Talon Winter Legal Thrillers Box Set

by Stephen Penner

  “Detective Wolcott knew he couldn’t get Luke to confess to murder,” Talon explained, “but he used that to get Luke to confess to something less, but would still be murder under the law. He got him to confess to being the getaway driver to an armed robbery where someone died. Even though the main reason Luke agreed to say he did that was to avoid being charged with murder.”

  Talon frowned. “Well, surprise. You’re getting charged with murder anyway. Detective Wolcott is the hero, and Officer Dickerson is no longer the one responsible for the death of Officer McCarthy. Time for arrests and press conferences and jury trials and sending a young man off to prison for something he didn’t do. Case closed.”

  Talon paused. She was almost done. And the worst part of being almost done was that once she was done, she couldn’t do any more to help Luke.

  “There’s one more jury instruction I’d like to point out to you,” Talon began her wrap-up. “There were a lot of instructions, so you probably can’t remember them all without looking, but toward the end there, right after she told you not to let sympathy affect your verdict, Judge Kirshner told you something else.” Talon opened the packet to the specific instruction. “She told you, ‘You have nothing whatever to do with any punishment that may be imposed in case of a violation of the law. You may not consider the fact that punishment may follow conviction except insofar as it may tend to make you careful.’”

  Talon looked again at her client, inviting the jurors to do the same with an openhanded gesture toward the eighteen-year-old, Luke Zlotnik, wide-eyed and scared to death.

  “Please, ladies and gentlemen,” Talon implored them. “Be careful.”

  With that, she let her shoulders drop and walked back to take her seat at the defense table, finished. She put another hand on Luke’s shoulder—heartfelt, but still performance.

  “I did everything I could,” she whispered to him.

  “I know,” Luke whispered back. “Will it matter?”

  Talon frowned. “We’ll know soon enough.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Of course, soon enough never was. Although Talon would have been willing to wait a very long time for the right verdict.

  By the time Kirshner, Cecilia, and Talon had all finished talking, the afternoon was almost over. The jury had less than an hour to pick a foreperson and begin to process of deciding how they were going to begin their process. Juries were rarely sequestered any more, so at 5:00 p.m. the jurors each got to go home to family and friends, after being admonished by the judge not to talk about the case to anyone, except their fellow jurors when they all returned the next morning to resume their deliberations.

  Talon went home too, via a couple of bars, and she and Curt stayed up late watching an old Pink Panther movie on TV. The 60s were weird. The next morning, Talon went into the office and sat at her desk, pretending she was able to do anything other than stare at her phone waiting for it to ring.

  Actually, she didn’t really want it to ring. Not yet. Quick verdicts were usually prosecution verdicts. It was the long, drawn out, ‘what could they be talking about’ deliberations that were better for defendants. Bonus points if the bailiff reported hearing arguing through the jury room door. The best thing Talon could do was focus on something else to take her mind off the wait. That was also the last thing she could possibly do.

  So, by midmorning, she decided to take a break from the work she hadn’t been doing and head into the break room to see if there was anyone she could talk to who’d take her mind off the interminable wait. Luckily, Olsen was refilling the coffee pot. He was always refilling the coffee pot.

  “Greg!” Talon called out a little too loudly. “How’s it going? What did you think of the closings?”

  Olsen nearly dropped the coffee pot at Talon’s bellow. “Oh, uh, right.” He regained himself. “Uh, I thought they were good. Very good. Hers was very good, I thought. But yours was better. Yeah, yours was definitely better.”

  Talon crossed her arms and frowned at the rambling answer. “Sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself.”

  Olsen laughed a little. “No, it’s not that. I’m just not sure it’s going to matter. You had good arguments. You had an expert. But they still have a dead cop.”

  Talon nodded. “Yeah, I know. There must be a better way of deciding something this important. Twelve people who, by requirement, know nothing about the law get to decide whether somebody broke a law so complicated and arcane it takes the judge two pages to explain.”

  Olsen scooped coffee grounds into the coffee maker. “The only other way would be to let the judges decide. But you don’t seem like the type of person who would trust a government employee to make that kind of decision.”

  “And an elected employee at that,” Talon scoffed. “Yeah, you’re right. This is the best we can do, but it’s still not good enough. I mean, you know how lawyers will say, ‘If you tried this case ten times, the prosecutor would win seven of those’ or whatever?”

  “In civil, we say the plaintiff,” Olsen reminded her. “But yeah. It’s a way to explain the strength of a case.”

  “But really, it only explains how crazy the system is,” Talon replied. “If the result of the case depends, not on the evidence or the lawyers, but on which twelve people get to vote, that’s crazy. It should be, ‘If we tried this case ten times, the prosecution would win ten times.’ Anything less than that shouldn’t be charged. If there’s a chance even one jury out of ten would acquit, then we shouldn’t let the other nine convict.”

  “Spoken like a true defense attorney,” Olsen raised his empty mug to her. The coffee was still brewing, and loudly. “Maybe you can get a rule change so that every criminal defendant gets ten trials.”

  “And have to wait on ten verdicts?” Talon laughed. “No way. Waiting on one is bad enough.”

  Olsen looked at his watch. He was old enough that he still wore a watch. “How long do you think they’ll be out?”

  “Maybe until tomorrow?” Talon guessed. “There was actually a lot of evidence and I gave them a lot to talk about. They will probably go back and look at what the teller actually said. They’ll need to work through the felony murder instruction to make sure they know exactly what the State has to prove. Plus, there’s all the stuff Dr. Ross told them, so they’ll need to go back through his so-called confession again with her testimony in mind. Also—”

  “Hey, there you are.” Hannah half-ran into the break room. She pointed at Talon. “I called your office, but you didn’t answer.

  “What is it?” Talon asked, but the floor was already dropping out of her gut.

  “The court called,” Hannah said. “You have a verdict.”

  CHAPTER 54

  Schrödinger’s Verdict.

  So long as the jury hadn’t reached its verdict, there was still a possibility Luke was innocent. A chance he would beat the charges. A reason to fight.

  But when the lid was lifted and the verdict read aloud in open court, Luke would either be guilty or he would be innocent. Nothing in between.

  Talon had actually let herself believe she might win the case. The cop-killer case with the confession. But the trial had gone better than she’d expected. The State’s witnesses were weak. Her witness was beyond strong. When she sat down after her closing argument, she really, actually thought there might be a chance she would win.

  But the verdict was too fast. There was too much evidence, too many issues, for them to discuss everything they should have discussed in only a few hours. That meant they didn’t discuss everything. That meant they jumped to their conclusion. Just like everyone else had.

  But still, even as Talon walked into the courtroom, her stomach in a knot and the blood pounding in her ears, there was still a chance that cat was still alive. A chance Luke would be found not guilty. A chance he wouldn’t die in prison.

  Talon walked past the same crowd of people who’d assembled for the closing arguments the previous day. At least it seemed to be the same p
eople. She didn’t really look closely. There was only one person she was looking at. Her client. Eighteen-year-old Luke Zlotnik, seated in that same damn suit, hunched over the table, crushed under the same weight of anticipatory dread that made it hard for Talon to put one foot in front of the other.

  She dropped herself into the seat next to Luke and tried to sound brave. Not that it mattered anymore. “You ready?” she asked.

  Luke didn’t look at her. His eyes were glued to the tabletop. He shook his head slightly. “No.”

  Talon nodded. She put that hand on his shoulder again, maybe for the last time. “Yeah. Me neither.”

  Cecilia was already at her table. She managed to look coolly detached despite the good (for her) omen of the quick verdict. The guards were closer than usual, in case Luke reacted badly to the verdict. The bailiff stood up to announce the entrance of Judge Kirshner. Talon stood up, too, but barely heard the bailiff’s invocation. She sat down again as soon as the judge reached the bench.

  “The jury has reached a verdict,” Judge Kirshner informed everyone, rather unnecessarily. Everyone already knew that. That’s why they were there. “Bring in the jury,” she instructed.

  There was an old trick for guessing what a jury’s verdict was. If, when they filed into the courtroom to deliver the verdict, they looked at the defendant, then it was a not guilty verdict. But if they avoided looking over at the defense table, then it was a conviction.

  The jurors filed into the courtroom. They didn’t look over at the defense table.

  “Would the presiding juror please rise,” Kirchner instructed.

  Juror No. 4 stood up. A middle-aged white man. Not just a rule follower, a rule enforcer. Not good.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” Kirshner asked.

  There was so much formality in the reading of a verdict in a criminal trial. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and everyone in the courtroom just wanted to know what the result was. The jurors should simply walk in and give a thumbs up or thumbs down. The ceremony just added to the agony.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Juror No. 4 answered. He had a piece of paper in his hand. The verdict form.

  “Please hand the verdict form to the bailiff,” Kirshner instructed.

  The juror did as directed, and the bailiff took possession of the verdict form. Talon was sure the bailiff snuck a peek at what word, or words, were written in the blank, but she didn’t see him do it. Still, that meant thirteen people knew the result, but she and Luke still didn’t.

  The bailiff handed the form to the judge who took a moment to read it. Now fourteen people knew. Kirshner looked up from the paper and over at the defense table. “The defendant will stand for the verdict,” she declared.

  Luke looked at Talon. His eyes were wide and red-rimmed. She could see his heartbeat in the hollow of his throat. He didn’t look like he had the strength to stand, so Talon stood up first and pulled him to his feet.

  “I didn’t do it,” he whispered to her, his voice cracking. “I’m innocent.”

  Talon squeezed his arm. “I know, Luke. I know.”

  “In the matter of the State of Washington versus Lucas James Zlotnik,” Kirchner read the verdict form aloud, “We the jury, find the defendant… guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree.”

  Luke collapsed into his seat, pulling Talon halfway down with him. The gallery exploded into a cacophony of cheers and sobs. There was a special verdict form too. The one for the aggravating circumstance of the victim being a police officer. Kirchner started reading that finding, too, but her voice could hardly be heard over the sounds of celebration and despair. But Talon knew the result. McCarthy was a cop. That was never in question. If the jury found Luke guilty of murder, they were going to find the aggravator too.

  It was over. All over.

  Talon looked down at Luke. He was slumped onto the table, his head in his hands, his back wracked with the sobs Talon could see more than hear. She knew his family was crying, too, but she couldn’t bring herself to look. Instead, she looked up at the indifferent judge who had denied her motions and suppressed her evidence. She looked over at the prosecutor who had secured herself a promotion on the convulsing back of an innocent man. And she looked at the jury, still too cowardly to look Luke in the eye as they took his life away for something he didn’t do.

  Luke was innocent. Talon knew it.

  But it didn’t matter.

  An innocent eighteen-year-old man was going to spend the rest of his life in prison.

  Talon had done everything she could to try to stop it.

  But she didn’t stop it.

  And that was the worst part of being a criminal defense attorney.

  END

  THE TALON WINTER LEGAL THRILLERS

  Winter’s Law

  Winter’s Chance

  Winter’s Reason

  THE DAVID BRUNELLE LEGAL THRILLERS

  Presumption of Innocence

  Tribal Court

  By Reason of Insanity

  A Prosecutor for the Defense

  Substantial Risk

  Corpus Delicti

  Accomplice Liability

  A Lack of Motive

  Missing Witness

  Diminished Capacity

  ALSO BY STEPHEN PENNER

  Scottish Rite

  Blood Rite

  Last Rite

  The Godling Club

  Mars Station Alpha

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stephen Penner is an author, artist, and attorney from Seattle.

  In addition to the Talon Winter Legal Thriller Series, he also writes the David Brunelle Legal Thrillers, starring homicide D.A. David Brunelle, the Maggie Devereaux Paranormal Mysteries, recounting the exploits of an American graduate student in the magical Highlands of Scotland, and several stand-alone works.

  For more information, please visit:

  www.stephenpenner.com.