Chapter 11 - What Money Can’t Replace
When Brandon took the stand, Demi’s lead attorney went after him hard, because Brandon was the story the defense most needed to spoil. If they could make the jury see a grasping opportunist instead of a young man who’d been handed something impossible, the whole case might tilt.
“Mr. Robbins,” the attorney said, pacing, “isn’t it true that Mr. Benedict offered you an enormous sum of money to accuse his wife of a crime?”
“No, sir. He didn’t.”
“But he left you his entire fortune. Eighty-two million dollars.” The attorney turned to face him. “You benefited enormously from this man’s death, did you not?”
Brandon was quiet for a moment. His ribs still ached when he sat too straight, and he sat straight anyway, and looked at the attorney, and then past him at the jury.
“I would have benefited far more if Roderick Benedict had lived.”
“Mr. Robbins—”
“If he were alive today,” Brandon went on, his voice level, “he could have sat in that chair and told you himself what his wife did. He could have gone back to running the company he spent his whole life building.
He could have watched my sister walk out of that hospital on her own two feet after her surgery — he wanted that, he asked me about her, he cared how it turned out.”
He shook his head slowly. “Money doesn’t replace a person. Anyone who thinks it does has never actually lost one.”
“Move to strike as non-responsive,” the attorney said quickly.
“Overruled,” said the judge. “The witness may finish.”
“He didn’t ask me to lie,” Brandon said, into the quiet. “He didn’t ask me to accuse anyone of anything that wasn’t true. He asked me not to let his own murder become a reward for the people who murdered him.
That’s all. And I’ll tell you the truth — I’d go back to scrubbing hospital floors tomorrow, for the rest of my life, if it meant that man didn’t have to spend his last hours lying in a bed listening to his wife lean over him and mock him while he died.”
For a moment the courtroom was silent. Then Demi came out of her chair.
“You opportunistic little thief—” She was on her feet, her composure gone entirely, her face twisted into something the tailored suit and the careful hair had been hiding all along.
“That money was mine! I earned it, I put in the years, I—”
The gavel cracked down. The judge ordered her restrained, and the bailiffs moved in, and Demi was pulled back into her chair still spitting the words, and it was over — not the trial, but the outcome of it.
Because everyone in that room had just heard what she was, and what she grieved. She had not said she loved him. She had not said she was innocent. In the one unguarded moment of the whole proceeding, the only thing she had mourned was the fortune.
It got worse for her from there. Gareth, watching the room turn and doing the math on the thirty years he was facing, decided he would rather be a witness than a co-defendant.
He took the stand and told the prosecutor everything: that Demi had come to him with the idea, that Demi had sourced the forged prescriptions and administered the drug, that Demi had chosen the house in San Diego and hired the men in the alley.
Demi, from the defense table, called him a coward and worse, and the two of them turned on each other in open court, and it helped neither of them. The final piece the prosecution entered into evidence was a single text message Demi had sent the night before Roderick died: a note to no one, a plan spoken to herself, saying that if he lasted past morning she would give him more.
The jury was out for less than two hours.
Demi Benedict was convicted of murder in the first degree for financial gain, of criminal conspiracy, and of solicitation of felony assault, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Gareth was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, attempted kidnapping, and extortion, and received thirty-two years.
As they led her out in chains, Demi turned her head and found Brandon in the gallery.
“You took everything from me,” she said.
Brandon looked back at her, and what he felt, to his own surprise, was not triumph. It was something closer to pity.
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“No, Demi,” he said. “You lost everything the moment you decided a man’s life was worth less than a house on the beach.”
The court upheld Roderick’s trust in full. And under the slayer rule — the old, simple principle that no one may profit from a killing they caused — Demi Benedict was barred, permanently and completely, from receiving a single dollar of the estate she had murdered a man to inherit.
