“Your parents couldn’t help?” he asked.
“My parents told me I was going to hell when I told them. They turned me out of the house and warned me to never come back.”
Jack shook his head. Religion could so easily be perverted into hate when humans turned away from its message of love. He squeezed Connie’s hand, urging her to go on with her story.
“A woman who owned a small diner down the street from the high school gave me a job as a waitress and let me sleep in her storage room,” Connie said. “The next few months were very hard. But once my Amy was born, I knew nothing else mattered. She was my sweet baby, my total joy.”
He could hear that joy in Connie’s voice, see it flooding her face as the memories of her child filled her.
“Amy was the happiest, most loving child. She was the reason I got up every morning and said prayers of gratitude every night. I worked in a day-care center so I could keep her with me. When she got close to school age, I applied to be a teacher’s aide. Only then my baby…my baby…”
Connie’s head dropped as her voice faltered. She stared down at her lap as her hand clutched his.
Jack would have sworn he was immune to dramatic pauses, but he wasn’t immune to this one. Connie didn’t know how to simply relate facts. She emitted the complete range of her emotions in full and living color. He now understood why Diana had wanted him to hear the story from her client. No one else could tell it like this.
“What happened to her?” he asked quietly.
“It was Amy’s fourth birthday. I was in the kitchen baking her cake. She was playing on the screened-in front porch. I heard a car, and it seemed much too close. I looked up to see this old car jump the curb and smash through our fence. It plowed into the porch, then sped away. I ran outside to look for Amy and I found her under the wreckage. She was dead.”
Tears poured down Connie’s cheeks, large glistening drops of pure grief. Jack had no handkerchief or tissue to offer her. He leaned over and gently rubbed the tears away with his thumbs.
“Did they find the driver?” he asked after a moment.
She tried to speak, but her words were choked by sobs. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Diana answer him with a shake of her head.
Connie wept for several more minutes before resuming her story. Her voice was whispered pain. “I wanted to die. I tried to. But Amy kept coming to me in my dreams. She told me she’d be too sad if I died. I enrolled in night school and earned a teaching credential. They offered me a job teaching third grade. I told them I wanted to teach kindergarten instead.”
“So you could be around children Amy’s age,” he guessed.
She nodded. “Sometimes when they smiled, I saw Amy in their eyes.”
Jack let a moment pass before he asked, “When did you meet Bruce Weaton?”
“Over a year ago. Amy had been gone almost four years by then.”
“How did you meet him?”
“I worked late one day setting up a classroom exhibit. When I walked out to the parking lot, I saw that one of my tires had gone flat. Everyone else had gone home. I didn’t have a phone to call for assistance. I was trying to figure out how to put on the spare when Bruce came by in his car. He changed the flat for me. Afterward, he invited me out for coffee.”
“You had coffee with him?”
“Oh, no. He was very handsome and drove a Mercedes. I was certain he was only being kind.”
“But you did see him again?” Jack prompted.
“About a week later. I bumped into him while we were both standing in line for popcorn at the movie theater in the mall. He’d come to see some war movie. I was there to see a Disney adventure my class was talking about. I was so surprised when he asked if he could sit with me and watch the kids’ movie.”
“And after the show?”
“He bought me an ice-cream cone from a concession in the mall. We talked until closing. He kept asking me about myself and seemed really interested in what I told him. When he walked me to my car, he invited me to dinner the next evening.”
Jack listened to the amazement in Connie’s voice as she described her growing relationship with Bruce. Everywhere they went over the next few months, women gave the good-looking Bruce the eye. But he gave all his attention to her.
Bruce told Connie about his father, Philip, and his brother, Lyle, both of whom were partners with him in a very successful real estate firm. He explained that his mother, Barbara, was a prominent judge. Connie had a hard time believing that this perfect man from a perfect family was interested in her.
After they’d been dating for three months, she finally got up the courage to ask Bruce what he saw in her. To her total amazement, he asked her to marry him.
“What did you say, Connie?”
“I didn’t know what to say. He’d been pressing me for weeks for…a more intimate relationship. I’d told him that after Jimmy, I didn’t want to be physically intimate with a man again unless I was married. Now he was asking me to marry him. When I told him I wasn’t sure, he agreed to give me more time.”
At a barbecue the following Sunday, Bruce’s seven-year-old nephew had dragged Connie into Bruce’s garage to show her the new bike his uncle had bought him for his birthday. As he swung his leg over the bike’s seat, the boy’s foot caught on the edge of a drop cloth. When Connie had pulled the drop cloth from the boy’s foot, she saw a tiny gold locket and chain in the corner. A distinctive blue rose was on the front of the locket.
“I picked up the locket, opened it,” Connie said, her voice suddenly nothing but a quivering breath. “I found Amy’s picture inside. She was wearing the locket the day the car hit the porch.”
Connie lifted her eyes to Jack’s. “Bruce had been so sweet to me. He’d asked me to marry him. I couldn’t believe he was the man who’d driven the car that had killed my baby.”
Jack held firmly onto her hand. “What did you do?”
“All I could think about was getting away. I ran from the garage and got into my car. I started the engine and backed into the street.”
“Did you see Bruce?”
Connie nodded. “When I put the car in drive and stepped on the gas, Bruce ran into the street and waved his arms, trying to get me to stop.”
“Did you try to stop?”
Connie’s chin dropped to her chest. “I tried to steer around him, but I was crying, and I couldn’t see him anymore. All I could see was Amy.”
“Connie, did you want to kill Bruce?” Jack asked.
“No. I only wanted to get away from him.”
Jack gently lifted Connie’s chin with his fingertips. The pain on her face bore witness to the truth of her words.
CHAPTER THREE
DIANA ACCEPTED Jack’s suggestion to talk about the case over lunch. Normally, she ate at her desk, unwilling to accept the long lines that were inevitable at good restaurants. But talking with him while grabbing a bite would actually be a more efficient use of their time.
Still, she felt uneasy.
She’d worked closely with both Richard and David Knight on cases, even shared an occasional meal with Richard without a moment’s unease. Jack’s brothers were also very good-looking, but she felt different around Jack, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on why.
It probably had something to do with watching him work his magic on Connie. That had been damn scary. Jack knew how to get a woman to talk to him and to trust him with effortless charm. She had no doubt that he could probably make a woman believe anything he said.
How could a woman ever know when he was being sincere?
Diana led the way to a favorite restaurant not far from her office. They got a great table on the second-story terrace that overlooked the street below. The day was dull, as most days in Western Washington were. In the distance the snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains wore dark lumpy hats of cumulus clouds.
But the early summer temperature was mild and the air tasted sweet, reminding Diana that people w
hose jobs chained them to desks all day needed to get out for a little natural light and fresh air once in a while.
The restaurant catered to business clientele, its patrons appropriately attired. But Jack had taken off his suit coat and tie, opened the collar of his shirt and rolled its sleeves to the elbows. Despite the lack of sunshine, he wore large reflective sunglasses and—what was strangest of all—a false beard.
After the waiter had taken their orders and scurried away, the reason for Jack’s altered appearance finally occurred to Diana.
“Do you still get recognized when you go out in public?” she asked.
“Enough that I do my best to avoid it.”
“How do fans react to seeing a screen villain in the flesh?”
“Depends on the fan. The nice ones smile and ask for my autograph.”
“And the others?”
“They demand to know why I stole my uncle’s business while he was in the hospital with a brain tumor, refused to give my nephew part of my liver when he required a transplant, drove my horse-racing competitor to suicide, seduced my sister’s best friend when she was in mourning, denied her baby was mine and then tried to murder her husband when he returned from the Amazon—having not been killed in the plane crash after all—only to find he was my long-lost brother who had been raised in the orphanage when we were separated as infants.”
She shook her head in amusement. “My, my, you were busy. I must have missed taping a few of the shows.”
“I’m surprised you taped any. You don’t strike me as a soap fan.”
“Mel was writing a paper that involved your TV character, and my assignment was to preserve your performances via the VCR,” she admitted. “You might find her conclusions interesting reading.”
“If Mel wrote the paper, I might find her conclusions above my reading comprehension.”
He was smiling, and Diana suddenly found herself smiling back. She knew few adults—and no men—who would have felt comfortable enough with themselves to admit that, even in jest.
This man had a couple of nice points about him.
The waiter delivered Diana’s seafood salad and Jack’s sliced roast beef along with their iced teas. Diana realized she was quite hungry and dug in. Her first bite tasted heavenly. This sure beat yogurt and an apple at her desk.
“I understand why you don’t want Connie convicted of murder,” he said between bites. “That would be unjust.”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” she said, and she was. But she was cautious, too. “Now tell me why you feel that way.”
She studied his face for any sign of the confidence with which he’d greeted her that morning. Or the captivating attention he’d lavished on Connie. But his sunglasses and beard hid so much of his face that reading any expression was next to impossible.
“Connie isn’t capable of intentionally squashing a bug, much less a man,” he said. “I can’t imagine that anyone talking with her for five minutes could think otherwise.”
Actually, Diana knew a lot of people too cynical to see her client for who she was. She was relieved to learn Jack wasn’t one of those people. That told her something important about him that nothing else could have. He did have some genuine emotional substance beneath the polished surface.
“Have you told the prosecutor what happened?” he asked.
Diana’s mouth was full of chunks of tender shrimp and fresh avocado. She shook her head in response.
“I think you should. Any prosecutor who heard Connie’s story would understand that she wasn’t responsible for her actions at the time she ran over Bruce Weaton.”
Diana swallowed before responding. “Any prosecutor in the wonderful world of TV maybe. In real life our Chief Prosecutor has too much time and effort invested in proving Connie’s guilt to entertain any thoughts of her possible innocence.”
“You don’t think he’d care about getting to the truth?”
“All George Staker cares about is arranging the facts in front of a jury so he wins the case. If I told him Connie’s story, he not only wouldn’t believe me, he’d do everything within his power to use the information against her.”
“You’ve been up against Staker before,” Jack guessed.
Diana nodded.
“Tell me about it.”
She sipped her tea as she gave his request some careful thought. It would be fair to tell him, she supposed. If he stayed on this case, he would need to know exactly what he’d be up against. Relating the basic facts should be enough.
“My client was a retired military man in his sixties, taking care of his wife who had terminal cancer,” she began. “He got up to attend to her in the middle of the night and inadvertently gave her too much medication. In the morning, he found her dead. Staker claimed the man had deliberately given his wife an overdose to collect on her term life insurance that was due to expire. He charged him with murder.”
“Are you sure your client was innocent?”
“Positive. I spoke to the hospice nurse. She’d visited the night my client’s wife died and administered pain medication without mentioning that fact to my client. He was asleep on the couch, exhausted from caring for his wife. When he was awakened a few hours later by his wife’s moaning, he gave her another dose of medication, assuming she hadn’t had any. When I learned all this, I went to Staker and asked him to drop the charges.”
“He didn’t,” Jack guessed.
“And he used what I told him to strengthen the state’s case. In his opening statement to the jury, he said the hospice nurse had spent many nights at my client’s home, implying they were having an affair. When the hospice nurse got on the stand, Staker cross-examined her about her recent divorce and asked if she was lying because she wanted my client’s wife dead so she could be with him.”
“And her denial didn’t carry any weight,” Jack said, “because the force of the accusation was enough to get the jury to believe the affair was true.”
Diana nodded. “I’m always amazed how ready people are to think the worst about someone without a lick of proof.”
“Your client was convicted?”
Diana put down her fork, her appetite suddenly abandoning her. “He took his own life.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jack had spoken the words softly. Without his impressive array of facial expressions and tonal range, he still sounded very sincere. Diana wondered how he’d managed to do that. Was that ability part of his training, or could it be she was seeing the real him?
“When did this happen?” he asked after a moment.
She hadn’t thought she’d share this next part. Now she realized she wanted to.
“Two years ago. I’m still not able to discuss the case dispassionately. Maybe I never will be. My client was a good man who loved his wife dearly. He was depressed over her death and filled with guilt for having had a part in ending her life prematurely, however unintentional.”
“Is that why he killed himself?”
“I think he would have come out of his depression if he hadn’t been unfairly accused and tried. He left a letter, thanking me for believing him and asking me to make sure that the hospice nurse was not victimized.”
“What did Staker say when you showed him the letter?”
Diana spoke the words through a clenched jaw. “He said he wished the guy hadn’t killed himself before the jury had reached their guilty verdict because he was robbed of another win. Staker was competing with the prosecutor in a neighboring county for most convictions within a calendar year.”
Jack called Staker a filthy name, so filthy in fact that Diana decided right then that she liked Jack very much.
“Is Staker in another competition?” he asked, his tone cool with contempt. “Or does he have a vendetta against Connie?”
“I don’t know about another competition,” Diana said, “but he never has anything personal against a defendant. They’re simply not real to him. Nothing and no one is real to Staker but Staker. The law
is something he uses for his own ends. He intends to use Connie’s trial to launch his campaign for judge. Her high-profile trial and conviction will give him the media spotlight he craves as the ‘hard on crime’ candidate.”
Jack chewed for a few minutes before he asked his next question. “What about the judge who will hear the case? Can you talk to him or her?”
“Him. William Gimbrere. He’s a friend of Barbara Weaton’s. And he would not be willing to listen.”
“As a friend of the mother of the victim, shouldn’t Gimbrere excuse himself from the case?”
“Every judge in the county is a friend of Barbara Weaton’s. Earl Payman should have petitioned the court for a change of venue at the time he entered Connie’s plea. He didn’t. When I did, Gimbrere told me the request had come too late and turned me down.”
“I can’t imagine that when the jury hears Connie’s story, they won’t at least opt for the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter.”
“The only option the prosecution is going to give them is guilty or not guilty of first-degree murder. There will be no lesser charge from which they can choose.”
“The prosecutor can do that?” Jack asked.
“He’s done it.”
“But there’s no way he can prove premeditation.”
“A death doesn’t have to be premeditated to qualify as first-degree murder. Paraphrasing Washington State law, a defendant can be found guilty of first-degree murder if he or she manifests an extreme indifference to human life by engaging in conduct that creates a grave risk of death to any person and thereby causes the death of a person.”
“Like deliberately running over a guy with your car,” Jack said, nodding.
“And you can be sure that Staker will do everything he can to try to prove Connie did that deliberately.”
“How can he?”
“By characterizing Connie as a jealous lover. Bruce’s nephew said he was showing Connie his new bike and the next thing he knew she was running from the garage. Staker claims that Connie saw another woman’s panties lying on the dashboard of Bruce’s Mercedes and suddenly realized that Bruce was two-timing her.”
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