their dreams and killing them. She had just murdered me in my dreams, but I woke up and I was strong and I fought it off. I had to stop her. Right then. Before she killed the children again. I had to do it. I murdered her but I had to do it.”

  Brunelle nodded and rubbed his chin, but didn’t say anything.

  “But then again,” Sawyer went on, her smile returning, “you said it wasn’t murder if you have to do it, right?”

  Brunelle surrendered his own smile. “I did say that. If it’s justified, it’s not murder. Murder is an unlawful killing.”

  “Then I’m not guilty,” Sawyer said.