Guilty

by Karen Robards

  Her fists clenched. Her mouth dried up. Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes, although she’d die before she’d let any fall.

  I’ll worry about it later.

  “Hey, how about we get us some beer?” Mario yelled.

  He had to yell, because they were on the expressway now, speeding toward D.C., and with the wind rushing in through the open windows and the radio blaring and several conversations going on at once it was the only way to be heard. The big halogen lamps lighting the road from high overhead made it almost as bright as day inside the car. The Camaro was speeding, weaving in and out as it passed other cars and light trucks and a couple of big eighteen-wheelers that rattled like marbles in a tin can as the Camaro shot by.

  “Yeah!” “Beer! Woo-hoo!” “I could use a beer!”

  “None of that light stuff. I like my beer heavy!” “Let’s get us some beer!”

  Kat hated beer, but she said nothing.

  The Camaro swerved suddenly, and Kat clutched reflexively at Leah’s arm. From the blur outside the window she knew that they were off the expressway and flying down an exit ramp. Jason stomped the brake at the intersection at the bottom of the ramp and everybody was flung violently forward, with the four in the backseat nearly thrown onto the floor.

  As they picked themselves up and wedged themselves back into place, they all started laughing like what had just happened was the funniest thing ever.

  Kat, too, because they were her friends.

  As Jason swung the Camaro out onto a nearly deserted four-lane road crowded with closed retail establishments, Mario banged his fist on the dashboard and turned to look at the rest of them. “Anybody got any dinero?”

  “I got a dollar and . . . look at that, twenty-two cents.”

  “I got a buck.” “I got seventy-five cents.”

  “I . . . don’t have any money,” Kat said, when all eyes were on her after everyone else in the backseat had turned out their pockets. “I’m not thirsty anyway.”

  “That’s okay.” Jason looked at her through the mirror again. “I’ll spring for yours.”

  And he smiled at her.

  The hard little knot in Kat’s stomach eased.

  That late at night, even McDonald’s twin arches were turned off. The only things still open were gas stations and convenience stores. A Quik-Pik on the next corner was all lit up, and Kat assumed that was Jason’s destination.

  “Does somebody have an ID?” she asked, meaning a fake one, as the Camaro, still traveling too fast, bumped into the parking lot and slid to a stop beside one of the gas pumps. The parking lot was deserted. Through the glass windows, Kat could see a solitary clerk behind the cash register. It was a woman. She looked Hispanic, and young.

  “I do, but it don’t matter.” Mario grinned at her. “I can pass for twenty-one easy.”

  “His ID’s good, though,” Justin said. “Way better than mine.”

  Everybody piled out of the car and started walking toward the store.

  “I gotta pee,” Leah announced cheerfully, and looked at Kat. “You wanna come to the bathroom with me?”

  “Yeah,” Kat agreed, and the two of them broke off to head around the side of the building where a battered sign announced Restrooms. They had both finished and Kat was washing her hands while Leah, peering around her into the mirror, fluffed her hair, when they heard a series of staccato sounds from outside.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  “What the hell?” Leah gasped, whirling to look at the door, which had no lock.

  “It’s a gun.” Kat knew what gunfire sounded like.

  Mrs. Coleman’s government-subsidized apartment was actually one of the nicer places in which she had lived. The seven years she had spent with her mother were a blur of crack houses and abandoned buildings and the occasional homeless shelter. After that, she’d been passed around among relatives and friends until one day a social worker had come and taken her away. During that time, the sound of gunfire had been a nightly occurrence. For years she had slept huddled in corners listening to it, praying that a bullet wouldn’t find its way through the walls and into her flesh.

  “Oh, shit.” Leah ran for the door. Kat was right behind her, slowed a little by her cumbersome footwear. What they saw as they burst around the corner of the building was the rest of the gang bolting toward the Camaro like something bad was chasing them. They were screaming at one another, fighting about something, but Kat was too far away to understand the words. All she knew was that Jason looked scared to death—and Mario was holding a gun.

  Her breathing suspended. Her gut clenched.

  There was a man between her and Leah and the car.

  An older man, stocky and gray-haired, in what looked like a blue uniform. He was on his knees with his back to them. Leah flew past him without giving him so much as a glance. As Kat ran up behind him, he groaned and kind of toppled over on his side, then rolled onto his back. She saw that he was clutching his chest—and then she saw why and stopped in her tracks.

  Bright blood bubbled up between his fingers, which were pale and pudgy, spilling over them, pouring on the black asphalt that glistened faintly in the store’s reflected light. In a single lightning glance, she saw that there was a badge on his chest, gleaming silver, with a cheap plastic name tag below it. She wasn’t close enough to read the name.

  He’s been shot. She remembered the gun in Mario’s hands, and a chill ran through her.

  He saw her. She could tell he did, because his eyes flickered.

  “Help . . . me.”

  Oh, God. She dropped to her knees beside him, bent over him, looking at him in horror, frantic to do something, anything, moving his hands aside so that she could see the wound. Then her hands came down one on top of the other as she pressed desperately against the hole, trying to stem the flow of blood. It was warm. And slimy. There was a smell. A sickening, raw-meat kind of smell.

  “Hurts,” he muttered. And closed his eyes.

  “Kat, come on!” The voice—Leah’s—shrieked out at her as the Camaro screamed to a stop just a few feet away.

  “Come on! Come on!” They were all shouting at her, but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t have gone to them if she had wanted to. She could feel the man’s—his name was David Brady, she could read his name tag now—life slipping away, feel the energy leaving him as if his soul were rising around her. All she could do was stare at the car and feel the dying man’s life ebbing, and her own heart thudding, and then the Camaro sped off with a squeal of rubber and she was left alone.

  Really alone, because David Brady was dead now. His life force was gone.

  She stayed beside him until she heard the sirens. Then she jumped to her feet and fled into the darkness, with David Brady’s blood still dripping from her hands.

  Chapter 2

  Thirteen years later . . .

  SOMETHING’S WRONG. The thought hit Tom Braga with all the explosive force of a bullet to the brain.

  His gut clenched. His pulse speeded up. As his breath caught, he continued to listen to the empty silence on the other end of the phone with building intensity. He didn’t know how he knew it for sure, but he did. They were speaking on cell phones, he and his younger brother, Tom from his unmarked car, which was at that moment slicing through the downpour en route to Philadelphia’s modern Criminal Justice Center, where he was scheduled to be in court at nine—that would be in about three minutes—Charlie from wherever the hell he was. They were both cops, he a homicide detective, Charlie a sheriff’s deputy. On this rainy Monday morning, they were both on duty. And unless he was totally going around the bend, Charlie was in trouble.

  “Yo, bro, you still there?” Tom gripped the phone so hard its edges dug into his palm, but his voice stayed deceptively casual. They’d been talking about Mom’s weekly Sunday dinner, which Tom had missed for the third time in a row yesterday because he was tired of being ragged on all the time about being thirty-five and single and because sometimes his congregated fami
ly, nineteen strong, was enough to drive him nuts. In the middle of rubbing Tom’s nose in the glories of the chicken parmigiana, which Charlie knew was his brother’s particular favorite, twenty-eight-year-old Charlie had grunted as if in surprise, then simply stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. And Tom had started getting this really bad vibe.

  “Yeah,” Charlie replied, to Tom’s instant relief. Until he realized that his excitable brother’s voice was absolutely flat, and he could hear Charlie breathing hard. “Um, look, I gotta go.”

  “Okay, well, you tell your sweet little wife Marcia hello for me, hear?” Tom’s tone was hearty. Cold sweat prickled to life at his hairline. “Tell her I’m looking forward to that homemade lasagna she promised me.”

  “I’ll do that,” Charlie said, and his phone went dead.

  With that answer ringing in his ears, Tom practically ran through the red light he was rushing up on. Slamming on the brakes hard enough to make the department-issue black Taurus fishtail on the wet street, he managed to stop just in time to avoid barreling out into the middle of the busy intersection. Despite the fact that he was way too close to it, he was all but blind to the traffic that began rolling past just inches from his front bumper. The steady procession of headlights made the gloomy day seem even darker than it really was. Rain sluiced down over his windshield, pounding on the roof and hood with big, fat drops that hit with a quick rat-a-tat and splattered on impact. The windshield wipers were working hard on high. The radio played easy listening.

  He was oblivious to all of it.

  Charlie’s wife was named Terry. And fixing peanut-butter sandwiches for their two little hooligans was about as good as her kitchen skills got.

  “Jesus.” It was both prayer and expletive.

  Taking a deep breath, Tom called on years of experience to separate mind from emotion, and did what he had been trained to do in emergency situations:

  What came next. Unwanted, an image of Charlie as he’d last seen him flashed into his head. Black-haired, lean and good-looking, as all the Braga siblings were, Charlie had been sitting in a plastic blow-up kiddie pool in his tiny backyard about three weekends back, clad only in trunks, happily yelling for help while his four-year-old twins dumped bucket after bucket of hose-cold water over his head. Seeing his brother’s laughing face in his mind’s eye didn’t help, so Tom did his best to banish it as he punched buttons on his cell phone. His hand was steady. His thoughts were clear. His pulse raced like a thoroughbred pounding for the finish line.

  An infinity seemed to pass as he listened to the ringing on the other end.

  Pick up, pick up, damn you to hell, Bruce Johnson, pick up.

  “Johnson here.”

  “Tom Braga.” Tom identified himself to Charlie’s supervisor. The cold sweat that had started at his hairline had by now spread to his whole body. Adrenaline rushed through his veins like speed. There was a tightness to his voice that he could hear himself, yet at the same time he felt very focused, very calm. “Where’s Charlie?”

  “Charlie?” Johnson paused. Tom could picture him kicked back in his chair, coffee and a newspaper on his desk, an island of good-natured calm in the center of never-ending chaos. The Philly sheriff’s office was large, with numerous departments and hundreds of deputies and support staff, but he and Johnson had grown up together in tough South Philly and in consequence knew each other well. The big, burly sergeant was a favorite with Tom’s whole family. “Let me check.”

  He covered the mouthpiece—not well—and yelled, “Anybody know where Charlie Braga is this morning?”

  Hurry, Tom thought, gritting his teeth. Then, having realized what he was doing, he deliberately relaxed his jaw.

  Seconds later Johnson was back on the line. “He took a witness from the jail over to the Justice Center. Wasn’t that long ago, so he should still be there. Any particular reason why you’re interested?”

  The Justice Center. Tom could see it, a little more than a block away on the right. It was a tall stone rectangle topped by a dome, with vertical lines of windows glowing yellow through the rain.

  The light was green and the intersection in front of him was clear. He registered that and at about the same time became aware of impatient horns honking behind him. A split second later he stomped on the gas. The rear tires of the Taurus sent up plumes of water as the vehicle responded.

  “I was talking to him on the phone right before I called you.” Tom’s voice was steady despite the fact that the bad feeling he’d had was getting worse. He was rushing toward the building now, anxiously scanning as much of it as he could see while weaving in and out of traffic in an effort to get where he was going fast. Cars were parallel parked all along Filbert Street, the narrow, pre-Revolutionary War era avenue out in front of the Justice Center. People hurried along the sidewalk, past the building, and up and down the wide stone steps leading to the main entrance. A sea of umbrellas and splashing feet were about all he could see of the pedestrians. From outside the revolving doors, he got a glimpse of the security checkpoint with its guards and metal detectors. Nothing looked out of place. There was no sign of trouble. But his gut was telling him otherwise, and one thing he’d learned during his thirteen years as a cop was to never go against his gut.

  “He gave me a signal, like.” Even as he scanned the area, Tom continued talking to Johnson. “Something’s wrong. You need to alert whoever else you’ve got over there that something’s possibly going down. Get some backup to Charlie’s location, stat. And tell them to keep it quiet. No sirens, nothing like that. I just got a real creepy feeling.”

  Johnson snorted. “I’m supposed to send in the troops because you’ve got a creepy feeling?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will do,” Johnson said. He was enough of a professional not to take chances when it was a matter of another officer’s safety—and not to question another cop’s instincts. He covered the mouthpiece again, and Tom could hear him giving the necessary orders.

  “Where in the Justice Center?” Tom yelled into the phone. Yelling was necessary to get Johnson’s attention again. Tom was in front of the Justice Center now, cruising past the long row of bumper-to-bumper parked cars, where there was, he discovered with a quick glance up the block, no longer an available place to park. Not that it was going to make any difference. Ignoring the cars piling up in honking indignation behind him, he double-parked beside a big silver Suburban.

  “Subbasement,” Johnson replied. “Probably.”

  Shit.

  The subbasement was a badly lit and ventilated rabbit warren two stories underground. Holding cells for prisoners needed in court that day, administrative offices, the courtroom for arraignments, anterooms for lawyers and court officials and bail bondsmen—all that and more were located down there. The place teemed with activity from seven a.m. on as the accused, the convicted, the acquitted, and everything and everyone connected with their cases rotated in and out.

  Charlie could’ve found all kinds of trouble down there.

  “I’m on the scene,” Tom said grimly, and disconnected.

  Jumping out, head bent, into the pouring rain that began instantly soaking his short, thick black hair and court-ready attire of navy sport jacket, white shirt, red tie, and gray slacks, he slammed the door and took off at a sprint toward the building. As he ran, he reached beneath his jacket to unsnap the safety strap on his Glock.

  If he was lucky, he wouldn’t need it. But then, he’d never been very lucky.

  Chapter 3

  BEING A PROSECUTOR IS not for sissies, Kate White thought grimly as the backs of the elegant Stuart Weitzman pumps she had bought on eBay for ten dollars rubbed against her increasingly tender heels with every purposeful step she took. The pay was lousy, the perks were nonexistent, and the people—well, all she could say was that there were a few good apples mixed in with all the rotten ones. A very few.

  “Get a move on, would you? If we’re late he’ll hang us out to dry,” Bryan Chen muttered b
ehind her. A small, compact Asian-American, the forty-two-year-old veteran assistant district attorney was definitely one of the good apples. Four months before, he’d taken her under his wing when she had graduated from law school at age twenty-eight and joined the prosecutor’s office. It was the first step on a career ladder that she was determined would take her to the (lucrative) pinnacle of one of Philadelphia’s stellar super-firms. Bryan, on the other hand, had been an assistant DA for going on sixteen years now and seemed perfectly content to make a career of it. Of course, he didn’t have a hundred thousand dollars in student loans to pay off and a young son for whom he was the only source of support, either.

  She personally wanted more, for herself and for Ben, her sweet-faced nine-year-old, than to live for years on end in a tiny leased house on a diet of pasta and peanut butter at the end of every pay period.

  And she meant to get it.

  “We’re not late,” she replied, with more confidence than she felt.

  Pushing through the heavy mahogany doors of courtroom 207 in the Criminal Justice Center, she was relieved to see that she was right. The “he” Bryan had been referring to—Circuit Court Judge Michael Moran, a humorless appointee who was presiding over today’s circus—was nowhere in sight, although the courtroom deputy stood in front of the bench with an anticipatory eye on the door that led to the judge’s chambers, obviously expecting His Honor to appear at any second.

  Hurry. Must not get on wrong side of notoriously cranky judge before trial even starts, she thought as she strode—big, long strides that killed her feet—down the aisle. Her shoes were wet and the highly polished terrazzo underfoot was slippery, making speed a dangerous proposition. But under the circumstances she felt she had no choice. The defense was already in place, and the courtroom galleries were full. The only thing missing was the judge—and the prosecution. Still, cutting their arrival dangerously close to the wire wouldn’t cost them a thing as long as they were in place before the judge came out.