“Hi,” he said.
She grinned. “Hi.” She walked down the hallway, glancing into the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the front wall of the law firm. “Never thought I’d feel weird coming here. It felt like home.”
“It was your home. It still is.”
She sighed and leaned against the wall. “How’s everyone?”
“Good. Lexi’s pregnant. They’re really psyched.”
“That’s fantastic! They’ve been trying for three years.”
“Yeah, she was bouncing off the walls today.” He moved next to her and leaned against the wall as well, catching a glimpse of their reflection in the glass. “How’s protecting the public going?”
“I’m not sure who I’m protecting anymore. Half of what we do seems to be covering our asses so our supervisor doesn’t ream us. But I had a case today where a victim of domestic violence didn’t have anywhere to go. I set her up with the YWCA and she got a place to stay for her and her kids. She started crying in my office and gave me a hug.”
“That had to feel good.”
“Yeah, it did. I didn’t think… for a long time, I thought the law was just about billing hours on some anonymous case. I didn’t realize there was humanity in everything we did. Someone’s affected by whatever we do.”
Brigham took out a roll of Life Savers and popped one in his mouth. He offered them to Molly, and she skipped the top green one and got the next one, which was red. “I’m going away for a day,” he told her. “Maybe Moab or somewhere. Come with me.”
“There’s nothing in the world I would love to do more, but I can’t just leave anymore. I just started. How would that look?”
“Not good, I bet.”
“I’m on a team, and so when one of us slacks off, everyone else has to make up the work. It’s not fair to my team to do that to them.”
“Can we do something this weekend?”
“I have a trial coming up, actually. I was going to go in Saturday and prep it.”
Brigham didn’t say anything for a long enough time that the only thing that broke the silence was the cleaning crew coming up the elevators and shyly filing past them into the office.
“Is this it?” Brigham said. “Is this our life now? Trying to fit in time when we can see each other?”
“I think that’s what couples do.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been part of a couple. I mean, I had girlfriends in high school and stuff, but nothing serious. Not until… this. I don’t know how it works.”
She turned to face him, taking his hands in hers. They were soft and sent chills up his back. “It works the way every relationship works. We grow together. Two lives being shared together. We might be taking different paths, but we’re going in the same direction. You have to remember that.”
He leaned in and kissed her. Their lips locked, and he could taste her fruity lip balm. He pulled away and rested his forehead against hers, staring at her shoes.
“Red pumps, huh?”
“They’re absolutely killing my feet. I think I’m gonna try to get away with sweats and sneakers from now on.”
“Your mom was wearing sweats when I met her the first time. She still looked hot.”
She playfully punched him in the chest. “Scumbag.”
“What? It’s not scummy to call a beautiful woman beautiful.”
“Ew, Brigham, stop it.”
He chuckled. “Well, you can’t go away with me and you can’t spend the weekend with me. How about a late dinner?”
“I’d love that.”
He took her hand, and they left the building.
29
Almost two weeks into her new job, Molly felt the ease of familiarity coming into her daily routine. She arrived at work and checked her email then her calendar for that day and pulled the cases that had been added the night before. The DA’s office had seventy-four trial prosecutors, and people called in sick or late or had some other reason they couldn’t make it to court on time. Their cases were shuffled around and spread among the prosecutors who were there.
She found an afternoon felony calendar that hadn’t been there the night before. There were fifty to sixty felony cases, and she was expected to have read the police reports on each and negotiate with the defense attorneys. She emailed her paralegal to pull the cases for that calendar and stack them on her desk.
Her calendar dinged. It was time for a team meeting. She rose and followed the line of attorneys on her floor to the conference room for the special prosecutions division.
Every prosecutor, no matter their division, had to cover calendars when needed and even did things as mundane as take public complaints for investigation. Molly had been assigned that shift once and quickly found it was just people who had already gone to the police and either weren’t taken seriously or felt the police weren’t moving quickly enough. Half the public complaints she’d heard were about neighbors encroaching on property or being too loud.
The conference room was filled with the attorneys and staff of the SP division. Molly found a chair against the wall and sat down, crossing her legs and noticing a run in her pantyhose. It was thin, barely noticeable, but now that she’d seen it, she couldn’t focus on anything else. She crossed her legs the other way and hoped no one noticed.
Molly thought the team leader of the SP division, Johnny Presto, had a ridiculous name for such a serious position. Johnny scanned a document on his tablet every meeting and then began doling out assignments. He went around the room, and each attorney got something new, mostly cases that had appeared on the news. There was one politician, someone in the legislature who had urinated on a prostitute, and the prostitute then alleged that he raped her when she objected. It was a tough case from the get-go, considering the victim was a prostitute and in the legislator’s hotel room willingly. Still, it sounded like an interesting case, and Molly wished she’d gotten it.
When Johnny came to her, he looked at his tablet and said, “Molly, you got the Ted Montgomery case as second chair. You’ll be helping Debra on it.” He moved on to the next person. “Jessica, I want you to—”
“Wait a second,” Molly interrupted. “Ted Montgomery? The man who killed his wife when she was dying of cancer?”
“Yeah,” Johnny said.
“I can’t do that. I was at the firm that’s defending him. That’s a clear conflict. I can’t go anywhere near that case.”
“Oh, well, sorry, but that’s how it is. Comes from the big man himself.”
Molly felt anger rise in her belly. “Vince assigned me to that case?”
“Yeah. Received the email this morning.”
Molly stormed out of the meeting. Johnny said something behind her, but she didn’t stop. She marched to the elevators and hit the button for the floor above. Rage seethed in her, and she had to pace the elevator to keep from going crazy as it slowly rose.
She got off on that floor and scanned her ID on the locked glass door. She was waved past the metal detectors and stormed her way to Vince’s office. She opened the door as his secretary said something about making an appointment.
She had wanted to be calm and sit down and discuss everything with him. Maybe he’d had a good reason to do what he did. When she saw his face as he was speaking with an Asian man seated across from him, all that went out the window. “You son of a bitch.”
“Good morning to you, too,” he said without missing a beat. He looked at the man. “Better excuse us, Thomas.”
The man, who Molly had never seen before, got up and left. Molly stood across from him, her arms folded as she paced in front of the desk.
“You son of a bitch,” she mumbled.
“Already said that.”
“Don’t be a smug prick. I can’t believe I actually thought you’d tell the truth.” She planted herself a few feet away from him. “You value me and want me at the office,” she said sarcastically. “I’m an excellent attorney.”
“You are.”
“Bullshit! You brought me over just so you could put me on the Montgomery case. You’re so scared of losing to Brigham again that you went through this whole thing just to mess with his head.”
“That’s true.”
She took a step back, shaking her head. “Brigham was right about you. Power is all you care about. Him beating this office on another high-profile case is a ding on your power. You used me.”
He exhaled. “Molly, I do think you’re an excellent attorney. And I did want you here. I realized your firm was on the Montgomery case after I’d already hired you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you want. It’s the truth.”
She paced around the desk. “It’s a conflict. I couldn’t appear on it if I wanted to, and I don’t.”
“Do you know the details of the case? Did you ever talk to Ted Montgomery? Ever even read the discovery we sent?”
She hesitated. “No, but that doesn’t matter. I was an attorney at the firm defending him.”
“The ethical rules on conflicts are murky at best. I think we can get Judge Lawrence to agree with us.”
“No way she will.”
“She will. Watch.”
“He’s my boyfriend, Vince. How do you expect me to go up against him?”
“I expect you to be a professional who works at an office that protects the public. As a professional, you will have to do things you don’t enjoy. That’s life. If you don’t like it, no one’s forcing you to stay.”
She approached the desk and placed her hands on it, leaning close to him. “There’s a line, Vince. You don’t see it until you cross it, but there’s a line. If you’re hurting the public in order to protect them, then you’re their greatest threat. Not some mugger or car thief.”
He rose, a flash of anger on his face that made his lips go straight as cardboard. “Get the hell outta my office and go do your job.”
Molly turned and stormed out, slamming the door behind her.
30
The night before the trial, Brigham lay in his bed, staring at the ceiling. The light from the moon was coming through the blinds and lighting up the room. He reached over and opened the blinds to get a better view. The moon was full without any clouds in the sky. He put his hands behind his head and stared at it a long while, then hopped out of bed and threw on some sneakers and a tracksuit.
He ran out of the house and grabbed his bike, which he took to the Trax station. No one else was out this late at night, and he sat at the stop by himself, staring at the blinking lights of a bank marquee across the street. The sleep deprivation wouldn’t bother him: he never slept the night before a trial.
The train was empty when it arrived, and he chose to stand rather than sit. The stop he wanted was about three miles away, and he hopped off, rode his bike through the residential neighborhood, and found the house he was looking for.
All the lights were off in Ted’s home. Brigham didn’t even know if he was actually there. He hadn’t had any contact with him for a few days other than a quick email confirming the date and time of the trial. No preparation had gone into his testimony, and Ted had no idea what was going to be asked of him on cross-examination. He would be going into the trial even more blind than Brigham.
Brigham knocked softly, and then he knocked again. Not wanting to wake the kids, he got a pebble and scanned the house. A room on the main floor had the windows open, and he could see diagrams on the wall and the headboard of a bed. He pegged the side of the house with the pebble, and then did it again with another one.
Someone stirred and then rose. Ted’s frame came into view as he stared at Brigham.
“Brigham?” he whispered.
“Open the door. We need to talk, right now.”
“Now? It’s, like, one in the morning.”
“Now, Ted.”
“Okay, hang on.”
Ted seemed to take his time getting to the front door and stepped out onto the porch in his bathrobe and shut the door behind him. “What’s going on?”
Brigham took a step toward him so he was only inches from his face. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“What? What do you—”
“Ted,” he said angrily, “what the hell’s the matter with you? Huh? You asked me to help you, paid me a small fortune, and then won’t even return my calls.” Ted took a step away, and Brigham closed the distance again. “You wanna go to prison for the rest of your life? Is that what this is? Some sort of pseudo-suicide? To make up for what you did to your wife?”
“How dare you! I died that day with her. You don’t know what that’s like.”
“The hell I don’t,” Brigham snapped. He turned away, staring at the front lawn. “I don’t want to represent you anymore. As soon as the court opens, I’m going to strike the trial and tell the judge that I need to withdraw from the case.”
Ted hesitated and then took a step toward him. “Don’t do that,” he said gently. “Please, don’t do that.”
“Then why aren’t you helping me?” he said, turning around to face him.
Ted’s shoulders slumped, and he gazed at the ground before collapsing onto one of the chairs set out on the porch. “I miss her every day, Brigham. At night, I still think she’s here. I’ll reach over to feel for her, but there’s nothing there. Sometimes I wake up excited to see her, and the horror of what happened comes back to me. And I remember it all. It’s like having to go through it again every single damn day. And I don’t know if it’s going to last the rest of my life or not. I’m scared. I’m scared of this trial, I’m scared of going to prison, I’m scared that I’ll never see her again. I just wanted… I just wanted to be with my kids. Every second of every day that I could. I wanted to be with my kids.”
Brigham sat in a chair next to him. “I can’t do this alone. If you want me to stay on the case, it’s truth time.”
Ted looked at him. “You want to know where I got the morphine, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Ted swallowed and looked away. He closed his eyes and mumbled something that sounded like forgive me. “This stays between us. I do not want you to use this in my defense, and as your client I forbid you to reveal it to anybody.”
“You have my word.”
He nodded. “I… I didn’t kill my wife, Brigham. My brother did.”
A breeze was blowing, and a house across the street had wind chimes. The sound was soothing but oddly creepy. Every horror movie Brigham could remember right now had wind chimes as the monster or killer stalked a neighborhood.
His mind went back to when he was young and he and his friend Andy would rent horror movies from a video store near their home. They could watch three slasher movies in a row and not get bored, though the movies were practically all the same.
Ted was gazing off into the distance, and neither of them spoke.
“What do you mean your brother killed her?”
“I mean, he killed her. It was something he and I had discussed. After Ruby and I discussed it, I needed someone to talk to, so I called him. He thought it was a good idea. Managed death is legal in Oregon, so I should transfer her to a hospital up there. But she was in so much pain they wouldn’t let her leave. And I thought that Huntsman Cancer at the university was the best place in the world to treat it. If there was even a chance that she would…” He trailed off, his eyes glazing over. “But there wasn’t. So my brother came down to stay with us. He worked with some shady pharmacist in Oregon to get the morphine—someone he met at the gym offering to sell steroids or something.” Ted spread his hands. “I didn’t even know about it.”
“How did he do it?”
“He called me from the hospital and said that the kids and I needed to come down and say goodbye. That he was injecting her soon and she’d have about thirty minutes. I begged him not to. I cried, I pleaded,” he said sadly. “I even tried to bribe him. But he said he was doing what I was too weak to do. And he was right. Tim’s always
been the stronger one. The quarterback of our high school football team, when I was in the chess club. He always had the hottest dates for dances while I took whoever he could set me up with. He was the alpha, and I think he always wanted to protect me. He just thought he was protecting me. He’s not a bad person. He thought this was what I wanted.”
“Was it?”
He shook his head. “No. I wanted as much time with her as possible, but I know now that was selfish. What happened was the right thing. My time with her was cut short, but she left in peace and love. It was a great gift to her, and I was too weak to do it.” He put his face in his hands. “I was too damn weak to give it to her, and Tim had to do it.”
“How did the hospital staff not see him?”
“I told him to leave. He did it for me and for my children, and for my wife. He did something that he knew was right, and that I didn’t have the stomach to do. I didn’t want him to pay for that. I forced him out of the hospital room and told him to go back to Oregon. I said I would deal with the fallout. He’s wanted to come forward since I got charged, but I won’t let him.”
Brigham sat there a moment. “Ted,” he said quietly, “we need to talk to the prosecutor about this.”
“What? No. Absolutely not.”
“You’re looking at a life sentence for something you didn’t do. We need to talk to the prosecutor.”
“No. I won’t do that to Tim. He’s my kid brother. He’s got his first child on the way, his entire life’s ahead of him. I won’t do that to him. You promised me you wouldn’t say anything.”
Brigham placed his elbows on his thighs and leaned forward, staring at the way the moonlight danced through the trees and cast shadows on the porch. “I won’t tell anyone. But you have to convince your brother to come forward.”
“No, I don’t want him to. That’s why I rushed the trial. He’s devastated that I’m going through this, and he called me, crying, before they came down here. Said he was going to confess to everything. So I just want this over and done with before he gets the chance. He did me a favor I will never forget. And I’m doing the same thing for him now.”
Mercy (A Neon Lawyer Novel Book 2) Page 13