Justice Read online

  Which was why trying a case was more art than science, and why Christine’s pronouncements were treated like they’d been handed down from Mt. Olympus, Malti-poos and all.

  The bottom line was, teams with Christine on them overwhelmingly won. And Ellis Hayes was being paid to win.

  “You’re looking pale.” Andrew gave Jess a wry smile as he slowed his step to walk beside her. “At a guess, I’d say you’re starting to feel a little vampirish right now.”

  “Vampirish?”

  “That’s what we get in the middle of these big trials: vampirish. Because we’re up all night, and never see the light of day.”

  It was an effort, but Jess smiled. But he was right, she realized. Outside, it was a steamy late August day, drenched in sunlight, thick with the sweaty humidity of D.C. in late summer, busy with the last gasp of tourists straggling into the capital before the nation’s schools got back in session. Since she’d been involved in this trial, Jess had caught only fleeting glimpses of summer. Trapped in the artificially cool, fluorescent confines of various buildings until, at something like eleven o’clock at night, she was free to stagger home and fall exhausted into bed before rising at dawn and doing it all again the next day, she was indeed starting to feel like Persephone trapped in the underworld.

  Or vampirish, as Andrew had suggested.

  But working hard—putting in the hours required to get the job done to the best of her ability—was what she did. It was the only way she knew to climb the ladder. She wasn’t the smartest, wasn’t the most attractive, wasn’t the most politically connected young associate in the firm. Far from it, in fact. But what she could be, arguably, was the hardest working.

  She was the only one of her colleagues that she knew of who hadn’t come from an Ivy League college, a top-ten law school. Her alma mater was George Mason, a D.C. school that catered to part-time, working-class students. This position at Ellis Hayes was the chance of a lifetime for someone like her. She’d gotten it because she’d acquired some unlikely but highly useful connections. Having gotten it, she was prepared to do whatever it took to make it a success. To make herself a success.

  The desire to succeed burned in her bones.

  “Could I have a word with you, Pearse?” Senator Phillips asked as they reached the hall, and he and Pearse moved away together.

  Jess followed Christine into the counsel room. Hayley Marciano, the fifth member of the defense team, was inside, already helping herself to the catered lunch that had been set out on the credenza.

  “Oh, well, what could you do? You did the best you could.” Carrying her plate toward the table as she spoke, Hayley greeted Jess with a shrug and a small, tight, faux smile. Jess was reminded that Hayley had been watching the proceedings on closed-circuit TV with the sound off—Christine was big on the importance of analyzing nonverbal cues from the witness as well as others in the courtroom—while taking notes to be dissected later, because the judge had refused to allow the proceedings to be taped. In her early thirties, tall, slender, and exotically lovely with faintly oriental features and sleek black hair pulled into a knot at her nape, dressed in the female lawyer’s staple and Jess’s own preferred garb of a black pantsuit, Hayley had volunteered for the job of questioning Tiffany when it had become obvious that Pearse’s effort was not going over well with the jury. She had been smacked down by Christine, who’d pronounced her a Doberman. “Elegant,” Christine had said. “Patrician. Cold as ice. Vicious in a fight. This jury won’t take to her.”

  Hayley had taken the assessment badly. In consequence she had been more dismissive even than usual to Jess, whom, as she had made abundantly clear from the beginning, she considered beneath her Harvard-educated self. Now, with Hayley looking at her with more than a hint of smirky satisfaction, Jess concluded that her performance was making Hayley’s day.

  Ouch.

  But she wasn’t about to give Hayley the satisfaction of letting her know how much the knowledge bothered her.

  “At least the judge hasn’t banned me from the courtroom yet.” Jess’s tone was light, but Hayley’s eyes widened angrily. In a firm like Ellis Hayes, gossip got around: even though Jess hadn’t been working there when it had happened, she’d heard from numerous sources the tale of the judge who’d ordered Hayley removed from her courtroom for blatantly flirting with a male juror. Among those who worked with Hayley, the incident, including Hayley’s subsequent dressing-down by the usually mild-mannered Pearse, had already become the stuff of legend.

  “Like I said before, this is a sympathetic victim.” Busy filling her plate, Christine intervened before Hayley could reply. “Isn’t a lot anyone can do about that. We just got to work around it. We—”

  The sound of the door opening served as an interruption, and they all glanced around as Pearse entered. As unflappable as they came, Pearse looked just as he always did, at least to Jess. But Andrew, who’d known him longer, grimaced. “Gave you hell, did he?”

  “The senator tends to be very hands-on. He wanted to go over this afternoon’s questions with me. Among other things.”

  “You tell him where he could stick it?” Christine rolled her eyes toward Pearse as he joined her at the buffet line.

  “See, that’s why I’m the head of this team: I don’t tell the paying clients where they can stick it.”

  “He’s smooth.” Andrew’s praise of Pearse was affectionately mocking.

  “Unlike you.” Hayley made a face at Andrew as he sat down. “We all know you couldn’t be smooth if you tried.”

  “Someone get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?” Andrew raised his eyebrows at her.

  “Let’s concentrate on the case, shall we?” Pearse intervened, giving the two of them quelling looks. “Hayley, you were watching the prosecution team. You notice any areas they seemed particularly sensitive to?”

  “The elevator. The making out thing. They tensed up when that was alluded to. In my opinion, more should have been done to really hammer home the fact that Higgs was kissing Phillips willingly.”

  Recognizing that for the dig at her it undoubtedly was, Jess ignored the poison-dart look Hayley sent her way and sat down with her plate, which held half a turkey sandwich and a spoonful of salad, very little of which she expected to actually eat. Mindful of the Cheerios, which were still making their presence known, she thought it better to err on the side of caution when it came to putting anything else into her nervous stomach.

  “This afternoon,” Pearse promised.

  “Somebody probably also needs to tell Rob Phillips’s mother not to glare at Higgs the whole time Higgs is on the stand.” Hayley’s tone was strictly business now. “I’m fairly certain the jury’s noticed. And Mrs. Phillips is not the most sympathetic character anyway.”

  “That would be you, Boss,” Andrew said to Pearse, grinning. “You get to have all the fun.”

  “A couple of days from now, when the prosecution experts are trying to tear apart your forensics, then you’ll be the one who’s having fun,” Pearse retorted. “Or not.”

  “They won’t be trying. They’ll be doing. People can cry, people can lie, but there’s no arguing with good old physical evidence.” Andrew grimaced gloomily as he stirred sugar into his tea. “Too bad almost none of it favors our side. Lucky I’m the best there is at making a molehill look like a mountain.”

  “I’ll say,” Hayley murmured with a wicked glint.

  “You two aren’t sleeping together, are you? ‘Cause if you are, I’d like to be let in on it. I need some amusement in my life.” Looking from Hayley to Andrew, Christine forked salad into her mouth.

  “Of course not.” Hayley and Andrew spoke in almost perfect unison, both on an identical note of repugnance, then exchanged wary, measuring glances.

  “Focus, people. Focus. We’ve got a trial to win here.” Putting his plate on the table, Pearse sat down beside Andrew.

  “And so far we’re not getting the job done.” Stabbing the air with another forkful o
f salad, Christine glared around the table. “This is a reasonable doubt jury. All we got to do is cast some reasonable doubt. How hard can that be?”

  “Harder than you think,” Andrew muttered, then took cover behind a hastily lifted sub sandwich as Christine’s gaze swung around.

  Jess was just taking a cautious nibble off the end of her turkey sandwich when Christine’s glare stopped on her. The fork stabbed in her direction.

  “First thing we got to do here is work on your Malti-poo. The jury doesn’t like you, nothing else you say or do is gonna make a difference.”

  Good thing she hadn’t planned on eating, because for Jess, after that, lunch turned into a drill session. By the time the break was almost over, Jess’s anxiety level had ratcheted up to such a pitch that her mouth was dry and her hands were shaking. But this was a huge opportunity for her. She was determined to take it and run with it.

  Or at the very least not totally blow it.

  Please God.

  Sick to her stomach: that’s how Jess felt as she headed back into the courtroom. Girding herself for the afternoon session, she tried to control her nerves by taking a series of surreptitious, but deep and hopefully calming, breaths.

  The net result of which was that she was light-headed from an overabundance of carbon dioxide, as well as anxious as she took her place at counsel table.

  “All rise!” the bailiff called. Judge Schmidt took his seat, Tiffany returned to the witness stand, Jess tried for adorable and competent at the same time without, she felt, a whole lot of success with either, and it was game on again.

  Only there was something different about Tiffany.

  Jess didn’t notice it at first. But as the testimony got more graphic—“If there was a struggle, how was it your underwear wasn’t torn, Ms. Higgs?”—Tiffany began to breathe unevenly. Her hands gripped the chair as if she was afraid it was going to try to run away from her.

  And she had yet to come out with a single “ma’am.”

  Even as she asked her next question, Jess lost her grip on her inner Malti-poo and frowned.

  “Were you gagged, Ms. Higgs?”

  “No.”

  “So you screamed, is that right?”

  “No.”

  Although she had known the answer—Tiffany claimed that Rob’s threats had made her too terrified to make a sound—Jess, playing to the jury, strove to look surprised. “You surely cried out for help in some fashion. After all, you were in his apartment for almost forty-eight hours, and there were other people in the building. You didn’t scream, or at the very least yell out something like, Help, help, call 911?”

  “No.” Tiffany’s truncated replies were starting to get to Jess. They just didn’t feel right. But what could she do? She’d already thrown in a number of yes-and-no type questions just as a test. She couldn’t stop and ask Tiffany point-blank if something was bothering her, which, in any case, wasn’t her problem.

  “The reason you didn’t scream for help is because you didn’t need help, isn’t that right? And the reason you didn’t need help is because the sex acts you were engaged in with Rob Phillips were absolutely consensual.”

  It was a flourish for the jury, meant to plant a certain image in their minds. The image the defense wanted them to have.

  Tiffany’s lips parted. They moved, but no sound emerged. Despite herself, Jess felt desperately sorry for the girl.

  “Objection!” Olderman was on his feet.

  “Overruled.”

  Jess took Judge Schmidt’s weary-sounding answer as permission to continue in the same vein. “They were consensual sex acts, weren’t they? Tiffany?”

  Oops. Using Tiffany’s first name out loud like that was a slip of the tongue. It was something opposing counsel rarely did, because it tended to humanize the witness for the jury, which was never a good idea. But it was too late to recall it now. All she could do was hope to gloss over her mistake. Jess expected Tiffany to gasp out some version of No, that’s not right, that’s not how it was, and got her riposte ready.

  But to her complete amazement, the words that came out of Tiffany’s mouth in strangled bursts of sound were, “Yes. Yes, you’re right. Okay? It—everything was consensual. He—he—it was consensual.”

  Jess froze. Around her the courtroom went dead silent. Jess could practically feel the electric surge of energy as every eye and ear in the room focused on the young woman on the witness stand.

  “Are you saying you were not raped by Rob Phillips?”

  Tiffany met Jess’s gaze. Her eyes were huge and anguished. Her fingers gripped the chair arms so tightly that her knuckles bulged. “Yes. I mean, no. No. I was not.”

  Then, for the second time that day, she burst into tears.

  And all hell erupted in the courtroom.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jess was still in shock some eight hours later, when she left The Capital Grille, the chichi restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue where Pearse had taken them all to celebrate, and headed for home. Slipping out a side door to avoid the media, a few members of which had gathered outside the restaurant hoping for more sound bites for their 11:00 p.m. newscasts, she glanced warily around as she went down the shallow flight of steps to the sidewalk. So close to the White House, there were a lot of people out and about, even at 9:20 p.m. Traffic was moving well, but the vehicles were practically bumper to bumper. One fender bender, and gridlock would ensue. On the sidewalk, shorts-clad tourists peering at maps competed for space with white-collar types in business suits, more festively clad vacationers intent on sampling the area’s high-end restaurants and bars, and D.C.’s motley cast of permanent residents going about their business.

  As soon as she left the steps behind, Jess was swallowed up by the moving crowd. She blended right in, and she was thankful to discover that no one seemed to be paying her the least bit of attention. Earlier, TV cameras had already captured them all—the whole defense team—leaving the courthouse together, which in her case was a big no-no. She had been instructed to keep away from the media at all costs. But she hadn’t been able to help it: she’d been trapped, with no way to escape as the reporters had crowded around. While she had tried to unobtrusively shelter behind him, Pearse had given an interview right there on the courthouse steps, with a jubilant Rob Phillips and his beaming, triumphant parents standing beside him and the rest of the team gathered around. They all—all except Jess—had seemed eager to bask in the brilliance of the klieg lights, savoring the victory, savoring the moment.

  The unspoken consensus among most of the celebrants had been, it just doesn’t get any better than this.

  Tiffany had recanted, right there on the witness stand. The judge had been aghast, the prosecution apoplectic, the defense over-the-moon ebullient. Pearse, Christine, and Andrew had been effusive in their praise of Jess’s cross-examination, with Pearse singling out her “artful” use of Tiffany’s first name for particular commendation. She hadn’t corrected him, hadn’t let on that it had been a total slip of the tongue, hadn’t done anything to erase their apparent impression that she had known exactly what she’d been doing. Even Hayley had grudgingly said something to the effect of What do you know, you actually got the job done, accompanied by a sour smile. Senator Phillips, his wife, and son had whooped and hollered and hugged and kissed everyone within reach—Jess included, to her discomfort—before eventually heading off to National Airport, where a private jet had been summoned to whisk them away to a friend’s summer home in Bar Harbor, where they meant to spend the next few days recuperating along the cool Maine coastline.

  The trial had been over. Just like that. Directed verdict: not guilty. The defense had won.

  Yay, team!

  Rutherford Dunn, Ellis Hayes’s octogenarian managing partner, had called to offer the defense team congratulations, which was rather like having Zeus call down from Mt. Olympus, and had spoken to Jess personally. (Oh, the glory!)

  Pearse had practically floored her by offering her a permanent
spot on his team.

  And a large bonus check had been promised to each member of the defense by senior management, which was thrilled at the high-profile victory.

  She should have been incandescent with excitement, Jess knew. For her, it was an important, career-making moment. Heading down 6th Street away from the little band of reporters gathered on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, meaning to hail a cab at the first opportunity, she should have been walking on air. She should have been as aglow as the rows of windows in the historic buildings lining the street, which now gleamed brightly with golden reflections of the setting sun. Deep inside, she should have been feeling as warm and mellow as the truly gorgeous late summer evening, the first one she had actually experienced firsthand for quite a while.

  But she wasn’t.

  Instead, she was anxious, worried, troubled. Depressed, even. Carefully cataloguing her feelings in an effort to account for her down mood, she concluded the list with an inner snort and a wry, Typical me. Have to look for the fly in every ointment.

  The thing was, though, lucky always tended to happen to someone else. She wasn’t that type of person: good fortune didn’t just fall into her lap. Never had, never would. From the age of five, when her father and little sister had drowned before her eyes, more bad things had happened in her life than good ones. No way Tiffany should have folded like that. No way the trial should have been over, Rob Phillips vindicated, the defense coming up heroes. Her coming up a hero. Not so easily. Not just like that.

  Maybe, she thought hopefully, maybe I’ve changed. Maybe after twenty-eight years the tide has turned. Maybe I am that type of person now.