KUP TERAZ

Last Witness
Hoffman Jilliane

Ocena: 2 (1 głosów)

Evil sees you Two years ago William Bantling was put on death row by Florida&rsquo.s Assistant State Attorney, CJ Townsend - for the torture and murder of eleven young women. Evil hears you Now three cops crucial to Bantling&rsquo.s conviction have been brutally slain. CJ knew them all - and the shocking secret they took to their graves. Evil knows you But it&rsquo.s clear that somebody else also knows the truth - though their reasons for wanting it kept quiet are very different to CJ&rsquo.s. Which leaves her with a terrifying choice: reveal the secret she swore to keep and stay alive - or be its last witness, and the next to die ... The heavy wooden doors to courtroom 4&mdash.8 swung open again, tapping the back of the chair where the corrections officer sat fiddling with the bottom snap on his department-issued green windbreaker. The plainclothes detective entered and walked slowly up the center aisle, his dress shoes thudding softly on the tired tan carpet, past the excited crowd, before finally taking a seat on the witness stand to the left of Judge Leopold Chaskel's mahogany throne. Miami Assistant State Attorney C.J. Townsend felt her mouth go dry. She rubbed her lips together, to keep them moist and to hide her anxious expression from the cameras, sketch artists and reporters that monitored her every move. Her heart began to pound furiously in her chest. But she could not run, could not just get up and leave&mdash.that was not an option. So she forced her eyes to look straight ahead of her. She didn't even glance at the man who sat at the opposite table across the gallery wearing an expensive Italian suit and a pained expression on his handsome face. She knew he watched her, though, waiting for her reaction. For her, he wore a bemused smile beneath his feigned look of anguish, his fingers drumming patiently on the table before him. &lsquo.State, are you ready to proceed?&rsquo. asked Judge Chaskel, perturbed that this case was once again his problem. He had run an almost-perfect trial. It should never have come back. Not for this reason. &lsquo.I am,&rsquo. replied ASA Rose Harris, C.J.'s friend and colleague in the Major Crimes Unit at the State Attorney's Office. After a moment she rose from her seat and said, &lsquo.Please state your name for the record.&rsquo. &lsquo.Special Agent Dominick Falconetti, Florida Department of Law Enforcement.&rsquo. &lsquo.How long have you been so employed?&rsquo. &lsquo.Fifteen years with FDLE. Four years with the Bronx P.D. before that.&rsquo. &lsquo.Agent Falconetti, allow me to direct your attention to the year 2000. At that time, were you the lead agent on the case of The State of Florida vs. William Rupert Bantliny&rsquo. &lsquo.Yes, Ma'am. The department headed up a task force&mdash.the Cupid Task Force, it was known by. It was comprised of detectives from multiple South Florida law enforcement agencies. In 1999 the task force was formed in response to a series of abductions and brutal murders that took place on Miami Beach. The subject had been nicknamed Cupid because of what he had done to the hearts of his victims, and the name stuck. I was the agent assigned initially from FDLE, so I, ultimately, led the investigation.&rsquo. Rose Harris gestured to the man at the table. &lsquo.And that investigation ended with the arrest of a subject, namely William Rupert Bantling, on September 19, 2000?&rsquo. &lsquo.Yes,&rsquo. Dominick looked over where Rose had gestured, where William Rupert Bantling sat nibbling on his lip now, looking as if he might cry. &lsquo.Mr. Bantling was arrested by Miami Beach police officers over on the McArthur Causeway. The body of victim Anna Prado was discovered in the trunk of his vehicle.&rsquo. &lsquo.And Mr. Bantling was subsequently brought to trial later that year for her murder?&rsquo. &lsquo.Yes.&rsquo. &lsquo.Who was the prosecutor in that case, Agent Falconetti?&rsquo. The tone of her voice hardened slightly. Dominick hesitated just a moment and looked in C.J.'s direction. &lsquo.Assistant State Attorney C.J. Townsend,&rsquo. he said softly. &lsquo.She'd been the SAO legal advisor on the task force for more than a year.&rsquo. &lsquo.During the course of this trial, you became romantically involved with Ms. Townsend, is that correct?&rsquo. &lsquo.Yes,&rsquo. he said, looking awkwardly down at his lap, &lsquo.we developed a relationship.&rsquo. &lsquo.And Mr. Bantling was convicted after a trial, correct?&rsquo. &lsquo.Yes. Convicted and sentenced to death.&rsquo. Rose Harris had moved behind Bantling at the table. Now she placed a hand on his shoulder, and he bowed his head meekly. &lsquo.But you came to discover that Mr. Bantling was not guilty of this crime, was he Agent Falconetti?&rsquo. &lsquo.I don't know that for certain,&rsquo. Dominick squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. C.J. felt his eyes searching the courtroom for hers, but she continued to stare straight ahead. Her legs had started to shake underneath the table. &lsquo.You came to discover facts, Agent Falconetti, that caused you to question Mr. Bantling's guilt, is that true? That he perhaps had been set up?&rsquo. &lsquo. I discovered facts that caused me to question some things, yes.&rsquo. &lsquo.That caused you to believe that Mr. Bantling had been set up?&rsquo. &lsquo.Yes, I have wondered,&rsquo. Dominick finally said, his voice resigned, his eyes finally giving up the search and casting downward instead. &lsquo.Show the court, please, what fact you discovered that led you to question the guilt of Mr. Bantling&mdash.that led you to believe that he had been set up, as he had alleged all along?&rsquo. Rose Harris was like a dog with a bone. &lsquo.Show the court the evidence you discovered, the evidence that had been withheld in the first trial, that evidence which told you an innocent man had been falsely accused and placed on death row!&rsquo. Dominick sombrely nodded his head. He looked defeated, as if he wanted to cry himself. He reached down underneath the witness stand, his hands emerging seconds later with a black plastic garbage bag that was sealed with red evidence tape. Using latex gloves and a jagged knife, he slid open the tape and with a pair of evidentiary steel tongs, reached inside. The smiling, white rubber face of a clown emerged from the bag, the tongs holding it at a distance by its fuzzy tufts of red hair, its blood-red twisted smile dangling in front of the jury, twirling and spinning slowly back and forth, posing for every camera. An enormous collective gasp sounded through the crowd. &nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp. She could take it no more. C.J. sprang to her feet, screaming. &lsquo.He is not innocent! He's guilty! He's guilty!&rsquo. Jilliane Hoffman has been able to draw on her experience as an Assistant State Attorney &#91.1992 &ndash. 1996&#93. to bring to life the world of C.J Townsend with chilling accuracy. Exclusively for www.penguin.co.uk Jilliane reveals the challenges on building on a successful story line and her research, but remains tightlipped on if we will see any more of C.J and Dominick in the future&#8230. Last Witness is a sequel to your bestselling first novel, Retribution. What were some of the challenges you faced in developing a continuing storyline? There were two distinct challenges that I faced in creating a sequel and follow-up storyline to Retribution. The plotline for Last Witness was imagined and worked through while I was writing Retribution, so the challenges actually began then. My goal was to write a sequel with a suspenseful continuing storyline that could definitely stand alone, but to accomplish that, I also needed to subtly work-in the plot and re-introduce the characters of Retribution without giving away the ending for first-time readers. It was definitely a challenge, but I&rsquo.m really happy with the way it came out. It was also great fun to continue to develop the characters that I have come to love, in particular this time, Special Agent Dominick Falconetti. What kind of research did you need to do to write Last Witness? Researching Last Witness actually brought me to some really interesting places. I&rsquo.m very hands-on, and if I am writing about a place, I want to have been there, smelled it, walked it, felt it. So I rode in a squad car with an experienced Miami Beach police officer, on the explicit instruction that he &ldquo.take me to some wonderful, dark places to kill people on Miami Beach. In particular, uniformed police officers.&rdquo. (I must admit, he did seem a bit anxious with me in the car after that.) I also attended an autopsy at the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner&rsquo.s Office, which gave me some wicked ideas. And lastly&mdash.and probably the most sobering place my research took me&mdash.was death row at Florida State Prison. FSP is the Florida prison where the absolute worst-of-the-worst offenders are housed&mdash.all 1200 of them. Many of them are in there for murder. They are so violent and anti-social, that they are all confined in a lockdown, single-cell environment 24/7, with the limited exception of exercise time in the yard three times a week. But even there, they are each assigned to their own chain-linked &ldquo.dog run,&rdquo. so that they don&rsquo.t actually have physical contact with any other inmate. And, of course, what makes FSP so infamous is that for some inmates, it is their last stop. Two special wings house forty-four death row inmates, and the execution chamber itself is in the basement. It was a very chilling experience to actually walk the row, and look into the eyes of the men who are the state&rsquo.s most grisly and infamous killers. &nbsp. We can&rsquo.t help but notice from the picture on your jacket and your biographical data that Miami prosecutor C.J. Townsend sounds and looks a lot like you. Is Retribution or Last Witness at all autobiographical? I get that question a lot. I believe that you should write what you know. And so, in creating the character Chloe Larson/C.J. Townsend, I did borrow a bit from myself. (Although I must admit that a size four with cascading long blonde hair was a bit of wishful thinking and literary license.)&nbsp. I put her in the same law school I graduated from, in the same apartment that I used to live in Queens, New York, and ultimately in the same job that I had, as a prosecutor in Miami. That way I knew what she would be thinking, what she would be smelling, seeing, feeling, hearing. I knew where the clown would enter her apartment in Queens, and why she couldn&rsquo.t hear him when he did. Mentally, I could picture it all. Now, while I, myself, have never been a victim of rape, I have counseled many, many women who have. So I was able to draw on those experiences in helping me develop C.J.&rsquo.s character and, ultimately, her conviction. The crime scenes and characters that you describe throughout both Retribution and Last Witness seem so frighteningly real. Are any of your books based on true cases that you worked? The storylines are completely fictional&mdash.there has never been a serial killer nicknamed Cupid in Miami. Nor has there been a serial killer anywhere, to my knowledge, who has targeted police officers. However, I have prosecuted a serial rapist before and I have worked on serial homicide investigations and witnessed my share of homicide scenes. In writing Florida&rsquo.s sexual predator notification laws, I have personally researched hundreds of cases of sex offenders and stood up in court many times to make sure they stay behind bars. I definitely have borrowed from my experiences in those cases, so in that sense both novels are based on true crime. The characters&mdash.from the police and detectives and judges&mdash.are all in some way created from the personalities of the hundreds of cops, special agents, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys that I have worked alongside with in my career. My characters&rsquo. voices are all ones I have listened to for years, which is probably why they sound so real. They are. Will we see more of C.J. and Dom in future novels? I won&rsquo.t give away any endings. I hate that. I will say that my next book is back in the courtroom with another monster. It is titled Plea of Insanity and the research I have had to do for that has been utterly fascinating.