The Stolen Hours

by Allen Eskens

On the inside, Lila felt like she was back on that rotted bridge, the boards beneath her feet crumbling and falling into the abyss. On the outside, though, she tucked her mother’s betrayal into a tiny corner of her heart, and asked Dr. Roberts to make a copy of the letter for her.

  Chapter 28

  The names of criminal attorneys got tossed around the jail like baseball trading cards. This one’ll get you out. That one sucks. The woman with the big tits is nice to look at but doesn’t know her way around the courtroom. The pod buzzed with scouting reports given by men who knew this stuff firsthand, which was helpful, because the right attorney was crucial to the next step in Gavin’s plan.

  There were only a few names that piqued Gavin’s interest, and they were the least coveted of the trading cards. The first guy he called wanted Gavin to wait nearly a week to meet, on account of him being in trial. That wouldn’t do. The clock was ticking on Gavin’s plan, and now that Lila Nash had been thrown into the mix, he had to trim his timeline by weeks. How dare that asshole ask him to wait!

  The first attorney to visit Gavin in jail spent his time bragging that he’d handled dozens of cases like Gavin’s. He didn’t actually say that he’d won those cases, but that didn’t matter to Gavin. When he finished his pitch, Gavin asked the man a single question.

  That lawyer failed his test.

  The second lawyer did no better, trying to come across as though Gavin would be lucky to have him. “I have an opening at the moment, but I’ll be meeting a guy tomorrow—a possible white-collar case—so if you want that slot, now’s the time to pull the trigger.” Did that timeshare-sales pitch actually work? Again, Gavin asked him the critical question, and that man, too, failed.

  The third, a man named Leo Reecey, seemed particularly well suited for Gavin’s purposes. His license had once been suspended because he’d stolen money from a client’s trust account. He’d been sued by another client for failing to disclose a conflict of interest. The two men in Gavin’s pod who had Reecey as an attorney wore an aura of dread as they paced the common area. Leo Reecey seemed a perfect pawn.

  Reecey showed up wearing a slept-in corduroy jacket mismatched against his khaki pants. He had bags under his eyes, etched in permanent half-moons, and the bulbous nose of a man who needed a few nips to get through the day. He may as well have worn a sandwich board reading WILL SELL SOUL FOR CASH.

  They met in a small conference room, a ten-by-ten space with a stainless-steel table mounted to the floor and four seats sprouting up out of the concrete like toadstools. No cell phones allowed. No guards listening in. No cameras rolling in the corner. The room was built to ensure attorney-client privilege. It had a red panic button near the door, but if an inmate decided to kill his attorney, the lawyer would have little chance of getting to that button in time.

  Reecey greeted Gavin with a handshake and a tired smile.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Reecey,” Gavin said, putting his speech impediment on full display. “May I call you Leo?”

  “That’d be my preference.” The two men took seats at the table. “I read up on your case,” Reecey said.

  “Don’t believe everything you read.”

  “That’s one of the Ten Commandments in my line of work. I’m here to get you through this as best I can. What other people say about you doesn’t matter to me.”

  He didn’t say that he would get Gavin acquitted, but simply promised to help him through the process. Gavin appreciated that Reecey wasn’t a man prone to overpromising. It also suggested Reecey understood that he was a glorified seat warmer. It was a terrible sales pitch, but an honest one.

  “Attempted murder, kidnapping, and first-degree criminal sexual conduct. Those are some serious charges.” Reecey spoke as though he was the first person to deliver this bad news to Gavin. “It’s going to take a lot of work to put together a good defense.” He was prepping Gavin for the price tag, an amount almost sure to be well below what Gavin was prepared to pay. Gavin let Reecey prattle on.

  “I don’t think that lineup they did was kosher. Looks to me like they were trying to get her to pick you out—with that whole lisp thing. We may need to bring in an expert to talk about different kinds of speech impediments. By the way, the cost of an expert is separate from my fee. But the lineup is the key to your defense, and that’s where we’ll put up our biggest fight. Even if we win, though, we have to deal with her pointing you out at trial.”

  “She’ll have to testify, right?” Gavin knew the answer to his question but wanted to hear Reecey say it.

  “You have the right to face your accuser. It’s in the Constitution. If they don’t meet that threshold, they don’t have a case.”

  “And what if I have an alibi? How do we present that?”

  “Well, that’s about as good as it gets—as long as the alibi has legs. I’d want to shore it up—you know, make it airtight, maybe get an investigator to take the stand and explain it to a jury. Do you have an alibi?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Like you said, it has to be shored up.” Gavin liked Reecey’s choice of words, and the ethical gray area they implied. Shoring up an alibi sounded an awful lot like creating one.

  “The thing is,” Reecey said, “that kind of thing takes resources, especially in a case like this.”

  Resources—lawyer code for money. Reecey was bringing it in for a landing.

  “I have resources,” Gavin said.

  “We’re talking significant amounts here.” Reecey had probably done enough homework to know that Gavin had the means to pay “significant amounts.” Gavin could almost see Reecey juggling the numbers in his head—set the amount high enough to sound upscale but not so high that it might scare Gavin off. “Probably…I’d say, I’d need…fifty grand?”

  Gavin almost laughed at the lowball request. Gavin’s mom gave him four times that amount as a yearly allowance. Allowance. He liked that term. It was a word he and his mother agreed upon in their negotiations. It sounded much more refined than terms like extortion or hush money.

  “I assume you brought a retainer agreement?” Gavin said.

  Reecey put his briefcase on the table and popped it open.

  As Reecey dug to find the retainer agreement, Gavin rang a Pavlovian bell that he knew would make Reecey salivate. “I’ll give you two hundred thousand dollars up front to be held in trust. I assume that would constitute sufficient resources to get the ball rolling?”

  Reecey could just as well have done a spit take, the way he reacted. When he pulled himself together, he said, “That’ll do fine.” He began writing Gavin’s name in the blank spaces on the retainer agreement.

  “I want you to add a couple lines to the contract. Once we get past the contested omnibus hearing, you’ll get a flat fee bonus of fifty thousand dollars on top of your hourly rate.”

  Reecey stopped writing and looked at Gavin. “Why would you do that?”

  “By then, I’ll know whether or not I have an alibi, and you’ll have earned the bonus one way or the other.”

  Reecey put his pen down. “What will I have done to earn a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus?”

  Now came the test—the question that had sent the other two lawyers scurrying away. “What I say here is confidential, correct?”

  “Attorney-client privilege. I can’t utter a word of it.”

  “Not to anyone? Not ever?”

  “Not ever.”

  “What if I told you that my alibi is a woman—a married woman?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened.”

  “But here’s the thing. I’ve been in here a while now, and she hasn’t come to see me. I have to assume that she’s not willing to give up her marriage to save my neck. But if I could get ahold of her…”

  “Have you tried giving her a call?”

  “I can’t do that. We only communicated through text messages. Her husband’s crazy jealous, so she bought a special phone, one she could use to text with
me. If I could communicate with her—text her—I could convince her to give a statement.”

  “I could send an investigator—”

  “No. It has to come from me. She won’t talk to anyone else.”

  “Well, how do you propose we do that?”

  Gavin leaned in to the table and lowered his voice. “That’s how you earn your bonus. You’ll need to buy a burner phone and let me use it.”

  “They won’t let me bring a phone here.”

  Gavin smiled on the inside. Reecey’s objection was how to get a phone past a jailer, not the ethics of providing a phone to an inmate. He liked where this lawyer’s head was at.

  “Not here,” Gavin said. “You’ll bring it to court. I have a Rule Eight hearing coming up. When we meet in the holding cell at court, you let me send her a text message or two—whatever it takes to get her to come in and give a statement. I need to convince her how important this is. That’s all you have to do, and the fifty grand is yours.”

  Reecey stared at Gavin as he considered the proposal, and Gavin could almost see the man contemplating the boat he would buy with the money.

  Gavin had gamed his moves with precision; the only gamble in the plan was getting his hands on a cell phone. His freedom, his life, everything hinged on finding an attorney willing to turn a blind eye.

  Gavin held his breath as the lawyer weighed right versus wrong. When Reecey finally made the decision, it came not with a smile or handshake but with the slumped shoulders of a man who had just calculated the price of his integrity.

  Chapter 29

  Andi had taken that Friday off, which gave Lila three days to ponder her panic attack and come up with a way to explain it to Andi—to Joe. It also gave her three sleepless nights to contemplate one inescapable truth: Gavin Spencer had triggered something in her. Whether it was Gavin himself or some characteristic of his, she had no way of knowing, but something about him had shaken her.

  Lila ran through a thousand iterations of what she would say, but every version collapsed beneath a tiny voice that whispered: What if? What if Gavin had something to do with her attack? It was absurd on its face, she knew that. Other than the GHB, nothing of what happened to her matched up with what Gavin did to Sadie. Besides that, he had been in Indiana that night.

  Still, what if?

  Those two small words created an enormous problem for Lila. No matter how inconceivable that what if remained, its mere existence could get her kicked off Gavin’s case. Andi would apply an overabundance of caution and lock Lila out for nothing more than a wisp in the wind. That seemed an injustice that bordered on cruelty. Andi needed her on that case. Lila understood the fog of Sadie’s amnesia, the mix of memory and imagination that might cause her to stumble in her testimony. No one was better suited to prep Sadie for trial than Lila.

  But more than that, Lila wanted to be there when they put Gavin in prison. It didn’t matter that he was in Indiana the night she was raped; his crime echoed what had happened to her, and she’d be damned if she was going to step aside because of something as implausible as a what if. She wouldn’t lie to Andi, but there was a large gray sea between the truth and a lie—a sea she would have to find a way to navigate.

  What to tell Joe was another matter. He would ask questions and pry, dig into the meat of that far-fetched suspicion. Just the fact that she and Joe would have a conversation about it gave weight to Lila’s need to tell Andi. And if Joe asked how she planned to tell Andi…Well, that’s where it all fell apart.

  The more Lila played out that conversation with Joe, the easier it was to persuade herself that she need not have it. She had to figure out what had tripped her up in court, fit all the pieces together, first. Then, like an artist revealing her work only after it’s finished, she could lay it out for him. He would forgive her keeping a secret from him, because that’s the kind of guy he was.

  By the time she went to bed Sunday night, Lila was convinced that keeping her circumstances to herself was more an act of discretion than deception. It posed no harm to anyone. But as she lay awake, listening to Joe sleep next to her, she found little comfort in the twists of her logic, knowing that she cast a far bigger shadow in Joe’s eyes than she deserved.

  * * *

  At eight o’clock Monday morning, with her stomach tied into a Gordian knot, Lila took her seat in the chair across from Andi, her back straight, her knees together, and her heart thumping as she awaited judgment.

  Andi, who had been writing on a legal pad when Lila entered her office, continued to write as she asked, “You want to tell me what happened in court on Thursday?”

  What little Lila had prepared for that moment drifted out the window, and she answered, “I’m not sure.”

  Andi stopped writing and looked at Lila, her countenance falling somewhere between the stern disapproval of a teacher and the soft disappointment of a mother. “You’re not sure what happened? Or you’re not sure you want to tell me?”

  Both, Lila thought. “I had some kind of…attack, I guess.”

  “You guess? I had to take over your hearing. I’ve never had to take over a hearing before, and I plan to never have to do it again. What would have happened if I hadn’t been there? If you become an attorney here, you’ll be on your own. I need to know you can handle yourself.”

  Andi’s use of the word if didn’t escape Lila’s notice. “I’ve taken steps to make sure it never happens again. I promise—”

  “Taken steps?”

  Lila had hoped those words might slip past Andi’s keen ear, because behind them lay a sordid entanglement of things like PTSD, and therapy, and hospitalizations. To suggest that her panic attack was nothing—that they happened all the time—would not only be a lie, but would surely get her pushed to a division of the County Attorney’s Office where the consequences of a mistake like that would cause little harm.

  But to say that it was a rare occurrence—which it was—planted the proverbial time bomb under her table in court. Andi could never be confident that it wouldn’t happen again, maybe at the height of an important cross examination or during a closing argument.

  Lila tried a third option—deflection. “Being here is everything to me.” Lila heard the begging in her voice, and it sickened her. She could only imagine how those words sounded to a woman like Andi Fitch. Lila gathered her nerve and tried again. “I promise you, it will never happen again.”

  “Lila, this is not an easy job. You were handling a first appearance. You should be able to do those in your sleep. What happens when there’s real pressure and you have the family of a murder victim in court watching you? You make a mistake at this level—you freeze up when it counts—and a murderer or a rapist walks free.”

  Lila felt like she was clawing at the icy side of a glacier, desperately trying to keep from sliding down. “You’ve seen my résumé. I’ve handled pressure before.”

  “This isn’t law school. It’s not pretend, and it’s not like TV. You won’t sleep the week of a jury trial. Your appetite messes with you. First you can’t eat, and then you’re famished but puke it up in the end. It’s pressure like nothing you’ve known before. If you can’t handle a first appearance, maybe there’s another part of the office where you might feel more comfortable.”

  Be strong, Lila thought to herself. Show Andi what this means to you. “I didn’t go to law school to haul deadbeat dads into child support hearings. I want to be a prosecutor. I want to protect women from abusers like Donald Gray. I want to help you lock Gavin Spencer away so he’ll never rape anyone ever again. This job was why I went to law school in the first place. It’s here or it’s nothing. Give me another chance; I’ll show you. Please.” Begging. Stop it!

  Andi considered her answer for a moment before saying, “Give what I said some thought.” Andi’s words took on a gentler tone as she continued. “I’ve seen people fall apart doing this job. Busted marriages, alcoholism—a good friend of mine got marched out of court for showing up drunk. If you have any d
oubts—”

  “I don’t.” Lila’s words finally landed sharp and hard.

  Andi appraised Lila and gave her a nod. “So, you want to tell me why Frank Dovey has taken an interest in you?”

  “Frank?”

  “He stopped by my office on Thursday. He saw you…freeze in court. He wants a report on your work. And he said that he’ll be doing your next quarterly evaluation. I have to go through him to put anything into your personnel file. That’s outside of the norm, so do you have any idea why he gave me that order?”

  The answer that came to Lila first—that Dovey was out to get her—sounded over-the-top paranoid, even to her. Instead, she said, “The only time we ever met was when I worked with Boady Sanden on the Pruitt case.”

  Lila saw what looked like a twinkle of understanding in Andi’s eyes. Then she nodded. “He wants me to draft a letter for your file regarding Thursday’s incident. I told him I’d give it some thought. Well, I’ve given it some thought, and I don’t think I’ll be writing any such letter. I’m taking you at your word that it was an aberration and won’t happen again. But, Lila, if this thing—this attack—isn’t an aberration, I’ll have no choice. Are we clear on that?”

  “We’re clear.”

  * * *

  Lila ate lunch at her desk, finishing up on the more pressing of Andi’s assignments. She passed the afternoon working on a research memo that she could have done in her sleep, her attention continually wandering away from her task and to her meeting with Dr. Roberts. Something he said—a minor point that Lila hadn’t given much thought to at the time—had become a pebble in her shoe, growing in size until she could no longer ignore it.

  Had the investigators, eight years ago, interviewed a man with a lisp? She remembered giving Detective Yates her account of the party and waking up in the bean field, but after that, she never heard from him. Now she couldn’t help but wonder how far he had gone to find her attackers.

  Somewhere in the back of a police precinct lay a box—or maybe only a thin file—holding the investigation of the rape of a girl named Lila Nash. If Yates had interviewed a man with a lisp back then, he wouldn’t have known that it mattered. Was it possible that somewhere in those reports lay the seed of what happened to her in court? Might she find her attackers in those pages?