“You sat through the trial?” James asked, rubbing her back with the palm of his hand. “That must have been horrible.”
“It was,” Mandy said. “There were all these boys … more than twenty of them.”
“I thought he had fifty victims,” Finn said.
“Yeah, but in sexual-abuse cases, it’s really hard to get victims to testify,” Mandy explained. “Some of the kids were too young, and their parents refused to put them on the stand.
“Others were too old,” Mandy continued. “The statute of limitations had passed and they couldn’t testify. There were some victims who claimed that nothing had ever been done to them – even though Pritchard had photographs. It came down to twenty victims.”
“What do you remember about him?” Finn asked.
“You know how when you look at people who are accused of heinous crimes and they just look like normal people?”
Finn nodded.
“That was not Lance Pritchard,” Mandy said. “You could tell by looking at him that he was evil. I remember he would try and stare down each one of his accusers. The prosecutor stood between him and the kids, bodily trying to block him off, but he kept jostling around so he could look around the prosecutor. It was creepy.”
“How long did the trial go?”
“It was a long one,” Mandy said. “It was about four months long. I was fresh out of college. The worst thing I’d seen up to that point had been a couple of armed robbers and a handful of wife beaters. This was the first … predator I’d ever come into close contact with.”
“Did he try to speak to you?”
“He tried to speak to all of us,” Mandy said. “During breaks, I would come back to my desk before the judge. He was always smiling at me with these big, yellow teeth.”
James tightened his arms around Mandy instinctively.
“It wasn’t just me. He tried to talk to Heidi, too. The bailiff was always threatening him.”
“What about his family?” Finn pressed. “Were they in court?”
Mandy’s face scrunched up as she searched her memory. “He had a son,” she said. “He was about twenty-three at the time. I remember hearing the prosecutor talking to another lawyer. Everyone thought the son had been abused, too, but he would never admit to it.”
“What did you think?” James asked.
“The son had vacant eyes,” Mandy said. “You could tell something horrendous happened to him. He was back in court about a year ago. I remembered him from that first case. This time he was the one in front of the judge.”
“What was he in for?” Finn asked.
“Armed robbery. He held up a liquor store,” Mandy said. “The family was in real financial trouble. The mother just took off at some point. That came up in court. The defense attorney tried playing on Judge MacIntosh’s sympathy.”
“Did it work?”
“Actually? Yeah,” Mandy said. “The prosecutor didn’t even try to fight a lighter sentence for him. The family was living in poverty. The brother was trying to take care of himself and his younger sister. He could have gotten fifteen years and the judge gave him five.”
“That was nice of him,” James said. “I never pictured the judge as a softy.”
“He remembered the father’s trial, too,” Mandy said. “I think he knew that he was abused.”
“What about the sister?” Finn asked softly. “Was she ever in the courtroom?”
“She was called to testify against her father,” Mandy said. “I remember thinking how young she looked. She was seventeen or eighteen at the time, which I guess would make her around twenty-two now. She seemed … older, though. She had one of those faces where you just knew she’d seen some horror.”
Finn gripped the arm of the chair, his knuckles turning white. “What did she testify about?”
Mandy was trying to remember. “She said she didn’t know about the abuse, and I believed her. She seemed more like a neglected little girl than anything else. It came out in court that her mom was a drunk and drug addict. Most people believed the mother knew what was going on, although they never had enough evidence to charge her.
“What I really remember is that the girl was wearing these hand-me-down jeans that were two sizes too big for her, and a shirt that was clearly from a thrift store, but she was really beautiful,” Mandy continued. “She didn’t have any money. She couldn’t even buy anything from the vending machine. She just sat in the hallway when everyone was at lunch, all by herself, staring at the wall.”