Good luck with that.
As she passed beneath it, the U.S. flag snapped sharply in the gust of wind that barreled through the canyon of buildings. It was only as she looked up at the Stars and Stripes, and the blue Commonwealth flag flapping beside it, that she realized both were at half-mast.
Her throat tightened. Her heart gave a sad little hiccup. For Judge Moran, of course, and for the four deputies and two civilians who had lost their lives yesterday. The prisoners who had died weren’t included in the official mourning, but as she looked up at those lowered flags she felt sad for them as well.
If things had worked out differently, she might well be dead now, too. The fact that she was alive was something to be profoundly thankful for, she reminded herself grimly.
Even if I am caught like a rat in a trap.
“I saw you on TV this morning,” the black female guard exclaimed as she processed Kate through the entrance. Kate handed over her ID, then walked through the metal detector, watching the steady stream of people entering and exiting the security stations around her. “Honey, after what you went through, you should be home in bed with the covers over your head. What in the world are you doing working today?”
Kate managed a smile and a shrug. “Gotta eat.”
The woman made a sympathetic face as she handed Kate’s ID back to her. “Ain’t that the truth. Okay, you’re good to go.”
By the time she was seated in a cheap plastic chair in one of the banks of grubby, graffiti-scarred cubicles where attorneys met with prisoners, Kate felt like she had run a gauntlet. Nearly everybody she came into contact with had a question or comment about what had happened yesterday. Those who didn’t have an opportunity to speak to her directly tracked her with curious stares. Fortunately, for her composure, the detention center was having a busy day, which meant nobody had time to indulge in a prolonged chat. The Criminal Justice Center had been closed to the public as part of the ongoing investigation into the shootings and attempted escape. The detention center itself was on high alert. All trials scheduled for the near future were being moved or postponed, which translated into massive confusion as well as a tsunami of lawyers rushing to visit clients and a ton of extra work for all involved. Kate viewed the chaos as a blessing. It had the double virtue of keeping everybody almost too busy to think as well as scrambling time lines and case files and assignments and court proceedings.
It made doing what Mario wanted just that much easier.
If I don’t do what he wants . . .
Her throat went tight. She licked her lips. Her hands curled involuntarily into fists. The consequences would be too much to bear.
Kat the expedient would have had no trouble doing what she had to do to make this whole thing go away. But Kate the conscientious did.
Calling up Mario’s file on the computer system had been simple. An ADA from the felony waiver unit had been assigned to the case, but it didn’t look like anything much had been done on it. Kate had read through the file, not once but several times. It was mostly low-level stuff, a couple of drug busts, petty theft, check kiting. There were two felony convictions, one for aggravated assault and one for dealing. He’d done time—six months for the aggravated assault and nine months on a five-year sentence, the rest off for good behavior, for dealing. He’d been released on probation eight months ago, picked up again three and a half weeks ago. This time, somebody had decided to get tough with him. The possession-of-a-firearm charge counted as another felony, which meant he fell under the guidelines of the “three strikes and you’re out” law. As he’d said, he was looking at some serious time.
Personally, she felt there were few people more deserving.
The thing was, she was getting ready to put him back on the streets.
Her stomach knotted at the thought. Besides the crimes that had caused him to be thrown in jail, he was guilty of taking part in yesterday’s escape attempt, which had left so many dead. If anyone knew, he would be charged with Murder One. But no one did—except her. And she wasn’t in a position to do one thing about it.
If they find out about David Brady, the first thing they’ll do is fire you. Then they’ll arrest you, and take Ben away. . . .
Her chest constricted. For a moment it was hard to breathe.
Maybe you should just confess the whole thing. Get it out in the open and deal with the consequences.
The thought entered her head unbidden. Instantly, she rejected it.
How can I? I can’t. What about Ben?
Panic was just starting to curl through her insides again when the door to the cubicle opened. Still wide-eyed and breathing fast from the fresh burst of fear pumping through her veins, Kate looked up through the bulletproof glass wall that rose from the center of the bolted-down table where she was sitting in time to watch Mario swagger in on the other side.
Every muscle in her body tensed. Dread balled into what felt like a rock in her stomach. Her teeth clenched. Her hands flattened on the table’s smooth metal surface as her fight-or-flight response kicked in and she battled the urgent need to spring to her feet and flee.
But she stayed seated.
Mario saw her through the barrier. His eyes swept over her. His lips quirked with transparent satisfaction before he looked over his shoulder to say something to someone—she presumed it was the deputy escorting him—behind him.
Still the same cocky asshole.
She took a deep, and she hoped calming, breath. Deliberately, she relaxed her muscles and averted her gaze. Opening her briefcase, which was lying on the table near her left hand, she grabbed a pen and a yellow legal pad from it before closing it again, then scribbled her name at the top for the sheer sake of occupying herself. The worst thing she could do was let Mario see how stressed—get real, how terrified—he was making her.
Never let them see fear.
Clearly Mario had managed to rejoin the general population of prisoners being held in the Justice Center yesterday without anyone’s suspecting that he had played a role in the botched escape. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be here. He was dressed once again in the ubiquitous orange jumpsuit that all the prisoners wore, and his bald head gleamed in the harsh fluorescent lighting. As a youth, he’d had a head full of frizzy black curls, and their absence, plus the neatly trimmed mustache and goatee and the sheer overdeveloped muscularity of him, made it hard to keep straight in her mind that this ’roided-up thug was the kid she had once known. He looked even broader and more menacing in the close confines of the small space. For the first time, she noticed a tattoo of what looked like a snakelike black dragon curling around his right wrist. Was it some sort of gang symbol? If so, she hadn’t come across it before. She was surprised she hadn’t spotted it yesterday, but then, her attention had been on other things.
Like staying alive.
She looked up as he approached the table. His gaze found hers, and she thought she saw a flicker of triumph in his eyes.
So much for playing it cool.
He’s got me where he wants me and he knows it.
The deputy escorting him glanced at Kate, nodded once, said something to Mario that she couldn’t hear because of the glass barrier between them, then withdrew, leaving them alone together. She knew the drill: When she was ready to leave, or if she needed help, all she had to do was press a button on the wall near her elbow. For security purposes, deputies remained stationed outside in the hall at all times.
There was no video or audio surveillance in the booths. By law, attorneys and prisoners were accorded complete privacy.
I can’t do this, she thought on another burst of panic as Mario slid into his seat. He propped his elbows on the other half of the table and folded his arms, leaning forward, looking at her confidently through the glass. I just can’t do it.
Not that actually getting him out would pose any real problem. The ADA assigned to the case would never even miss it. On an average day, each one of them took care of something like forty cases, and most of those didn’t even make it
onto their radar screens until the night before. The DA’s office handled about seventy thousand cases a year; the system was drowning under the sheer volume of proceedings. In the previous year alone, sixty percent of felonies were dismissed at preliminary hearings simply because someone—prosecutor, witness, cop—didn’t show up or was unprepared. The justice system was a revolving door that turned crooks loose every single day. Everybody knew it: judges, lawyers, cops, crooks. Only the public remained in blissful ignorance.
Mario’s just one more cretin in an ocean of them.
Dozens like him go back on the streets every day. By shaking him loose, you’re not doing anything that hasn’t been done a million times before.
All she had to do was take over his case, and then just fail to do anything. Show up in court unprepared, with no prosecuting witnesses. It would be a slam dunk: case dismissed. Just one more hood back on the streets.
No one would know. She could get on with her life.
I’ll know.
Smiling at her, Mario picked up the telephone that allowed them to communicate. After a barely imperceptible pause, she did the same, settling the hard plastic receiver against her ear. Her heart raced; her palms grew damp. But to the best of her ability she kept her face absolutely expressionless as their eyes met and held through the glass.
“Looking good, Kitty-cat,” he said through the phone. “Real high-class nowadays. And hot.”
Fuck you, Mario.
“If I’m going to do this . . .” Her voice was cold, abrupt.
She couldn’t just roll over and play dead for him. She was one of the good guys now; she had worked too hard to turn her life around to go back. There had to be some way out of this, some way to save herself and Ben without giving in to his blackmail. But what? She didn’t know. Not yet. She needed to get over her panic, take some time to think. Thus her immediate strategy became obvious: delay, delay, delay.
“Oh, you are,” he said. And his smile widened.
Kate fixed him with a steely stare.
Pretend you’re in charge here, even if maybe you aren’t. Don’t let him think he has the upper hand, even if—no maybe about this—he does.
“If I’m going to do this,” she repeated icily, “you’re going to have to give me something in return: the name of your supplier, maybe. Or the details of some crime you know about, and who committed it.”
His eyes narrowed and he lost the smile. “What? Hell, no.”
“I don’t have any get-out-of-jail-free cards stashed in my pocket, you know. If you want me to spring you, you’re going to have to work with me here. Give me something to use as a reason. Something that I can take to a judge.”
“You can forget that. I ain’t no snitch.”
“And I’m not a miracle worker.”
His eyes narrowed. “I saved your life yesterday, bitch. Rodriguez would have wasted you for sure. Don’t you go forgetting that.”
“You call me bitch again, and I guarantee that what I’ll forget is that we ever knew each other.”
“I’ll call you whatever the hell I want.” His expression turned ugly. “I own you, baby. You better get me the hell out of here.”
“You don’t own squat.” Through the glass, she matched him threatening glare for threatening glare. “You start shooting off your big mouth, the person who’s going down is you. You were the one who was carrying the gun that night. You think twenty years sucks? Try looking at the death penalty.”
“Believe me, if I’m looking at it, you’ll be looking at it right along with me. And anyway, it wasn’t me who pulled the trigger. Keep pushing me, and I’ll swear on my sweet dead mother’s life it was you.”
Impasse.
“Get real. I’m a lawyer. You’re a felon. If I deny everything, who you think they’re gonna believe?”
Unnervingly, he smiled at that. Crinkles appeared around the corners of his mean little pit-bull eyes. His teeth showed white through his beard.
Kate’s heart skipped a beat. Hopefully, there was no way he could tell.
“Names and places, Kitty-cat. I know names and places.”
He did, and they both knew it. She also knew that she would crumble like a stale cracker at the bottom of the pack before she let it come to that.
It was time to dial the confrontational tone down a couple of degrees.
“Look, Mario, I want to help you, for old time’s sake and all that, but I’ve been on the job only a couple of months. It’s not like I can just tell them to let you go and they’ll do it. I still need my boss to sign off on everything I do, and if I’m going to go to him and tell him I want to bargain the charges against you down, I’m going to have to give him a reason. You’re going to have to give me something I can use.”
His lips compressed. For the first time, he looked uncertain.
“I’m not giving you shit.”
She shrugged as if to say, “Your call,” then pressed the round gray button on the wall that summoned the deputy. Mario’s eyes widened in surprise.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Leaving. I’ve got to get back to work.”
“What about getting me out of here?”
“Like I said, I need your help to do that.”
“Kat . . .” Alarm and anger mixed in his tone.
“And by the way, just so you’re aware, calling me that, or anything except Ms. White, is a mistake. Let on that you know me in any way, shape, form, or fashion other than as a lawyer, and you’re screwed, because if any whiff of the fact that we have a previous acquaintance gets out, I’ll be yanked from your case. And that won’t work for what you’ve got in mind.”
The door opened. As the deputy stepped into the room, Kate smiled at Mario through the glass.
“I’ll be in touch,” she said, and hung up the phone.
There was no way he could possibly know her knees were shaking.
His mouth moved, and she was pretty sure the words coming out of it were mostly curses. His eyes shot bullets at her through the glass. But then the deputy was beside him, sliding a hand around his arm, glancing at her, saying something to Mario, and Mario had to hang up.
She didn’t look at him again, but instead busied herself with restoring her legal pad and pen to her briefcase as he stood up and was led from the room.
Left alone, she stood up herself. It was no surprise at all to discover that her legs were as wobbly as rubber bands. Her heart pounded; her stomach churned.
She felt like a worm on a hook, wriggling madly as it fought to avoid a hungry trout.
But she’d bought herself some time. Exactly what good that would do she didn’t know. But it was something.
By the time she was back inside the ornate stone building at the corner of Juniper and Penn that was home to the DA’s office, she was almost calm again. Her nerves were still jittery, but her breathing was normal, her heart had calmed down, and her legs once again felt like they could support her weight. It was a little after two-thirty, late to be returning from lunch, so there was no one she knew in the crowd waiting for the elevator. Instead, a motley collection of people—a raggedy old man who looked (and smelled) like he’d spent the morning with a bottle, a college-age girl in blue jeans, two fiftyish guys in suits, a well-dressed older couple discussing something in whispers—crowded in around her. Punching the button for the ninth floor, she stared into the shiny brass panel facing her and concentrated on relaxing her face.
The only word that came to mind to describe her expression was grim.
The Major Trials Unit occupied all of the ninth floor, and it was bustling, Kate saw as the elevator door opened. A chattering group of what looked like high school students was being given the grand tour by John Frost of the Public Relations Office. A loudly wailing old woman—Kate assumed she was either a victim or a witness—in red polyester slacks and a brown poncho was being hustled into the nearby ladies’ room by another, much younger woman in a suit whom Kate knew to be an ADA, although she
could not immediately recall her name. An administrative assistant, Nancy somebody, emerged from the break room beside the restroom with a steaming cup of coffee in her hand and hurried down the hall, blond and lithe in a long-sleeved blue T-shirt and flowy skirt, sloshing coffee into a saucer as she went. The smell of it wafted through the air. Kate waved at Cindy Hartnett, the twenty-five-year-old receptionist whose semicircular desk faced the elevators, as she stepped off and the elevator doors rumbled closed behind her. The voluptuous brunette waved back as she reached to answer her ringing phone. Ron Ott, a fellow ADA in the Major Trials Unit, was leaning against Cindy’s desk, probably trying to get her to go out with him as nearly all the single males in the building did. He glanced over his shoulder as Cindy waved, saw Kate, and waved, too. Behind Cindy, a large room full of cubicles was home to the paralegals, who did much of the grunt work on the cases. Several were on their feet, standing and chatting, looking over the shoulders of seated individuals whom Kate could not see, or walking around with files or cell phones in their hands. The walls separating their desks were only six feet high, so the row of windows overlooking the street bathed the room, and the reception area Kate was walking through, in shafts of sunlight thick with dancing dust motes. A long, pale green hall with dark wood doors opening off it ran to the left and right of Cindy’s desk. Kate headed right, toward her own office, waving to a few of her colleagues whose doors were open. Bryan’s door was closed, she saw as she passed it. She had talked to him on the phone last night when he’d called to check on her, but she hadn’t seen him all day. Which suited her just fine. As far as she was concerned, the fewer people who wanted to discuss yesterday’s events, the better.
I have to get my act together about this.
“Oh my God.” Mona shot to her feet as Kate hurried past her administrative assistant’s office, which was right next door to hers. “Where have you been?”
Kate had hoped to reach her own office and safety without eagle-eyed Mona spotting her. With that hope shot to hell, and with Mona hurtling toward her like a heat-seeking missile, Kate stopped and turned to face her. Aware that her grip on her briefcase was tightening into viselike territory, she forced a smile.
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