As soon as Gabe said that, Kitt took the opportunity to introduce the facility that Gabe and Sebastian’s investigationhad found out in Honey Island Swamp. After that, no one cared about the involvement of a few civilians in an investigation when they were faced with the reality of children being kept in a secret prison out in the middle of a swamp.
I hadn’t paid too much attention to that part of the case. It brought back too many memories I preferred to leave behind, and my memories were already hard enough to ignore.
I’d spent some time at that facility. Not a lot, thankfully, as it wasn’t where the bell ringers typically kept their high-earning Angels. It had only been about a week as a layover while I and a few other kids were being transported to a new location, but the eeriness of the swamp was hard to forget. It was a great hiding spot. National parks were protected land, and the dense vegetation and hostile terrain meant the facility wouldn’t be accidentally seen by some random hiker that wandered too far off the trail.
It had been a miserable place that I never wanted to think about again, and I’d only lived there a week. I couldn’t imagine growing up there as some other kids had.
Kitt’s case leaned heavily into this facility. He started by presenting the factual information, such as financial records, banks statements, and even phone records and emails that showed frequent communication between Vanshaw and Barr. On a technical level, it was damning evidence proving that both of the accused sitting in that room were involved with the heinous facility. However, just as Kitt had predicted, the jury didn’t seem as moved as they should have been. All of this information was just numbers on a page. It lacked emotion, and without that human element it was hard to reach people’s hearts.
The defense was smart, and faced with irrefutable facts, they quickly shifted their strategy. Both Vanshaw and Barr no longer claimed that they had nothing to do with the bellringers. Instead, they admitted to some minor involvement, but downplayed their importance and insisted that they whole pedophile ring was actually led by Senator McLeod. It was a plausible argument since the Senator had been in charge of the Honey Island facility, and most conveniently, the man was dead, so he couldn’t defend himself against the accusations.
The two men would still be found guilty, but if they played their cards right and were able to make the late Senator take the fall as the ringleader, then their punishments would be a slap on the wrist compared to what they truly deserved.
A few of the older children from the Honey Island Swamp facility were brought out as witnesses, but it was obvious why Kitt couldn’t build his case on the words of such young children. Seeing an eight-year-old girl sitting on the witness stand, shaking so bad she looked like she was about to slide right off the chair, was a heartbreaking sight, but she couldn’t give clear testimony. She mixed up her words, stuttered when she was nervous, and kept looking over at Kitt and the rest of the prosecution team like she was looking for the right answer.
It got even worse when the defense was allowed to cross-examine her, and they intentionally worded their questions in difficult ways so she would get confused and answer the wrong things. Kitt did his best to keep the trial on track, objecting whenever the defense was clearly trying to intimidate or lead the young witness into a wrong answer, but there was only so much he could do. He couldn’t put words in the child’s mouth, even if those words would have been truthful.
Having the children testify wasn’t even that helpful. None of them ever personally saw Vanshaw, and the few that did see Barr, didn’t come across as very reliable witnesses.
So, no. The case could not be built on the backs of children. That wasn’t the point. Having the children show up in court wasmerely to remind the jury about what we were fighting for and soften them up for the third and final part of Kitt’s strategy.
This was where adult witnesses, like Clay and I, were necessary. Our testimonies, personal accounts that combined both emotions and facts, would be the deciding factor in whether or not we won the case.
The twins went first, explaining to the jury about what had happened to their brother, and then Clay followed them to tell them about his own experiences as a victim of the bell ringers’ trafficking.
On Kitt’s recommendation, I wasn’t allowed to watch the trial during any of their testimony so that my own testimony wouldn’t be influenced. Instead, I sat alone in the closet-sized waiting room, tugging nervously at the cuff of my shirt and trying to keep my knee from bouncing as I waited for the bailiff outside the door to bring into the courtroom.
I could do this. I just had to repeat the memories that were already in my head. I’d already told these memories to other people.
What was a few more?
A lot more.
A whole room full of people, all specifically there to judge whether I was telling the truth.
With a sigh, I let go of my sleeve, which was in danger of unraveling under my nervous attention and rubbed a hand over my face.
This was going to be hard.
Closing my eyes, I thought back over the case. We’d come so far. I couldn’t be the one to mess things up just because I was nervous. Clay was out there right now talking about things that were just as hard as my own past experiences. If he could do it, so could I.
Although, now that I thought about it, I realized something strange. It wasn’t until Clay’s contribution to this story we were building that the name “bell ringers” was actually mentioned. Until then, everyone had talked about human trafficking and an organized pedophile ring, but no one had specifically called them thebell ringers.
That meant up until Clay got involved, all these investigators were pursuing the bell ringers without even knowing the name of their enemy.
What kind of conviction did that take?
Surely, there must have been plenty of times when Sebastian and Gabe and Logan thought that they were on the wrong track. That maybe they were jumping at shadows and chasing an enemy that didn’t really exist. Yet, they pushed on because it was the right thing to do, because they knew that somewhere out there were victims that needed their help.
Gripping my hands into tight fists, I managed to stop my nervous shaking. As one of those victims, now it was my turn to help them. I couldn’t afford to let my nerves get the best of me now.
“Jordy Emerson,” the bailiff called my name, summoning me into the courtroom.
I swallowed, and my throat felt like someone had taken a power sander to it.
After chugging a little paper cup of water from the water cooler in the corner and fixing the collar of my respectable button-up shirt, I was as ready as I was going to get.
Inside the courtroom, there weren’t as many people as I expected. It wasn’t like those courtroom dramas where the audience is always packed with emotional spectators for the sake of drama. Only about half of the audience’s seats were filled. That still meant there were a few dozen people watching me as I entered the room, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared.
