Law of Attraction

by Allison Leotta

  Nick stepped into her living room and pushed the door shut with his elbow. He wore a suit and a tortured expression. He immediately wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her hair.

  It felt both natural and completely wrong to be in his arms. She stood frozen as he held her. He inhaled deeply at the nape of her neck.

  “Oh, Anna,” he whispered.

  She let him embrace her for a moment. She hadn’t planned to, but it was such a comfort to be held. She wondered how to start. Before she could, Nick pulled back and looked at her. He held her arms steadily.

  “I have to tell you something terrible,” he said softly.

  “I know,” she said, and started crying.

  Once she started, she couldn’t stop. Her shock and grief from Carla’s announcement this morning, the frustration building throughout the day as D’marco’s neighbors slammed their doors in her face, her guilt and regret—all of it came pouring out in noisy, hacking sobs. Nick gently drew her closer. Anna cried into his chest as he stroked her hair. She cried like her heart was breaking—because it was, and because she knew it was only going to get worse.

  When her crying finally subsided, Nick cradled her head in his hands, and kissed her gently. She let him—or, rather, she let herself. For a moment, she savored the taste of his mouth, sweet through the saltiness of her tears, his clean scent, the warmth of his chest pressed to hers. She consciously took in every part of him, trying to memorize each detail, knowing she would play them through her head in the months to come. Then she drew back.

  “I heard about Laprea’s murder this morning,” she said. She took a step back and drew a deep breath. “I’m prosecuting the homicide case.”

  “What?” Nick was stunned. He didn’t seem to know where to begin. “You can’t, you’re in the misdemeanor section.”

  “I’m second chairing. It’s because I know the family. From our case.”

  “No, no, no.” Nick ran his hand through his dark hair and turned from her. “Fuck,” he whispered. He paced across her small living room. There wasn’t much space; his long legs covered the length between the sofa and kitchen table quickly before he stood in front of Anna again. He put his hands on his hips and looked at her with grim determination.

  “Anna, you can’t do it. Tell them you have a conflict.”

  Now she had to walk away, moving herself out of his gravitational pull. She went to the window at the front of her apartment. The basement window started at the height of her nose; her view was level with the sidewalk outside. She watched two pairs of feet go by: a woman’s in Mary Janes and a man’s in bowling shoes.

  Nick walked up behind her and put his hands on her hips.

  “What about us?” he asked softly.

  It was the question she had been struggling with all day. Her tears had dried and now she just felt the gritty residue of salt on her cheeks.

  “Are you going to represent D’marco Davis in the murder case?” she asked, turning to him.

  “Of course I am. He’s my client, he has been for years. He needs me now.”

  “Then there can’t be an ‘us.’”

  His voice was almost a whisper. “Why are you doing this, Anna?”

  “No, why are you doing it?” she cried, pushing him away. “You got him off—you fought me to get him off—and now he killed her! And you’re going to try to get him off again!”

  “That’s my job!” Nick shouted back.

  “It shouldn’t be! Not if you have a heart! This isn’t some law school competition—these are real people. Now Laprea is dead, and it’s our fault! Her children lost their mother! Don’t you feel any responsibility for that?”

  “I feel terrible! But there’s nothing I can do about that now. I can’t make her not dead. But I’m a defense attorney. In America, everyone deserves the best defense. That’s what I do. I defend people from the government.”

  “You work to set criminals free!”

  “He’s innocent until proven guilty! You don’t think he should get a defense. It’d be a lot easier if you could just presume him guilty, wouldn’t it, but guess what? He gets a trial by jury and a lawyer.”

  “Don’t fucking lecture me about criminal procedure! This isn’t about ‘does he get a lawyer’—this is about you! And me, and Laprea and D’marco. I didn’t protect her—I failed. You got him off—you succeeded. I don’t know which one of us is worse. But I know I’m not going to lose this time.”

  “Anna, this is ridiculous.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Don’t blame me because you couldn’t convict D’marco Davis.”

  Anna inhaled sharply. She felt like he’d just kicked her in the stomach. It was the worst thing anyone had ever said to her.

  “You asshole,” she whispered.

  “You’re upset right now,” Nick said, lowering his voice and putting his hand on her arm. “That’s understandable. But try to calm down. You just need to recuse yourself from this case.”

  “I need to rescue myself?” Her voice was an unnatural screech she’d never heard before. She yanked her arm away. “I can’t be with you anymore, Nick. I’m prosecuting your client for murder. And it’s not just the conflict of interest. I can’t be with someone who would defend a man like D’marco Davis. I don’t know how you live with yourself—but I know I can’t.” She strode to her door and opened it. “Now get the fuck out of my house!”

  He stared at her, so angry he was unable to form a response.

  This was not how she’d wanted this to go. If they were going to break up, she’d hoped to do it as two people of goodwill who understood that circumstances beyond their control were pulling them apart: reasonably, logically, sadly but nobly. She’d had a vision, herself in a long hoop skirt standing at the rail of an ocean liner sailing out to sea, waving a lace handkerchief at Nick while he remained standing on the wharf. A civilized, romantic leave-taking. Not this screaming, name-calling fight in her basement apartment. In some distant corner of her mind, she was vaguely aware that she would come to regret sending him away like this. But she was seething now, unable to take back what she still felt. She stood at her doorway, glaring at him.

  Nick stalked out without another word. Anna shut the door and watched through the window as his feet strode angrily down the sidewalk. When he was out of sight, she stumbled to her bedroom, threw herself onto her bed, and cried herself to sleep.

  14

  The first indication that something was wrong came from the autopsy.

  Dr. Danielle Laroche checked the name on the corpse’s wristband: Laprea Johnson. The body lay naked on a stainless steel gurney. Dr. Laroche wheeled the gurney out of the cooler and down the hall to the autopsy room, passing several other bodies laid out on carts lining the hallway. Some were covered with sheets, others were naked. Every size and color of the human spectrum was represented: young and old; men and women; black, white, and brown; bloated and emaciated; tattooed and unscarred; hairy and bald; well-endowed and not—all lying stiffly in the pale pallor of death. One infant’s body looked tiny on an adult-sized gurney.

  The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was responsible for investigating every suspicious death in D.C. With more than 4,000 investigations each year and not enough pathologists to conduct them, the office was running a bit of a backlog. But Laprea Johnson’s case had gotten some press, so they’d immediately assigned it to Dr. Laroche, their best pathologist. Dr. Laroche was a pretty black woman with a set of dimples that dotted her cheeks when she smiled. Juries loved her.

  The doctor pushed the cart into the autopsy room, an enormous space flooded with bright fluorescent lights. The walls were lined with stainless steel sinks and counters covered with glass jars and beakers. The white tile floor, scrubbed with a strong antiseptic solution every day, gleamed despite the messy work done around it. The middle of the room held a dozen autopsy bays, where eleven other bodies were already laid out. Pathologists and orderlies hovered over them in various stages of examination. Each bay had its
own set of power tools and hoses hanging on cords from the ceiling.

  In one corner of the room lay an in-ground scale, slightly bigger than the rolling table. Dr. Laroche pushed the gurney onto the scale, which automatically subtracted the standardized weight of the cart. The doctor noted the weight of the body by speaking into a handheld tape recorder: “One hundred and four pounds.” Her voice had a trace of a lilting Caribbean accent, a remnant of her childhood in Jamaica. Eventually, she would turn her tape-recorded notes into a written autopsy report.

  The pathologist pushed the cart into the vacant autopsy bay to continue her examination. She noted her findings into the tape recorder.

  “The body presents as a slight twenty-one-year-old African-American woman, five feet one inch tall. Small, round bruises, approximately two inches in diameter, consistent with finger marks, cover both upper arms, the left shoulder, and chest. There are bilateral subdural hematomas in the orbital sockets,” she said, noting Laprea’s two black eyes. “These injuries, while visually remarkable, were not fatal.”

  She noted Laprea’s bruises on a triplicate form with a figure of a woman, coloring in marks on the figure to correspond with Laprea’s injuries. The doctor looked at the large dent in the left side of Laprea’s head. No bullet holes, no knife wounds. Plain old blunt-force trauma to the skull. Before she made a single incision, the doctor knew that this was the cause of death. Still, everything had to be examined and documented.

  The pathologist used her scalpel to make a long cut starting behind Laprea’s right ear, running over the crown of the head, and terminating behind the left ear. After the exam was over, the doctor would sew the incision back up, and it would not be visible during an open-casket viewing. Dr. Laroche peeled the skin away from both sides of the incision, pulling it backward behind Laprea’s head and forward over her face, revealing the top of the skull. To a layperson, it would look as if a red cloth covered the lower part of Laprea’s face, but that was her face, inside out. Dr. Laroche could now examine the exposed skull. It was deeply fractured on the left side, a wide crevice running from the temple to the base of the skull.

  Dr. Laroche slid on a clear plastic face shield and pulled down the Stryker saw hanging from the ceiling. The handheld power saw had a round, revolving blade, which would cut through bone but not soft tissue. She turned it on and the tool whirred in her hands. She sawed a line around the equator of Laprea’s skull, making one triangular notch in back so that when they put the skullcap back on, it would not slide off the bottom half. She pulled off the top of the skull, now the shape and size of a large soup bowl, exposing the brain that was encased within it.

  Dr. Laroche cut the spinal cord and lifted the brain easily from its cavity. It was grossly bruised where the skull had been fractured. This was the cause of death. She noted this into her tape recorder. The doctor then hung the brain from a string in a jar of formaldehyde solution. In two weeks, the tissue would be fixed by the chemicals, allowing easier handling and a more thorough inspection.

  The pathologist then turned to the trunk of the body, using her scalpel to make a deep, Y-shaped incision in Laprea’s torso, the branches of the Y starting at the shoulders and meeting under the breasts, the stem going down to the pubis. There was little blood, as the body had no blood pressure now except gravity. The doctor peeled back the skin from the Y and used bone-cutting shears to break through the ribs, removing a large, neat square of ribs and sternum. This opened the body cavity so the doctor could cut out the internal organs—heart, liver, intestines, stomach, kidneys, uterus—in a single large block, hefting the mass onto a separate table. Each organ was then separately weighed, dissected, and examined.

  The results were unremarkable until she reached the reproductive organs. Dr. Laroche sliced open the uterus along both sides, bivalving the pear-shaped gray organ. She stopped when it lay open. Inside the uterus nestled a human fetus the size of a peach.

  • • •

  Jack rubbed his temples as the paralegals filed out of his office. He’d spent most of the day trying to douse a flare-up of support staff drama. The paralegals claimed that the secretaries weren’t doing their share of the filing; the secretaries were mad that the paralegals got to work a flextime schedule; and everybody was angry at Jack for forbidding them to play DVDs on their computers during the workday. Finally, at four o’clock, he could concentrate on the Davis case.

  He had almost gotten through Laprea Johnson’s preliminary autopsy report when his phone buzzed. He groaned. Once, he would have ignored it, but now any call could be an emergency that only the Homicide chief could address. He picked up the phone.

  It was Anna, asking if he was free “sometime this afternoon.” Sure, he agreed distractedly. He had barely put down the receiver when she appeared, legal pad in hand, hovering in the doorway. He waved her into the office.

  “Hi, Mr. Bailey. Um, I mean Jack.” She walked in and stood nervously in front of his desk. He gestured for her to have a seat.

  Anna’s anxiety reminded Jack of his days as a rookie prosecutor. He had been similarly intimidated—though he’d hidden it better—by the Homicide chief at the time, a burly Irishman whose capillaries flared red when he yelled at his lawyers. Sometimes it was hard for Jack to believe he was sitting on this side of that desk now.

  While he empathized with Anna’s nervous deference, he didn’t try to ease it. It was good for the young lawyer to be a little frightened of him. That fear would not only keep her on her toes, it would serve as a fence between them, keeping their relationship formal and well defined. He was her boss, not her buddy. That line was particularly important now that they were co-counsel on this case. It was necessary both for the public perception of their relationship and for his own peace of mind.

  Especially, Jack thought, with a young woman this attractive.

  Anna sat in the chair on the other side of his desk and crossed her legs. Nothing in the way she dressed was seductive or designed to call attention to herself: she was wearing a black skirt, a blue silk blouse, and low-heeled pumps. Nevertheless, Jack couldn’t help noticing that she had great legs.

  He brought that thought to a screeching halt. He avoided thinking about the women he supervised in that way. It couldn’t lead anywhere but trouble. With a conscious effort, Jack looked at Anna’s face and not her calves.

  Anna pointed at the pictures of Olivia sitting on his desk, the only personal decoration in the room. “Your little girl is beautiful,” Anna said.

  “Thank you. Luckily, she takes after her mother.”

  He gestured to a picture of a beautiful woman sitting on a playground swing, holding a beaming, toddler-sized Olivia on her lap.

  “Is she a lawyer, too?”

  “She was a police officer. She passed away.”

  Jack had gotten to the point where he could say this without grimacing.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  In the awkward silence, Anna handed him a stack of papers. “I thought you might want the Jencks materials to turn over to defense counsel,” she said, “so I got Detective McGee’s notes and reports together, and redacted the witnesses’ home information.”

  Jack glanced at Anna’s neatly organized papers. The prosecution was required to give the defense any prior statements of any government witness. Anna was getting a jump on things—they wouldn’t need a Jencks package until the preliminary hearing, and there wouldn’t be a preliminary hearing until D’marco was arrested—but this would eventually save Jack an hour of paperwork. The young woman was making herself useful.

  She handed him another sheet of paper, a to-do list she’d made for herself. “I was thinking of a few things I’d like to do on the case. I just wanted to run them past you before I get started. Make sure I’m on the right track.”

  He nodded, sighing. His attempt to minimize Anna’s role by simply ignoring her was not working.

  “I want to track down every police report and 911 call that’s e
ver come out of Laprea’s house,” Anna said. “I’ll find every time she reported that D’marco hit her. A good 911 call could be powerful, like her voice talking from the grave. We’re allowed to introduce evidence of past abuse—the jury can infer that since D’marco beat Laprea on other occasions, the same interaction prompted him to kill her this time.”

  “Okay.” Jack would have assigned a paralegal to get the 911 calls, but if Anna wanted to pursue it, that would save him some time. “Go ahead and get the calls. We’ll have to argue about getting them in. The Supreme Court’s been cutting back on evidence like that.”

  “I know, I read Crawford and Giles. But I think we may have a good argument here. I’m also going to call every hospital in the city, and see if Laprea was ever treated there. I’ll subpoena any medical records. I did some research on the rule against hearsay. There’s an exception for statements made during medical treatment. If she ever told doctors she was there because D’marco hit her, it will be admissible.”

  Jack tried not to smile as the young prosecutor continued to elaborate the bullet points on her to-do list, describing legal tactics he had been using for ten years as if she were Columbus finding America. At least she was headed in the right direction.

  “Basically, I want to get every piece of evidence that will give Laprea Johnson a voice,” Anna concluded. “She can’t speak anymore, she can’t tell the jury what happened the night she was killed. But we can tell the story of D’marco’s abuse through the bits and pieces she left behind.”

  “Great.” Her to-do list would free him up to talk to witnesses and put them in the Grand Jury. That was the meat of a homicide case. She could cook up all the side dishes she wanted.

  “And I wanted to let you know I’m going to go to Laprea’s funeral on Friday.” Despite her deference to him, Anna said this as a statement, not a request.

  “Are you sure you’ll be welcome there?” Jack asked quietly.

  “No. But I have to go.”