2023/10/31 - Karen Coe, P.I. Ch. 01

As always, Deena was in her own little world. She gave very little thought to anything, from cheating on her husband to agreeing to kill him. Antonio was younger than her, exciting, hot in the sack, and drew her out of her numbness. When Antonio said he'd take care of everything, she was too much in lust to question what that entailed. She hadn't wanted to kill Jason so much as she just wanted a new life. When Antonio convinced her it was the only way, she went along. He painted a picture of life on the beaches of Rio, with Jason's money all hers.

He introduced her to a couple of friends and the partying included sex. Deena was the centre of attention and she was now being redirected from the boredom that was her life. The friends gave Antonio some cash to "help with the cost of the party" and Antonio gave half of it to Deena. She got a kick out of it. The sex with these guys was exciting and she was getting paid to boot. Soon she was working as an escort, going out with guys who brought their upscale vehicles to Goncalves Auto. Deena was not the only girl that Soares had recruited. He had a couple of other women he knew from here and there. But Antonio didn't actually enjoy the life of a pimp. A pimp organizes his stable's workflow. And he gets to bang them when he wants. He reasoned, why do the work? Deena was already a secretary and helped with business administration at Orsini. Let her run the workforce. He'd still bang them when the mood struck.

Before long, Deena was running the operation. She recruited more girls. Antonio recruited the johns. He got a 15% kickback, Deena took 25% and her girls got 60% plus tips. Deena liked turning her own tricks. She liked the sex, she liked the nice restaurants and she liked pocketing 85%. Plus tips. Jason had considered himself to be in a happy marriage. He worked hard, made good money, and came home to a wife he loved. They were 21 when they got hitched. By year 6, his business was white hot, but it seemed to take control of his life. He wasn't around enough to see Deena slowly become disillusioned. He was around enough though to notice some changes.

First, there was the sudden burst of manic joy over the new car she'd found. He hadn't seen her so happy for a while, so he was glad to buy it for her. Then she slowly began to distance herself. She'd walk into the house with a serene contentment on her face but her mind was clearly elsewhere. He knew what the possibilities were and he didn't like any of them. She began dressing differently and keeping odd hours. She had tried at first to get her hours to jibe with her husband's schedule. He worked late as a rule, and she could get out of her day job with Orsini at 5pm, do dinner and sex with a client and be home by 9pm. When he got home at 10 at night, it was no problem.

But when the season changed and it got cold and dark early, she would come home after him. The way she was dressed and the way she reeked when she got home was not lost on him. He had things to say, and the marriage was in a state of crisis.

The Brenners kept up pretences. Even as the tension mounted, they went through the normal day-to-day of married life. Shortly before the end, she borrowed his pickup, ostensibly to help a girlfriend from work move to her new apartment, while he drove her SUV for the day.

He had uttered the word "divorce" once or twice toward the end. When she announced that she was going "by myself" to Florida for a couple weeks, he told her that he believed everything except the "by myself" part.

He told her that whoever "this guy" is, he hopes that her marriage was worth it. He reminded her that just a year earlier, they'd talked about starting their family soon, then remarked that he's now glad that kids won't have to be factored into any settlement. She smirked. She and Antonio had already come to a decision regarding her marriage. She knew that Jason's fate was sealed and that there would be no settlement.

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From the time of the Voight family bombing, Deena was a changed woman. The smirk had been replaced by sober contemplation. She was mortified at what she'd agreed to. She had been smug during the planning stage. She was murdering her husband but she was only doing it in her mind. What spouse doesn't dream about that once or twice during the course of a marriage? But then the bodies began to drop.

She knew about the plan but it was abstract. Hubby would die and her gloom would go away. She had bought the bomb components. Antonio never said "Here's a list of things we need for the bomb". He merely gave her a list and said he needed the items and said he didn't have the time or money to do it himself. But she knew he was planning on building bombs. She should have suspected that the items she was buying were for bombs. But she didn't want to know.

She heard about the first bombing up north when she was in Florida. In her mind there was no connection. She barely understood any of the particulars when it came to bombs in general. That was Antonio's department. Deena did not want to know. But news of the explosion in the Providence area had made things a bit less abstract. She knew from first report that her husband wasn't the victim But she was a bit less smug. She was rattled. It could just as easily have been him. Now she was in a new place. Not completely separated from that abstract fantasy of being free of her husband, yet beset by a creeping sense of unease that he could have been killed.

She deluded herself that the bombing that took the life of one Mr Shah couldn't possibly have anything to do with the plot to kill Jason. The next day, the second bombing was in the national news. Again, someone other than Jason was killed. But for a second straight day, Deena felt her sentiments shift. It was harder to delude herself. She actually worried about Jason. She still wanted to be free of him, but the idea of blowing him to bits began to bother her. She also began to feel a chill between herself and Antonio. She began to question what she saw in him. It was maybe more what he represented than who he was. He represented a way out.

Once again, more abstractions. The concrete reality was that he was a conniver. He preyed on married women. He fostered prostitution. And he was a murderer. But then again, now so was she. She drowned her sorrow in the hotel bar, and in the back seats of a couple of vehicles. That was the thing about being a whore. She could ply that trade anywhere she went. By the time she went back to their room that night, she could barely stand to look at Antonio. She just threw the $300 on the dresser with disgust, and crawled into bed. He stayed awake.

Around 3 in the morning, she roused sufficiently to watch him pull out his cell phone to make a call. A call to no one. She slept fitfully after that. By 9.30 she was awake, and walking to Mickey D's to get some breakfast and a coffee. She was wearing workout pants and a Lulu Lemon top. Her motel key and burner phone were in one pocket. Her money and iPhone were in the other. The iPhone rang. It was the Providence police. Jason had been injured and was not expected to survive. She ran back to the hotel. Antonio, his work for the day completed, was sleeping. She told him goodbye. He told her he loved her. She just repeated her goodbye without any further endearment and called a cab from the motel lobby. They wouldn't set eyes upon the other again until the trial.

When she saw Jason unconscious in his Providence hospital bed, burnt and battered, her heart went out to him. Of course, being unconscious, there would be no recriminations from him, none of the harsh words he'd last spoken to her. The last thing on her mind right then was Antonio, her prostitution enterprise, or the status of the as-yet unconcluded plot. She was with Jason's parents, and for a brief moment, she had nothing to do with what happened to him, distracted as she was by the grief she shared with the elder Brenners.

Everything else in the world faded away as she accompanied the Brenners to the hospital chapel. The grief over Jason's grim prognosis insulated her from the outside world. Then outside the chapel door, she learnt of a fourth bombing, a bombing she'd forgotten to consider. When she heard that it was a mum and her three babies, she collapsed, physically and emotionally. That final blast had triggered the transformation of Deena from the smirking whore who had left her husband, to the empty shell of a human being that now stared at the wall of her prison cell in New York.

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Brock woke up in Karen's bed for what would prove to he the final time. "Babe, it's been fun but we can't keep doing this. I mean, I know you're here in New York for the trial, but you really need to scat on back to your missus."

"Karen, is there someone you're scatting back to?"

"Well, I did meet a guy. I met him just before you and I reconnected."

Brack chuckled, "Wow, so you've been jumping back and forth between me and him. Does he know you're slutting around on him? God, you're really something, Colangelo."

And just like that, the spell was broken. Karen got out of bed and laid into him as she dressed. "You have some nerve calling me a slut. Even if I were, you have a wife back home and you're fucking me. You have no room to talk. It's been fun, Brack, but it's been a mistake. One I won't be making again. On a professional level, I've found our association fulfilling and I do hope you contract my services again in the future. I think we work well together, and I appreciate your business. But personally, we have no business being together. You have a family and it does your family no good for you to spend your downtime with a slut. And as for me, right now there's somewheres else I should be."

And with that, Karen walked out on a bewildered Brack Waterhouse. Within two hours, she was on a train back to Providence.

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Bombing crimes fall under Federal jurisdiction. Timothy McVeigh was put to death by federal authorities in 2001 based on his conviction for multiple murders arising from his bombing of a building in Oklahoma. In the present case, the random nature of selecting victims and the idea of murdering innocents just so that a woman could be rid of her husband aroused public consternation.

But it was the death of Vanessa Voight and her three babies that coalesced public outrage. The Attorney General gave the go-ahead to pursue the death penalty in this case. Many of the usual anti-death-penalty activists were strangely silent in this instance. The courtroom was filled with everyone you might expect. Karen Colangelo was back... back from Providence, where she had done a couple of small investigative jobs for her fledgeling business. Back from some time spent bonding with Clark Mathers, some of it overnight bonding. She was sat in the courtroom next to Brackwell Waterhouse, who had expressed words of sincere contrition over the manner in which they had parted company.

The families of the victims were there. Most eyes were riveted to the visibly-scarred Jason Brenner and the emotionally-scarred Tyler Voight. When the two men met, there was a reflexive unease between them. Jason knew he was the reason that Tyler's wife and kids were dead. He felt somehow responsible for it. Tyler looked at the burn scars on Jason Brenner, saw how the effects of the blast still hindered his movements, saw the look of guilt in his eyes. Tyler threw his arms around Jason and wept upon him, "It's not your fault. They did this to us."

Jason was not a weepy guy but at this minute, he and Tyler Voight were on the same page. In the weeks to come they formed a mutual support bond and became friends.

The nature of the charges required a cumbersome defence scheme. Often, the defendant less culpable will ask for his case to be severed from that of the more culpable defendant. This increases the chance that the less culpable defendant will not be given a sentence as harsh as that meted out to the more culpable defendant. Here we had murder charges, and each defendant had his own counsel. If there was a conflict between the defendants, each of them needed to have an attorney who would represent his interests, the other defendant be damned. But we also had conspiracy charges here.

Conspiracy by its very definition requires that two or more people agree to a plan and then commit an act that moves the plan along, an "act in furtherance." Conspiracy charges cannot be severed. It would make no legal sense that one defendant be found guilty and the other not guity in a separate trial. If one defendant is found not guilty, then that defendant did not conspire. Which makes it impossible for the other defendant to have conspired. One cannot conspire alone. So to avoid conflicting verdicts, the conspiracy charges have to be tried jointly. So there was a separate team to represent the defendants jointly against the conspiracy charges.

The judge was hearing pre-trial motions at this point. This is usually where counsel for the defence throws a few Hail Marys. A motion to get the charges dismissed or reduced. Change of venue. Request for court-ordered psych exam for the defendant. Deena Brenner's attorney for the non-conspiracy action, that is the lawyer defending her interests in the 6 murder charges and the 1 attempted murder charge, addressed the judge. "May it please the court, Your Honour, my client Deena Brenner has directed me to file an unusual motion, a copy of which I will present to the court and to the other counsels. In short, my client wants to plead guilty to all 6 murders and the 1 count of attempted murder, but she will only do it under two conditions. First, she must be allowed to allocute and confess all details of her involvement. Secondly, regardless of either the severity or the leniency of the sentence passed on her co-defendant, Mrs Brenner insists that she be given the death penalty, which she will not contest, beyond that automatically required by statute."

Immediately the Soares defence team objected. Such allocution would incriminate their client, essentially making her a witness for the prosecution, and her name was not on the government's witness list. The judge ordered everyone into chambers. Things got heated, but after everone had had their say, and had answered the judge's questions, he ordered a recess. The following day, he gave his ruling.

The conspiracy case against both defendents would proceed. But the murder cases would be severed from the conspiracy case. And the murder cases of each defendent would be severed from each other. Deena would be allowed to enter a plea of not guilty in both of her cases. The trial for conspiracy would go forward. A guilty verdict for the conspiracy charges would mean a death sentence for both defendants in all likelihood anyway. Her allocution would have to wait till last, so that any confession would not put into the record any testimony prejudicial to Soares.

The highlight of the conspiracy trial was when the prosecution played recordings of a number of phone calls between the defendants, taken from the FBI wiretaps. They were damning:

Antonio Soares: Hey baby, what's the 411? Is he gone?

Deena Brenner: No he is not. He's critcal and not expected to last. I pictured him in tiny pieces. What the fuck did you use, an M-80?

AS: Nope, I gave him the whole deal. How did he get out in one piece?

DB: Fuck if I know. God, what a shit show. There were the two bombings before him. Yours I trust?

AS: Of course it was, you knew the plan, Deena....

DB: I did and I didn't. I just wanted him to vanish in a cloud of dust. I wasn't interested in the others. Where did you pick them from anyway?

AS: Assholes, baby, assholes. I deal with them all the time, so some Arab asshole, some redneck asshole, some rich asshole...

DB: Wait, that's one extra. You only did two besides Jason, right?

AS: Jesus Christ, Deena. We talked about this. Don't you pay attention?

DB: Yeah, sorta, I don't know.... I'm trying to forget, I guess. Fuck's sake, the one guy we wanted dead is the only one who isn't.

AS: Yeah, but you telling me he almost gone, right? Any minute now, right?

DB: Who the fuck knows? What are you going to do if he pulls through? Bomb the hospital or was I supposed to smother him with a fucking pillow?

AS: OK baby, you sounding stressed.

DB: Tony, you just don't know. I had no beef with his parents. And now I've got to deal with them. They always treated me nice and now I've gotta look them in the eye and tell them nice shit to make them feel better.

AS: Too bad your old man didn't treat you good, like me, heh heh...

DB: Jason treated me fine (sniff). Treated me like a queen. He just bored the shit out of me and was never around. Shit. He didn't really deserve any of this. I should have just divorced his ass and taken my 50%.

AS: You just couldn't resist some hot Tony loving!

DB: What 28 year old bored housewife can resist a 21 year old who stays hard and fucks like the energizer bunny? Shit, I was thinking with my vadge when you filled my head with all that bombing crap...

AS: Baby, baby, we almost done with everything. We gone put all this behind us. Nobody can survive what I gave him to work with. Once he's gone, we going to Brazil. I'll support us. They need good mechanics down there and I'm the best. You'll have his money and you won't need no office job. You won't need to do no more trickin'. Of course unless you like getting laid. I won't hold you down like your old man did!

DB: Oh, be still my heart. I get to be a murdering adultress and a whore. Every girl's dream. I can't believe who I am now. I was a good kid. I was a good wife, for a few years at any rate, and all of a sudden I look in the mirror and I don't know who I am.

AS: You are the best, baby. You mean everything to me. That's who you are. You and me... Tony and Deena. Tony and Deena forever.

DB: Yeah, we'll be in prison forever. Shit, we committed fucking murder. We'll be in hell forever.

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If she was conflicted during the course of that phone call, she was clearly less so by the time of their next conversation the following day:

Antonio Soares: S'up, baby?

Deena Brenner: You monster!

AS: Whoa, slow your roll....

DB: You monster. You fucking monster!

AS: What the fuck, Deena?

DB: You said you picked a rich asshole to kill. Shit, I can't believe I signed up for this. What the fuck did you do?

AS: You better explain things.... I don't know where you going with this.

DB: You asshole! You killed a mother and her three kids. Fucking hell! They were babies. All less than 3 years old or something. Toddlers. A fucking infant! What the fuck did you do? What the fuck did I do? God... I just want to die. I just wanted out of my marriage and I let you talk me into this shit. You fucking monster! We are just fucked! I'm sorry I ever met you. My life is over. We have killed 6 innocent people. And my husband is still alive and maimed. If he lives, we have fucked him up for life. He will never be right again. He loved me. He didn't deserve this. He didn't deserve what I did to him. My God you got me involved in fucking prostitution! I am so fucking totally fucked! I can't bear to look at his parents now. I can't stand to be in the room looking at his battered body. You asshole...

AS: Look, I swear.... Deena, This rich guy came in with the car. All superior and all that shit. Problem with the thermostat, oil change...

DB: You idiot. It was his wife's car. He brought in his wife's car! Probably had carseats in it for the babies. The fucking babies! She was busy at home taking care of the babies while you were arranging to blow them to pieces! You fucking animal! Look... this whole thing has gone straight into the crapper. I can't even bear to look at myself when I pass a mirror. There's no way I'm going to look at you the same way either. I'm done. I'm out. Don't call me on the burner unless it's an emergency. Don't call me to chat or to call me baby. We are both screwed. Call me only if you need to.