Justice Page 3

  The clatter of plastic made her fairly certain he was closing the black plastic lid that came attached to the garbage can. Maybe now he would wheel it away and …

  Mee-eee-eee-eee.

  Clementine gave one of her pitiful, strangulated meows. It was loud enough to freeze the black shoes in their tracks, loud enough to send Lucy’s horrified gaze shooting to the cat, loud enough to make Jaden bury her face in Lucy’s shoulder with a shudder. Crouched on her belly, Clementine was staring out at where Miss Howard had been. Her fur was still all puffed up. Her eyes were wide and unblinking.

  “What the …?” The man broke off.

  The black shoes turned toward the bed. Lucy could now see the highly polished toes, the crease in his pants. Watching, she felt as if time had somehow been suspended. The only logical place to look for the source of the sound was under the bed. Any second now he would bend down and lift the edge of the bedspread and …

  The rest was too terrifying even to think about.

  She held her breath. Her heart felt like it would slam its way out of her chest. Sweat poured over her in an icy wave.

  Mee-eee-eee-eee.

  Rigid with fear, Lucy awaited discovery. Jaden kicked at the cat, her black Converse sneaker soundlessly slashing the air. Hissing, Clementine shot out from under the bed.

  “Damn cat.” The man’s tone made it clear he wasn’t a cat lover. His shoes moved so that Lucy could see the sides, then the heels. He was turning away.

  Lucy went weak with relief, letting her head drop so that her forehead rested on the floor. Beside her, Jaden closed her eyes.

  The clatter of plastic made her think the black lid that came attached to the garbage can had been closed.

  Screech. Screech.

  He was rolling the garbage can away.

  The next logical thing for him to do would be to come back and clean up the blood. The thought of having him so close again, of being just one bad turn of luck away from discovery, twisted Lucy’s stomach into a pretzel.

  Jaden nudged her. Let’s go, she mouthed.

  This time Lucy nodded, then put a cautionary finger to her lips: Wait.

  They both listened to the screeching sound as it got further away. He was heading toward the back door, Lucy was all but positive, which was located in the laundry room. It opened onto a tiny yard, with a concrete path that led to a garage and an alley. He could bring a car there, maybe, and haul Miss Howard away. A distant clatter made Lucy think that the garbage can had just crossed over the raised threshold that separated the hall from the kitchen.

  Now.

  The word flashed between the two of them. They acted on it instantly, slithering out from under the bed, rising to a crouch, creeping on silent feet toward the bedroom door. Lucy’s heart pounded so hard that she thought it might explode. Her breathing came fast and shallow. They could still hear the faint screech of the garbage can’s wheels. As long as they could hear it, she thought, they were okay. The laundry room was off the kitchen, and from the sound of it he was almost there. They would have to go out the front. They didn’t have much time.

  Screech. Screech.

  With Lucy in the lead, they slipped out into the hall and tiptoed down the red oriental runner. The hall was lit by a pair of candlestick lamps on a table. The warm yellow glow felt almost obscene under the circumstances. The kitchen was even brighter, a normal cheerful kitchen. They had to pass the entrance to the kitchen before they could get to the front door. If he looked around at just the wrong time …

  Lucy shuddered. If he catches us, we’re dead.

  Clementine watched them come. She was crouched in the kitchen doorway. Her eyes looked as round and bright as an owl’s. Her fur was puffed. Her tail swished.

  Please be quiet, Lucy begged her silently. Please.

  Scree—

  The screeching stopped. Lucy and Jaden registered that with a single, horrified exchange of glances. The front door was within view. It was solid dark wood, no window, fitted with a couple of locks. They rushed it, fumbled with the locks, a dead bolt, a knob lock, turn one, turn both, trying to be quiet, trying to be quick, casting so many terrified glances over their shoulders that they could hardly watch their hands.

  Footsteps in the kitchen, coming their way. Clementine jumped up and turned to look, tail raised stiff as a broomstick in the air. Batting Jaden’s hands aside, Lucy frantically twisted the knob, praying they had both locks in the right position, as panic made her fingers shake, made her go weak in the knees.

  Mee-eee-eee-eee.

  “Who’s there?” His voice was loud and sharp. Oh, God, he’d heard them. He was coming. Clementine skittered out of his way.

  Heart in throat, Lucy wrenched the door open. She and Jaden practically shoved each other through it, then fled down the steps and into the hot, humid night.

  As they raced away down the sidewalk, Lucy dared a quick glance over her shoulder.

  Silhouetted by the light spilling out of the doorway they’d just escaped through, the man stood on the top step, staring after them. His face was shadowed, but she could see that he had thick, dark hair and a tall, muscular build.

  “Oh my God, he’s looking at us,” Jaden gasped. Lucy saw that Jaden was looking back, too. Their eyes met in an instant of shared horror, then Lucy grabbed Jaden’s hand and they ran for their lives.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Three weeks later …

  “So you just—gave it to him?”

  With all eyes in the packed courtroom on her as she stopped in front of the witness stand, Jessica Ford—no, Jessica Dean now: she kept forgetting that she was in the Secret Service’s ad hoc version of the Witness Protection Program—could feel her palms starting to sweat.

  “Y-yes.” The witness looked at her with big blue eyes that were wide with apprehension.

  “He didn’t ask for it?”

  “No. Not exactly. But …” Tiffany Higgs was twenty-four, a pretty, wispy blonde in a flowery summer dress who was every bit as delicately built as Jess’s five-foot-two inch, undersized, newly (reluctantly) blond self. When Tiffany’s voice trailed off, Jess’s instinct was to urge her to continue. Then she hesitated. Hesitation was pretty generally held to be as dangerous for trial lawyers as it was for big game hunters—the prey, sensing fear, might well spring at you unexpectedly—but she had a goal she was working toward and Tiffany’s answer was already enough to take her where she wanted to go.

  Time to back off.

  Resisting the urge to run her damp hands down the sides of the skirt of her bubblegum pink, picked-out-by-the-jury-consultant summer suit, Jess turned both hands palm out in a calculated gesture of confusion instead and concentrated on following the instructions she’d been given.

  Which was to keep it nice. Jury-friendly. Nonthreatening. Forget attack dog. The impression she was striving to make while interrogating this witness was strictly Malti-poo.

  “You’re telling us that Mr. Phillips did not ask for your phone number? You wrote it on a napkin and pressed it into his hand as he was leaving the bar on your own initiative?” Jess carefully kept her voice nonaccusatory. It was imperative to keep the jury from sympathizing totally with Tiffany, the alleged victim in this rape trial of Robert John Phillips IV, who was sitting at that moment at the defense table trying to look like the innocent, falsely accused law student the defense team was portraying him as. Which, as a newly conscripted member of that team, Jess devoutly hoped was the truth.

  Given that Phillips was the handsome, twenty-five-year-old only son of a wealthy, powerful, also-present-in-the-courtroom U.S. senator, the stakes here were high for everyone concerned. The media was out in force—thank God cameras were not allowed in the courtroom!—and, on this twelfth day of what was projected to be a four-week-long trial, the prosecution team, which had rested its case the previous Friday, was clearly smelling blood in the water. Paul Olderman, the politically ambitious DA and lead prosecutor, was salivating at the thought of what a conviction cou
ld do to advance his career, and, in a happy coincidence, derail the senator’s, who was of the opposite political persuasion.

  What the senator wanted, as Jess’s bosses had made abundantly clear, was nothing less than a resounding acquittal for his son.

  Fat chance. The problem was, Rob Phillips came across as overprivileged and obnoxious once he started talking, so much so that they had almost decided not to put him on the stand. Looks 8, personality 1, had been the verdict. Every indication was, the jury didn’t like him. And to tell the truth, Jess didn’t either. Not that her opinion actually mattered one way or the other. But the jury’s did. In a he-said, she-said trial, which this one was shaping up to be, the defendant’s likability was all important.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Tiffany raised Jess’s Malti-poo and did her one better: she went for the full scared Yorkie. Her voice shook, her body shook, and she wiped a tear from the corner of one eye. A sideways glance told Jess that the gesture registered with the jury: the grandmotherly woman in the front row stopped her incessant knitting, her brows furrowing in sympathy. The portly school-bus driver on the far end of the second row pursed his lips and shook his head. At least six of the twelve good citizens seated just a couple of yards to her right looked noticeably moved by the witness’s distress.

  Crap.

  Swallowing her chagrin at having been one-upped in the playing to the jury department, Jess tried to look both kindly disposed toward the witness and skeptical of her testimony at the same time.

  No easy task. But she tried, because trying was her job. The defense team’s position was that this was a vindictive, emotionally unstable young woman. Having had her Cinderella fantasies brutally dashed when the senator’s son had slept with her and then made it clear that that had been all he’d wanted to do with her, she had set out to exact a ruinous revenge by falsely crying rape when the opportunity had presented itself, after which she hoped to win a million-dollar payday by means of a civil lawsuit.

  As a scenario, and a defense, it was reasonable.

  The problem was, Jess was increasingly having trouble buying it. Which meant she was having trouble selling it, although she was doing her best.

  See, the thing was, the law was not about justice. It was not about truth. It was not about fairness, about right and wrong, about parity.

  In the case of the elite D.C. law firm of Ellis Hayes Associates LLP, Jess’s esteemed employer, it was about nailing your opponent’s balls to the wall in return for your salary, which was embarrassingly large due to the obscene amount of money the firm was being paid to win. The firm’s slogan? “Going to war when the outcome is life or death.” The unstated corollary: and grinding your opponent’s face into the dirt in the process.

  Ergo, enter the gladiators.

  Today, in courtroom 318 in Moultrie Courthouse in Washington, D.C., Jess was one of those gladiators. It was her first real foray into the stadium, as it were. She’d been on the job with Ellis Hayes for nearly four months and had been working the Phillips trial exclusively for the past three weeks. But until jury consultant Christine Hubbard had decided that the jury had taken a dislike to hard-driving lead counsel Pearson Collins, Jess’s had been a strictly supporting, research-based role. Pearse was a Rottweiler if she’d ever seen one, Christine said, using her own personal classification system, which had helped her win 308 out of 312 cases since it had come to her in a burst of what she could only describe as truly cosmic brilliance. It might sound foolish (and here she had glared at Jess, who had clearly failed to control her expression sufficiently when the system had been explained to her), but it worked. According to Christine, the largely working-class jury had turned hostile to Pearse from the moment he had started questioning Tiffany Higgs, which had been yesterday (Monday) morning at approximately 9:00 a.m. They thought he was too aggressive, too intimidating, too deep-voiced, too big. Christine’s take on it was that when Pearse shot questions at Tiffany, what the jury saw was the equivalent of a bad-tempered Rottweiler threatening a shivering little Yorkie. As a result, their natural protective instincts were instantly aroused, and they instinctively sided with the Yorkie. The remedy had been arrived at in an emergency war session after court had adjourned the previous day: when the time came to question Tiffany again, the defense needed someone equally feminine, equally petite, equally inoffensive-looking, to do the job.

  In other words, Jess. Hazel-eyed, square-jawed, even-featured Jess, who, with a disarming scattering of freckles dusting her small nose, was attractive in a girl-next-door kind of way that pushed no buttons. Jess, with her newly wavy, newly blond bob, tricked out in a nauseatingly pink suit that she protested, in vain, made her look like a bad caricature of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. Only minus the whole adorably cute vibe.

  Try accessorizing with a smile, Christine had snapped back as she had supervised the application of cotton-candy pink lipstick. Otherwise, you just look like a hundred pounds of cranky. And juries don’t like cranky.

  With all eyes now on her, Jess felt kind of like a minor-league player unexpectedly called up to bat in the big leagues.

  “Would it be fair to say that you gave Mr. Phillips the napkin with your number on it because you wanted him to call you?” Jess asked. The Cheerios she’d had for breakfast had coalesced into a churning mass in her stomach. At any moment she feared they were going to rebel. Losing her breakfast in front of the jury might have won her some sympathy points, but she’d really rather not go there.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Tiffany’s voice wobbled. Even to Jess, she looked more like a scared teenager than the viciously scheming gold digger the defense needed her to be. Why didn’t I just say no when Cates—her boss—agreed to lend me to the defense team? Then she answered herself: Because working this trial is the opportunity of a lifetime, that’s why. Then her innate, much-despised streak of truthfulness forced her to add: And because I really, really wanted to get away from Cates. “I—he was nice to me. I thought he was nice. I didn’t know he—”

  Out of instinct, Jess jumped in before Tiffany could add something that Jess was pretty sure would be detrimental to the client.

  “There was also the fact that he was handing out fifty-dollar bills as tips all around that night, isn’t that right?” Jess heard the sudden sharpness of her own tone with chagrin. Malti-poo, she reminded herself grimly, and tried her best to radiate sweetness and light while at the same time doing a decent job of interrogating the witness. “He gave you one of those fifty-dollar bills every time you brought him a drink that night, didn’t he?”

  And, oh yeah, let’s not forget to smile.

  Tiffany wet her lips as Jess stretched hers. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Turn that smile toward the jury. Let them see how unthreatening you are. Hey, the middle-aged woman in the yellow dress in the front row is smiling back. I think she l-i-i-kes you.

  “And how many drinks did you bring him?”

  “F-four.”

  “Two hundred dollars. Mr. Phillips gave you two hundred dollars for bringing him four drinks. No wonder you gave him your phone number.” Too much snark, Jess realized as soon as the words left her mouth. The Cheerios gurgled threateningly.

  “Objection!” Olderman, a no-nonsense, fifty-ish career prosecutor with an impressive won-lost record, leaped to his feet. He was average height, thin, dressed in an appropriately lawyer-ish dark gray suit, with a limp white shirt and a nondescript blue tie. “That was uncalled for. It tends to impugn my client’s character.”

  “Overruled. But you might want to watch your tone, Ms. Dean.” Judge Howard Schmidt looked at Jess reprovingly. Sixty-two, white-haired, carrying north of two hundred and fifty pounds on a five-eight frame, he resembled Santa Claus without the beard. The good news was, as everyone knew, Schmidt was prone to favoring women. The bad news was, Jess wasn’t the only woman in the courtroom, far from it, so that only helped her as far as a match-up with Olderman was concerned.

  “Sorry, Your Honor.” Jess was determined not to
let her Malti-poo slip again. “May I restate?”

  The trouble was, she didn’t believe in Christine’s idiotic system any more than she believed in Phillips’s innocence.

  And keeping up that damned Christine-ordered perpetual smile was starting to interfere with her concentration, to say nothing of the fact that it was making her cheeks feel as stiff as hardening concrete.

  “Please do,” the judge answered. “I didn’t realize there was a question in there.”

  Jess tuned out the dryness of his tone and, with an apologetic glance at the jury, turned her achey/smiley face toward the witness.

  “Did Mr. Phillips give you two hundred dollars for bringing him four drinks, Ms. Higgs?” Her tone was positively honeyed this time.

  “Yes.” Tiffany shot an anguished glance at the jury. “I didn’t—it wasn’t about the money. I—I liked him and …”

  Break in quick, before the witness and the jury can connect.

  “Two hundred dollars is a lot of money, though, isn’t it? And you’ve already testified that you were short on your rent that month and had a number of other expenses you couldn’t meet besides. Isn’t that right?”

  Tiffany’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Never mind that Jess was only twenty-eight herself, looked about eighteen, and was handling the witness as delicately as possible under the circumstances. Tiffany was making her look like a bully. Another sideways glance told Jess that those shaky “ma’am’s” were playing well with the jury, which was broken down pretty evenly by race and gender but skewed fifties and older. She could see that many of them were thinking of their own daughters, or granddaughters, or nieces, or whoever, and she immediately vowed to ask no more yes-or-no questions to which a “ma’am” could be attached if she could avoid it.

  And smile. Christine’s voice seemed to echo in her head. Jess stretched her lips wide one more time.

  “Mr. Phillips did subsequently call you, isn’t that right? That same night? About what time was that?”