There were a few seconds of silence before Cadie yawned. “I guess everything will be a bit better in the morning, huh?” she finally said, fatigue making her sound somehow much younger to Jo’s ears.
“Most things usually are, darling,” Jo agreed, charmed. “Wrap me around you, and sleep deep, okay?”
“Always,” Cadie murmured sleepily. “’Night.”
“G’night sweetheart.”
Jo could feel the cloak slip over her personality even as she stalked into the courtroom and down the centre aisle towards the witness box. She had contemplated willing it not to happen, but as soon as she had stepped inside and seen the all too familiar faces lined up on both sides, she knew she might as well just let it.
I should have known there was no point fighting it, she thought grimly.
It was Friday morning and, surprisingly, Jo had found herself called to the stand almost immediately. There had been a strange sense of satisfaction for her at the semi-audible gasp when she had walked into the room. Even those who knew nothing about her history – and she supposed there were a few of them – were impressed by the figure she cut.
And the weird thing is, I knew that would happen or I wouldn’t have chosen this outfit. I wanted it to happen, apparently, she thought as she walked forward. She was all in black – black leather pants and boots, black turtleneck and a mid-thigh length leather jacket added to her usually imposing stature. It was a color she had pretty much avoided since leaving Sydney, but today had been different. Jo knew damn well she was making an impression. With her long hair, and startling blue eyes, it wasn't too difficult to live up to the reputation she obviously still had.
A quick glance left and right told her there were many in the room who, if they didn’t want her dead, then they certainly wanted a piece of her. Marco di Santo, of course, sat at the defendant's table, looking sullen and ... she half-smiled ... twisted. I guess being castrated will do that to a fella.
Behind him were a row of henchmen, most of whom were known to Jo. In her day they had been minor thugs, just soldiers on the street. Now, she guessed, with di Santo at the top of the tree, these were the yes-men who kept him safe and supplied him with whatever was his drug of choice these days. He used to be a coke-freak, she remembered. One look at his haggard features told her his time in the prison hospital had been less than friendly to his habit, though. They must have kept a 24-hour guard on him.
Jo stepped up into the wooden witness box and settled herself into the chair. She kept her face cold and closed as she took in the details of the courtroom. She was damned if she was going to give anyone in the room, least of all the rows of hungry reporters she could see behind the prosecutor's desk, anything.
Technically, of course, this wasn’t a trial, just a committal hearing. The prosecution would be trying to convince the judge that there was enough evidence with which to go to trial. And the defense would have its chance to get the whole thing thrown out. That was where Jo came in, she knew.
The courtroom made an interesting sight. All the lawyers were bewigged and robed. The judge beside her was even more so, his robes red and draped in silk, unlike the lawyers, who were in plain black. His wig hung down below his shoulders, and his tiny half-glasses perched on the end of what was a rather florid nose. Too much red wine and gin chasers. The clerk of the court approached.
“Please place your left hand on the Bible,” he said, the radio mike attached to his lapel carrying his words to the rest of the room. “Raise your right hand. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
Oh, I wish Cadie were here, Jo thought. “I do,” she said aloud.
“Please state your name for the record.” She smiled as he omitted the requirement for stating her address as well.
I'm still getting some protection, then. Good to know. Not that it did me much good when this goose came calling, Jo thought, looking at di Santo briefly. “Jossandra Christie Madison,” she said quietly, trusting the microphone perched on the edge of the witness box would catch her words.
The clerk moved away and there was a pause in proceedings as the lead prosecutor shuffled his papers and gathered his thoughts.
Jo knew, because she had been well briefed by the lawyer and by Harding, that more hinged on her testimony than just the charges stemming from the attack on her home and Josh. Di Santo had been one of the few who had slipped through the net when Jo had first turned state's evidence five years earlier. The police had tried many times to bring charges against him, but he had evaded them each time. The home invasion against Jo had been just what they needed to get him into court. And now she would have the opportunity to bear witness to a number of incidents that they hoped would help put di Santo away for a long time.
Jo swallowed and moistened her lips as the prosecutor cleared his throat and looked up at her.
“Miss Madison, could you please tell the court about your association with Marco di Santo, the defendant. How long have you known him?”
“I've known him about 15 years.”
“What was the nature of your relationship?”
“I worked for Tony Martin as his bodyguard. Mr. di Santo was Tony's second in charge. He ran the King’s Cross Martial Arts School, the protection rackets associated with it, and the numbers games for Tony.”
“Tony Martin, as in the Tony Martin who you helped put in prison five years ago on three counts of murder and …” He shuffled his papers again, finding the relevant page. “And five counts of dealing in illegal substances?”
“Yes. That Tony Martin.” Jo could hear the coldness in her own voice and hardly recognized herself. I guess that woman’s never going to leave me.
The defense counsel, a small, slightly sweaty man with a number of nervous affectations, rose quickly from his chair.
“Objection, your Honor. This witness is offering nothing but hearsay regarding issues that have nothing to do with the matter before this court. She is a paid informant, whose best interests are served by fabricating evidence against my client.”
The prosecutor almost snorted his derision.
“Miss Madison is a material witness in this case, your Honor. It will be shown that it was her home which the defendant invaded, her house-sitter who was held hostage. In fact, it was Miss Madison who detained the defendant long enough for the police to arrive. By detailing her history with the defendant we intend to establish a pattern to his behavior that will prove he had ample motivation and the methodology for the attack on Miss Madison.”
Jo watched the interchange calmly, almost amused by the game-playing. The judge removed his spectacles deliberately, and gazed sternly at both attorneys.
“The objection is over-ruled. This witness’s history with the Department of Public Prosecutions is irrelevant. She is the alleged victim in this case. But I will remind the prosecution to stay focused on this case. I will not tolerate any straying from the path …” He glanced at the defense brief again. “From either side.”
The prosecutor turned back to Jo.
“Are you being paid for your testimony today, Miss Madison?” he asked.
“No, I am not.”
“Could you tell us in your own words about the events of February 10, this year?”
Jo nodded and shifted slightly in her chair.
“I was working as a yacht skipper in the Whitsunday Islands,” Jo replied carefully. “My next-door neighbor, Josh Matthews, was house-sitting for me, as I was going to be away for about three weeks. On February 10, I received a phone call from Marco di Santo.”
The prosecutor stepped out from behind his desk and walked slowly towards her, hooking his thumbs under the edge of his robe in a rather pompous fashion.
“And what did Mr. di Santo say to you?” he asked. Jo watched a thin bead of sweat trickle from under the man’s wig, across his temple and down the side of his jaw.
“He said he was at my house, that he had Josh, and that if I didn’t come t
o him straight away he would make Josh a lot less pretty,” she answered.
“And what did you take to be his meaning?”
Again the defense counsel piped up. “Objection, your Honor. She’s testifying about the inner workings of my client’s mind, which, unless she’s some kind of telepath, is impossible for her to know.”
“Over-ruled,” the judge said curtly.
Jo smiled wryly, and, with a nod from the prosecutor, continued. “He meant that he would, at the very least, cut Josh, if not kill him.”
There was another pause as the prosecutor turned away from her slightly before he asked her the next question.
”Did your previous experience with Mr. di Santo suggest that he would carry out his threat?”
Jo almost laughed.
“I knew he would,” she said.
The lawyer walked over to the far corner of his desk, where an easel stood. It held a large, rectangular card which was covered with a light cloth.
“Miss Madison, do you recognize this?” Quickly he whisked the cloth away, revealing a full-color, blown-up photograph.
At first Jo struggled to make out anything recognizable in the mess of reds and blues and flesh tones. In the time it took for her eyes to adjust and for her brain to be able to distinguish the figure into something that made sense, Jo felt her world telescope in on itself. It took all her famous self-control not to suck in a deep and noisy breath. Instead she ground her teeth together. The photo was all too familiar. It was the girl Marco di Santo had shot and beaten to death in a Sydney back alley after he had king-hit Jo into oblivion – the girl who had changed Jo's life. The girl she had been sent there to kill. Jo swallowed.
“Yes, I recognize it,” she said, her voice a deathly calm, cold whisper.
“What is it?” The prosecutor was in his element now, loving the drama of this line of questioning, and he didn’t much care what it was doing to the former assassin.
Jo had a moment of dizziness, backed by a wave of nausea that threatened to double her over. Instead, she folded her hands over each other and gripped tightly until her fingernails dug into the skin. And now I'm very glad Cadie isn’t here to see this.
“It's the body of a girl called Shannon, who was a drug addict and a casual employee of Tony Martin's,” she said. “She had cheated Tony out of a few dollars and he had sent me to kill her.” The frankness of those words chilled her, and she felt the eyes of the entire courtroom riveted on her. Jo flinched and looked down at her hands, wondering at the tiny semi-circles of blood where her fingernails had cut. “I couldn’t do it, but before I could let her go, di Santo ambushed us both.”
The prosecutor walked back towards her, forcing her to look up at him before he continued.
“Was this the first time you had witnessed the defendant in such an act of violence?”
Jo smiled wryly. “No. He made a habit of it.”
“Objection, your Honor. Relevance?” The defense counsel had leapt to his feet once again. “I’m at a loss to know just what this has to do with the events of February 10.”
The prosecutor sighed dramatically. He’d played tennis with the defense counsel two days earlier and they were, in fact, good friends. But all was fair in love and court and he was enjoying his moment in the sun.
“It goes to establishing a pattern of behavior, milord,” he said patiently.
The judge chewed the end of the arm of his half-glasses contemplatively. “I’ll allow it,” he said finally. “But please get to the point, Mr. Roberts. I don’t have a lot of patience for these sort of histrionics.”
Old bugger’s probably got a late golf game lined up, Jo reasoned. Her hands were still shaking from the shock of the photograph, and she was finding it hard to tear her eyes away from it. All those nightmares. As bad as they were, they never matched the reality, she thought, staring into the lifeless eyes of the girl crumpled on the damp roadway. In the corner of the photograph was a man’s shod foot, and with a burst of remembrance, Jo realized it was Harding’s. She turned to look at the detective, who was sitting two rows behind the prosecution. Sympathetic eyes met her own.
The prosecutor was talking again.
“Let’s go back, shall we Miss Madison, to February 10 this year,” he said. “After you received the call from Mr. di Santo, what did you do?”
Back on relatively safe ground, Jo stuck to the facts of her rescue of Josh and the arrest of di Santo. By mutual agreement between herself, the prosecutor and Harding, the only thing she left out of her account of the events was Cadie’s involvement. She was brutally honest about her own part in the tale, right down to the violence she had committed on di Santo as they had waited for the police to arrive.
By the end of the prosecutor’s questions, Jo felt drained and sickened by the whole thing. But she knew there was no easy escape. The defense counsel had to have his turn. With a curt, “your witness”, the lead prosecutor sat down and left Jo to deal with the cross-examination.
The defense counsel stepped forward and looked at Jo carefully, allowing a few seconds of silence before he began.
“Miss Madison, let’s go back to that alley in King’s Cross, for a moment, shall we?” He gestured toward the still-exposed photograph on the easel. “Did you actually see my client kill this girl?”
“He had pistol-whipped me and I was unconscious, so no, I did not,” Jo replied, experienced enough at these games to know how to maximize her case even when the defense was making a relevant point.
“So, you just assumed that my client had done the deed?”
“Given that he had threatened to before he hit me …”
“A simple yes or no answer is all that is required, Miss Madison.”
Jo sighed. “Yes.”
“I see,” said the lawyer. “Was there anyone else in the alley, anyone who could corroborate your story?”
“No, there was not.”
He turned away from her and returned to his desk. “So, we have only your word – the word of a hardened criminal, a killer in your own right, in fact – that it was my client, and not you, who killed that girl?” He pointed at the photograph again.
“Yes, that’s all you have,” Jo admitted.
He changed tack, this time going on the offence. “When the police arrived at your house in Shute Harbor on February 10, they found my client on his knees and you were standing over him with a garrote around his neck. Is that correct?”
Jo nodded. “More or less.”
“And once again, we only have your word for it that you were acting in self-defense. Correct?”
“You have Josh Matthews’ word that he was held hostage,” Jo said.
“Well, I have my own theory about that, Miss Madison,” he said, somewhat smugly. “Would you like to hear it?”
“Objection,” called the prosecutor. “Are we here to talk about evidence, or my learned friend’s, no doubt rich, fantasy life?”
“Get to the point Mr. Barclay,” the judge said, the note of impatience clear in his tone.
“Certainly, milord,” replied the defense counsel agreeably. “I put it to you, Miss Madison that my client is an old acquaintance of yours, and he arrived in Shute Harbor to visit you, found you absent, called you and when you arrived home, you got in to an argument. I put it to you that Josh Matthews got caught up in the middle of it all and hysteria, combined with his youth and loyalty to you, convinced him to give the fanciful testimony we saw yesterday. I put it to you that what the police actually saw on February 10 was you brutalizing a man with whom you’d had a long and antagonistic relationship.” He looked at Jo and smiled. “How am I doing?”
Jo shrugged. “This is your fantasy, not mine,” she answered. “That’s not how it happened.”
“Mmmmm, so you say,” he replied. “Once again, all we have is the word of a woman who has killed many times, and is here today as part of an immunity deal with the prosecution. It’s not a lot to go on, really, is it?” Abruptly he sat down, dismissing
Jo with a wave of his hand.
“Do you have anything else for this witness, Mr. Roberts?” the judge asked the prosecutor. There was a pause before he replied.
“Just one question, milord,” the prosecutor said, standing. He leant forward, his hands pressing on the table in front of him. “Miss Madison, are you here today as part of the immunity deal you struck with the Department of Public Prosecutions five years ago?”
Jo considered the question carefully. Would she be here if she hadn’t had that previous relationship with the police? She thought about what di Santo had done to Josh and, she supposed, to her. Damn right I would be, she concluded.
“That deal covered criminal acts I had committed prior to that time. And I believe at the end of the three trials that resulted from me turning state’s evidence, that I signed a piece of paper that allowed me and the DPP to go our separate ways,” she replied, with a half-smile. “There has been no new deal struck. I’m here as someone whose home was invaded by that man…” She pointed at di Santo. “And whose house-sitter was held hostage. That’s all.”
The prosecutor nodded in satisfaction. “No more questions, milord,” he said, as he flicked the tails of his robe from under himself as he sat down. “The witness is dismissed,” the judge instructed.
S’funny how such an evil place can look so pretty. Jo leaned against the a/c-cooled glass, gazing out over Darling Harbor and the other sights of Sydney. The bridge, the Opera House, all the tall city buildings were lit in various shades and styles. It was a beautiful sight from high in the hotel, but it left Jo cold.
She was naked, having just crawled out of bed after a fruitless few hours of attempting to sleep. I’m sure I’m making somebody’s night, she thought. They’d need a pretty good set of binoculars, though. Jo was sitting on the narrow window ledge, side-on to the window, her legs outstretched and slightly bent, her hands wrapped around her knees. Her forehead was pressed against the glass as she looked down on the city.
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