The Girl in the Glass Box: A Jack Swyteck Novel
Page 31
Beatriz looked up at her mother, no sign of regret in her expression, just utter disbelief.
“I shot him, Mom.”
Julia rushed inside, hugged her daughter with every fiber in her body, and kissed her face repeatedly.
“Good girl,” was all she could say.
Chapter 77
“You two can get up,” said the officer.
In the time it had taken the Clinton County Sheriff’s Department to check out Jack’s story, three more squad cars had arrived at the mini-station and nearly an inch of new snow had fallen on Jack’s back. He and Theo rose from the frozen pavement, shook off the snow, and stepped beneath the cover of the canopy. They were just in time to see a pair of border patrol officers putting Julia into the back of an ICE van.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Jack said to Theo.
About a mile down the road from the service station, a stone’s throw away from Big Sal’s Pizzeria, was the Clinton County Sheriff’s Office. The complex sat on several acres and included a state-of-the-art jail that housed three hundred inmates and employed ninety-six corrections officers. Corrections was by far the largest division, more than three times bigger than the law enforcement division, due in no small measure to the fact that the jail also served as the Buffalo Field Office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On any given day, ICE relied on Clinton County to hold dozens of undocumented immigrants who didn’t quite make it to Canada.
Jack battled the ICE bureaucracy by phone while Julia was booked and processed. Beatriz changed out of her bloodstained clothes and then sat in the visitors’ waiting room with Theo. By midafternoon Julia was officially Clinton County Inmate No. 19-1068I. She was dressed in the familiar orange jumpsuit for the meeting with Jack. They were seated on opposite sides of a small table.
“Did you talk to immigration?” Julia asked.
“It took a while, but I finally got through to the DHS lawyer on your asylum case.”
“What’s going to happen?”
Jack didn’t sugarcoat it. “Our strongest argument for asylum was that the government of El Salvador has demonstrated an unwillingness or inability to protect you from domestic violence. DHS will notify the judge that Jorge is dead. It’s the department’s position that the factual basis for your claim for asylum has evaporated. You can’t have domestic violence when your domestic partner is dead.”
“Will the judge agree with that?”
“Judge Kelly was going to rule against you even before this happened. This just makes our appeal tougher.”
“But we still have an appeal, right? You said that could take more than a year.”
“Yes, but that’s going to be a little different now.”
“How do you mean?”
“Before this happened, the judge would have let you stay out of detention until the Board of Immigration Appeals decided your case. Now DHS is going to oppose your release because you left Miami-Dade County.”
“Will the judge do that to me?”
“I think he probably will,” said Jack. “You were released on the condition that you wouldn’t leave Miami-Dade County. You violated that condition.”
Julia’s eyes welled with tears, but she sucked them back. “What about Beatriz? What will happen to her?”
“Obviously, she’s in no trouble for the shooting. Even if Jorge hadn’t killed the gas station attendant, it would have been a clear case of self-defense.”
“I meant, where will she live.”
“Can she stay with your sister?”
“I suppose. But if Beatriz is in Miami and I’m up here, how will she visit me?”
Again, Jack didn’t want to give false hope. “I can file a motion to see if we can get you transferred to a closer facility.”
“Can we get that?”
Jack went as far as he could. “We can try.”
Jack sat beside Theo in the waiting room while Beatriz went in to see her mother. The windowless room had three rows of fixed seating, all facing in one direction toward a pointless infomercial playing on the flat-screen television mounted on the wall. A half dozen visitors stared at it blankly, having nothing better to do while waiting to see a loved one behind bars.
“This just sucks,” said Theo.
“Yeah, it does,” said Jack.
“Do you think they’ll move Julia to a jail in Miami?”
“Not a chance. The per diem from ICE is what makes these local jails profitable. Clinton County will cling to Julia like a cash cow.”
“So she sits here in New York for another year until the appeals board says she has to go back to El Salvador. Do I have that right?”
“Hate to say it, but that’s the most likely outcome.”
“Shit, Jack. There has to be some way to fix this.”
Jack was out of ideas. They sat in silence, arms folded and eyes straight ahead. The infomercial rolled on, and Jack wondered why anyone would ever need to cut a soda can in half.
“I guess I could marry her,” said Theo.
Jack snickered. “Yeah, right.”
Theo cut him a sideways glance. He wasn’t laughing.
“Marry her?” asked Jack.
Theo shrugged. “I could.”
Jack turned his attention back to the beefsteak tomatoes sliced paper thin. “Yeah. I guess you could.”
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful, as always, to the talented team of friends and professionals who help make me a better writer. “Thank you” to my editors, Carolyn Marino and Hannah Robinson; my agent, Richard Pine; and all those at HarperCollins Publishers who have a hand in the amazing journey of creating a book. Special thanks to my beta readers, Janis Koch and Gloria Villa, who remind me that “grammar matters” (the errors that remain are all mine).
Most of all, thank you to my wife of twenty-five years, Tiffany, who makes it all worthwhile.
About the Author
James Grippando is a New York Times bestselling author of suspense and the winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. The Girl in the Glass Box is his twenty-seventh novel. His books are enjoyed worldwide in twenty-eight languages, and his signature character, Jack Swyteck, is one of the most enduring protagonists in the legal thriller genre. James is a practicing attorney at the law firm of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP and teaches the Law and Lawyers in Modern Literature at the University of Miami School of Law. He lives in South Florida.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by James Grippando
A Death in Live Oak*
Most Dangerous Place*
Gone Again*
Cash Landing
Cane and Abe
Black Horizon*
Blood Money*
Need You Now
Afraid of the Dark*
Money to Burn
Intent to Kill
Born to Run*
Last Call*
Lying with Strangers
When Darkness Falls*
Got the Look*
Hear No Evil*
Last to Die*
Beyond Suspicion*
A King’s Ransom
Under Cover of Darkness
Found Money
The Abduction
The Informant
The Pardon*
Other Fiction
The Penny Jumper
Leapholes
*A Jack Swyteck novel
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the girl in the glass box. Copyright © 2019 by James Grippando, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text
may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by James Iacobelli
Cover photograph © plainpicture/Stephen Carroll
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grippando, James.
The girl in the glass box / James Grippando.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-265783-1
1. Swyteck, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Legal stories. 3. Miami (Fla.)—Fiction.
PS3557.R534 G57 2019
813′.6—dc23 2018022312
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-288582-1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3
www.harpercollins.ca
India
HarperCollins India
A 75, Sector 57
Noida
Uttar Pradesh 201 301
www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com