Except satisfaction.
The frustrating part was that she didn't even know what was missing from her life. In spite of her earlier lament, it wasn't personal relationships. She'd never included those in her career plans. After eighteen years spent ducking the fallout of her parents' turbulent marriage, she'd never wanted a husband, and she felt not the slightest desire to experience motherhood. There were enough children in this world already; she didn't need to contribute her own for simple ego gratification.
So what did she need? She chose her own cases and set her own hours. She did nothing in or out of the office that she didn't want to do. She was in total control of her life.
But something was still missing.
When the knock sounded at her door, she quickly slid her feet to the floor and into the three-inch heels she'd discarded. It wouldn't do for Loretta, her secretary, or anyone else to find her lazing comfortably. She'd put too much time and effort into constructing an appropriate image. No need to tarnish it now.
After waiting a suitable moment, Loretta opened the door and slipped inside. "There's a gentleman here to see you, Ms. Gibson," she said in her brisk, efficient manner. "His name is Zachary Adams. He doesn't have an appointment, but as he said it was quite important, I told him I would check with you. You do have a little free time before your appointment with…"
The woman continued, but Beth had stopped listening. She knew her schedule for today better than the secretary did, and she didn't need reminders. Instead she concentrated on Loretta's earlier words. His name is Zachary Adams.
Zachary. She hadn't seen him since Sarah and Daniel's wedding. She had rather vainly thought he would ask her out once their clients' custody case had been resolved in church rather than in court. She had even decided that she would turn him down on the grounds that he wasn't her type. The men she dated were all intelligent, successful and ambitious. They ranged in age from late thirties to mid-forties. They were, for the most part, divorced. They generally had a good deal of money and even more ego. They were satisfied with being seen in the right places by the right people with Walter Gibson's daughter and Bill Townsend's granddaughter. They expected little from her on a personal level.
More importantly, they didn't threaten her. They didn't tempt her. They left her cold. They were safe.
And none of those words fit Zachary Adams. There was no denying he was intelligent, and she supposed in his own way he had achieved success. He lacked ambition, though, and money, and, from what she'd seen, ego. He was satisfied with his little practice in his little hometown, handling little cases and giving little bits of legal advice to people he'd known all his life. She doubted that he even knew she was Walter Gibson's daughter and Bill Townsend's granddaughter, and he wouldn't be impressed if he did.
He didn't even fall into the proper age range. He couldn't possibly be older than thirty-three, and she did not date younger men. Not even only-three-years-younger men.
And he tempted her. He tempted her to forget all the rules she'd lived by. He tempted her to forget about logic and caution and replace them with emotion. With passion.
He wasn't the least bit safe.
So she had prepared all sorts of polite, socially correct excuses for not beginning a relationship with Zachary—but he had never called. After Sarah's wedding, where she had been the maid of honor and Zachary had served as best man, she hadn't heard from him again. So much for her ego, she'd thought.
But now he was here, waiting to see her.
"Ask him to come in, Loretta," she said when the secretary finished speaking. As soon as the door closed behind the other woman, Beth raised her hand to smooth her hair. It was simply a desire to appear thoroughly professional, she told herself. It wasn't feminine vanity.
A moment later the door opened again, and Loretta stepped aside to allow Zachary to enter. He was just as she remembered, Beth thought as she rose to her feet: blond, blue-eyed and handsome. Not attractive, not good-looking, but drop-dead gorgeous.
He was dressed as formally as she'd ever seen him, with the exception of Sarah's wedding, when he'd actually worn a suit. His jeans were faded but neatly pressed, his shirt a subdued plaid, his sport coat a soft, buttery tan corduroy. The tie knotted loosely around his neck lent a touch of convention to the outfit, but only a touch. Now that he was in front of her desk, she couldn't see his feet, but she would wager he wore boots, something suitable for traipsing around his southeast Tennessee mountains.
She would also wager that this was the first time in history that so casually dressed a lawyer had appeared within these hallowed halls.
"Hello, Zachary." She offered her hand, and he accepted it for the briefest of handshakes.
"Thanks for taking time to see me." Without waiting for an invitation, he sat down in the chair closest to her desk, and Beth followed his lead.
"What brings you to Nashville?"
"I have a favor to ask of you on behalf of a client."
Business. Somewhere deep down inside, she felt a tiny rush of disappointment. She would have liked… She wasn't sure exactly what. More. A little personal attention. A friendly exchange before getting down to business. Some hint of the interest that had been in his eyes the last few times she'd seen him.
She forced away the disappointment, replacing it with cool professionalism, and gestured for him to go on.
"The daughter of one of my clients back home was arrested here in Nashville Sunday night for murdering her husband. She stabbed him while he was asleep on the sofa." He paused, stroking one fingertip along his jaw, then went on. "She confessed to the police. No excuses, no explanations, just, 'I did it.'"
"Are you going to plead her guilty?"
"I'm not going to do anything. I can't take the case." He smiled, a shadow of the boyishly charming smile she remembered so well. "She can't plead guilty. She's got four kids and is pregnant with the fifth."
"But if she confessed—"
"Don't you want to know why she did it?"
Again she silently gestured for him to continue.
"He'd beaten the hell out of her. And this wasn't the first time. Some of her injuries were recent, the others were almost healed." He crossed his legs, resting one foot on the other knee, and Beth saw that she'd guessed right. He had on hiking boots, sturdy and worn and somehow right with the jeans and the coat and even with the tie.
"Even with a confession," he said, "a good lawyer might be able to get her off. Battered woman syndrome is being used successfully as a defense all across the country. A good lawyer could use it in this case."
Beth felt an uncomfortable tingle down her spine. The first time he'd said "a good lawyer," she had known immediately what he wanted from her, and it was a lot. Too much. "That's a hell of a favor, counselor," she said softly.
He smiled again, but said nothing.
"Do you know how much it costs to defend against a murder charge?"
"Not to the penny, but I can guess at the range." Then he turned the question back on her. "Do you know what it'll cost those five kids to lose both their father and their mother?"
That was unfair, she thought. She might not have any desire for children of her own, but well hidden somewhere inside her was a soft spot for the kids already on this earth. "I take it she has no money."
He shook his head. "She stayed home with the kids while her husband worked. With him gone, there's no income."
"I don't think the partners would approve." That was an understatement, she thought silently. It wasn't a love for the law that drove her associates, but money. They wanted their share of it, along with everyone else's. If she went to the next meeting and told them that she'd taken on a pro bono murder case, their rumbling and grumbling would be heard down in the streets.
"Your name's on that letterhead, too," Zachary reminded her. "Doesn't that give you some measure of authority? Or do you have to ask their permission before you take on a new client?"
She gave him a long look that let him know
she found his suggestion insulting; then she asked, "Why don't you want to handle this?"
"I've never handled a felony case before. I'd be willing to learn, but a case where someone's life is at stake is too important for me to use for on-the-job training." He rose from the chair and wandered over to the full bookcases that lined one wall. "And … I can't afford it."
"You can't pay the cost yourself, yet you have no qualms about asking me to?" she asked dryly.
"Not you. Your firm." He turned to look at her. "Come on, Beth, you people are experts at making money off people in trouble. You can afford to give a little of it back. I don't have your resources, your background, your expertise or your reputation. If anyone can help Carrie, it's you. Maybe it means you earn a little bit less this year. From the looks of things around here, you won't even miss it."
She certainly couldn't argue that point with him, not sitting here in an office that cost more to decorate than he probably earned in a year. But to accept this case, to commit not only herself but also the firm to such an outlay of time and money when she couldn't even guarantee a victory…
Still, murder cases were always a challenge, and this one, which on the surface seemed a sure loser, would be even more so. And hadn't she just been complaining not ten minutes ago about how rarely she got to handle a case that she cared about? Arguing for some poor, abused victim's life in court had to be more interesting than the cases already stacked on her desk. And wouldn't it be nice for once to feel that she had really made a difference in someone's life? To know that she had accomplished something that none of her associates could have done for the simple reason that they didn't defend people without money?
She had learned in law school that everyone, guilty or not, was entitled to the best defense. But the real world had revised that tenet: everyone was entitled to the best defense that money could buy. Poor people went to jail all too often because they couldn't afford a good lawyer, and rich people got away with all sorts of crimes because they could hire the best. Like her.
Wouldn't it be nice to turn the tables for once?
"I'm not sure I even believe in the battered woman syndrome defense," she stated evenly. "I have no doubt that this woman deserves our sympathy. There's no question, either, that while her husband was alive, she deserved help and protection under the law that probably wasn't forthcoming. But does she deserve permission to kill? To take the law into her own hands and murder the man who hurt her?"
"Since no one else was protecting her, didn't she deserve the right to protect herself?"
"Of course. So why didn't she exercise that right by leaving him?" Beth countered.
"Maybe it wasn't that easy." Zachary was watching her thoughtfully from across the room. "Before you make a decision either way, will you at least meet Carrie—talk to her, see what he did to her?"
He thought she was going to turn him down—Beth could see the resignation in his eyes even from this distance—and he was probably already thinking ahead to what his next move would be. And most likely she would turn him down. But she could give him something. She could talk to this woman, could listen to the details of her particular case, before she rejected it. "All right. I take it she's still in jail?"
He nodded.
She stood up and slipped into her jacket, then picked up her briefcase from the credenza. "I have an appointment in court at three. If we hurry…" She hesitated, considering what she'd been about to say, then, against her better judgment, said it anyway. "Maybe we can find time for lunch after we see her."
After another nod from Zachary, she led the way from her office, pausing only briefly at Loretta's desk to instruct the secretary to rearrange her schedule.
It wasn't far from her office to the jail; within fifteen minutes they were seated in the interview room and waiting for Carrie Lewis. Beth drew a yellow pad and a pen from her briefcase, then glanced covertly at Zachary. She knew intuitively that he would have been disappointed if she'd turned him down cold—not just disappointed for Carrie's sake, but disappointed in her. She knew, too, that that would have disturbed her. It didn't make sense—caring what this man thought of her—and if she spent any time analyzing it, she was quite sure she wouldn't like her conclusions, so she pushed it out of her mind as the guard escorted the prisoner inside.
The first word that came to Beth's mind when she saw Carrie Lewis was pathetic. She was a pathetic figure: thin and battered, helpless and hopeless and lost. There was no doubt in Beth's mind that this woman was a victim—of her husband, of the legal system and of society as a whole. But enough of a victim to literally get away with murder?
Zachary introduced them, and Beth offered her hand, deliberately waiting until the other woman took it in a cool, limp handshake. Then she picked up the pen, braced the pad against the edge of the table and politely said, "Tell me why you killed your husband, Carrie."
The words came haltingly, emotionlessly, filtered through a curtain of mousy brown hair, and they wove a story that Beth had heard countless times before. Only the ending was different.
Delbert Lewis had beaten his wife when he was angry, when he was drunk and when he was bored. With no place to go, no one to turn to for help and feeling that she somehow deserved his abuse, she had tolerated it until something inside her had shattered. Something had said never again, and she had taken the only action that she knew beyond a doubt would protect her. Maybe she had simply tired of being his victim. Maybe she had feared for the safety of the baby she was carrying. Maybe she had suffered too much shame or helplessness or pain, or maybe his threats against the children had been more than she could endure.
Whatever the catalyst, she had chosen her moment carefully. She had waited until he was asleep, relatively harmless, unable to hurt her. Unable to stop her. And she had resolved the problem herself. There would be no more beatings. No more fear. No more pain. No more threat.
And possibly no more freedom.
"Why didn't you call the police?" Beth asked, looking up from the notes she'd jotted down.
Carrie also looked up. Her face was painful to look at. "What could they do?" she asked dully.
"If you'd pressed charges, they could have arrested him."
"And held him how long?" Zachary asked. It was the first time he'd spoken, and Beth turned to look at him. "A few hours? Maybe one night? Certainly no more than that. And then what?"
"Why didn't you leave him?" Beth asked, turning her attention back to Carrie. "Why didn't you divorce him and get a restraining order against him?" Silently she acknowledged that the questions sounded naive. She knew the reasons as well as anyone. Women who left their husbands were all too often found, and the punishment was severe. To men like Delbert Lewis, their wives weren't their partners, they were property. Divorce meant nothing, and restraining orders weren't worth the paper they were written on.
But she wanted to hear Carrie's answer. She wanted to hear why this woman had chosen to stay in an abusive marriage. She wanted to know why she'd chosen murder instead of divorce.
"He told me if I ever left him," Carrie whispered, "he would kill me."
"And you believed him."
She looked up again, her face marked with the colors of violence. With a quiet certainty that had been absent throughout the interview, she softly replied, "Yes. I believed him."
* * *
Chapter 2
« ^ »
Over lunch in a nearby restaurant, Zachary asked the question that had been nagging at him since Beth had begun to interview Carrie. "Will you take the case?"
Beth fingered the delicate stem of her water glass for a long moment before looking up at him. "I don't know."
"Do you think locking her away in prison is the proper punishment for what she's done?"
"Do you think a butcher knife through the heart was the proper punishment for what Delbert Lewis did?"
He started to respond, then gave a rueful shake of his head. Carrie was so easy to pity. She fit the image of a victim s
o well, and Del was so easily cast as the villain. The big, violent bully and the fragile, defenseless woman. "I don't know," he replied with a sigh. "But I do know Carrie was in a desperate situation."
"But murder wasn't the solution."
"Maybe it wasn't the right solution," Zachary countered. "It's certainly not the one I would have chosen, or you. But neither you nor I would ever be in her situation. For Carrie, killing Del might have been the only way to escape, the only way to stop him from killing her. How many women live their entire lives in fear of the men who are supposed to love them? How many women are killed by those men? The courts don't offer much in the way of help. The cops' hands are tied by the system. Social Services doesn't have the resources to handle every single case. What's a woman supposed to do? Just sit back and wait to die?"
"She's not supposed to commit murder," Beth said dryly.
"According to the battered woman defense, it's not murder. It's self-defense."
She leaned toward him, her green eyes fired with passion. "Delbert Lewis was asleep when Carrie killed him. He didn't present a threat to her or the children. He wasn't capable at that moment of harming her. She wasn't defending herself from anything." Then the heat faded away, and she frowned distractedly. "If she had killed him during their fight, in the midst of his rage, there wouldn't even be a case. The district attorney would have taken one look at her, and he would have declined to bring charges against her. Her husband's death would have been a clear-cut case of self-defense."
"If she had tried to defend herself then," Zachary pointed out, "there would still be a case, only the defendant would be Del, because Carrie would be dead."
Beth acknowledged his statement with a slight shrug as the waiter served their meal. When he was gone, she asked, "When is her arraignment?"
Somebody's Lady Page 2