“Exactly,” Jack said.
“In fact,” Millin went on, “back then, she seemed like a good guy. On the right side of this. Rachel North wasn’t on our radar.”
“So what the hell put her there?” Jack leaned forward. This was the crux of it. The future legal—and personal—battleground.
“Jack?” Martha took a few steps toward him, high-signing Millin that she was taking point. “In fact, you did. Though not on purpose.”
“What?”
Martha shrugged. “By choosing her for the Deacon Davis jury. Which gave Rachel’s suspicions of her beloved Senator Rafferty’s relationship with Danielle Zander time to fester. She couldn’t stand it, thinking of them, together—that’s what I imagine. And she turned out to be correct about their affair. But she couldn’t let it go. Had to punish him. By punishing her rival. It was Rachel North who was the jealous one, not Nina Rafferty.”
Jack was silent, for a fraction of a second. No. Rachel was not that kind of a girl. An old-fashioned phrase, and she’d hate that he’d put it that way, but still. No.
“How the hell do you know that?” Jack challenged her, his tone dismissive. “Did Rachel confide in you, in some half-assed sorority-sister confessional? Did you get her to spill the beans without letting her know she was a target? None of that’s admissible, Gardiner. And you know it.”
“May I go on?”
Jack rolled his eyes at Martha. “Cannot wait to hear this.”
“Because the person who ratted out Tom Rafferty? The confidential interviewee, the informant who ruined Tom Rafferty’s career? And Logan Concannon’s? And who knows who else who got in her way? The one who provided us with the salacious motive to convict Nina Rafferty? And who now, every day, tries to get us to convict someone else?”
“No.” Jack’s head turned from side to side again. His brain stumbled, faltered, failed him.
“Yes.” Millin flipped his notebook closed.
“Yes.” Gardiner repeated. “Your wife.”
RACHEL NORTH
NOW
I hate this, I honestly do, and I’m sick of being told what to do by everybody else.
“Rachel North, you have the right to remain silent,” that statie Oz instructs me as I get out of the car. The punishing June sun is belting down on me, my flat shoes threatening to melt into the asphalt. “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”
Like I don’t know that.
“Don’t say anything, Rachel.” Jack’s talking over him, my husband’s hand grasping my arm.
Like I don’t know what’s best for myself. I’m almost a lawyer, for God’s sake. I feel like wrenching out of Jack’s clutches, but his clutches are exactly what I need.
“What’s going on, Jack?” My eyes are welling with tears as I look at him, and it’s honestly true that I don’t know.
Me and Jack. And Martha.
My mentor, my colleague, my good buddy Martha Gardiner, the one who promised she saw potential in me, completes the parking lot triangle of people telling me what to do.
“Tell us, Rachel. Tell us what happened.” Martha opens her arms to me, and her voice is saccharine and poison. “You can’t hide this any longer. Let’s go inside. And you can tell us the truth.”
Like I can’t make my own decisions about what’s true.
Oz hovers at my side like some muscle-bound nanny as we troop through the back door and down the hall. A studiedly uninterested Leon passes us, going the other way. He doesn’t even flinch. So he knew, too.
Does everyone know what’s going on but me?
I’m ready to explain, perfectly, whatever it is. I simply need to know what it is.
Ten minutes later, I do.
Jack had demanded to be here after Martha revealed her “findings” at our house. Our house! He’d demanded, wisdom aside, to represent me. He’d promised he wouldn’t warn me to keep quiet, but he’d called anyway. Because he cares about me. And needs to protect me.
They think I killed Danielle Zander.
That I lured her out to the parking lot. That I pushed her, hard, against a dumpster. And when she fell, I made sure she was dead. That I dragged her between two big green garbage containers and waited for the Sunday night snowfall to cover her. That I knew the surveillance camera was down, the statehouse was closed for a snow day, and the trash collection wasn’t until Monday night. Because I was jealous of Dani and Tom Rafferty.
Far as I’m concerned, they can concoct all the outrageous stories they want. They have no proof. None. At all. Because there is none. I’ll handle this, and I’ll walk out of here, and Jack and I, partners, will sue them for everything they’ve got.
Jack has his arm over the back of my metal chair. We’re sitting across the conference table from Martha, who’s opened that red accordion file folder she’d never let me see. Based on the drivel evidence she’s attempting to foist on us, I should have swiped it.
I sit, silent, taking it in. I know not to say a word, but I mentally respond to every one of Martha’s idiotic pieces of “evidence.”
That I reported Logan’s “screw you” call to Annabella? So what? That’s statehouse protocol. And screw Annabella for telling. That’s supposed to be confidential. I could nail her for that, I bet. And hey, I win, because Martha revealed Logan admitted she did it. Which is probably illegal, some kind of sexual harassment. I could nail her, too.
Martha’s saying it’s proof of my jealousy that I made up a story about Logan and Tom Rafferty’s late-night parking-lot encounters and told it to Annabella. Made up? Who’s to say I didn’t see them? Everyone worked late.
They should focus on the real bad guys. Annabella and Logan, for two. And Tom. And Nina. One of those is a far more likely suspect for Danielle’s murder. Or, as I’ve always hoped, they could charge both of the entitled Raffertys. Poetic justice.
Martha’s back is to the door. Behind her, seated in a row of plastic swivel chairs, Nick and Andrew and Eli, acting like they don’t know me. They all have yellow pads, and are taking notes like obedient do-bees. That statie’s posted outside the door.
“Do you have more?” Jack’s been taking notes, too, though he’s not as outraged as I might have expected. We need to talk. I need to make sure he knows how to handle this.
“We do,” Martha says, “We do have more. But don’t you want to—confer with your client? Tell her whatever you decide to tell her? I’m happy to give you two whatever time you need.”
Damn right, I think.
“We do.” Jack turns his yellow pad facedown. Places his pen on top of it. Waits.
Martha and her minions stand. The three good interns let her open the door, then troop out after her.
I wait until I hear the door click closed.
“Can you believe this?” I turn to Jack, eyes wide. “What do you think, honey?”
“I think they’re prosecutors, Rach,” he says. “And they’re convinced they have a case.”
“But we have a plan! Martha Gardiner’s a sleaze, a cheater. We have all that proof! She thought she had a case against your slasher-killer, too. Until you were too good and she had to disappear that witness.”
“Rachel.”
“Jack. Don’t interrupt me. Seriously. Listen. She knew she was losing the Deacon Davis case, so she got rid of those jurors. With the help of the judge, too, had to be. All we have to do is drop a big freaking dime. Several dimes. Or flat-out tell her we’re going to spill the beans. Rat her out. Her credibility will be zero. We know how to play this game. It’s worked out so well that I took this job. Wasn’t I right? I’ve learned so much from both of you.”
“Rachel.” Jack was shaking his head. Like I’m wrong? I’m totally not wrong.
“Jack, no, I’m right. Remember? You told me it was a bad idea, working here, but I truly thought I could learn the other side of the law. But she’d cheated on you—oh, that sounds funny—and I knew I had to report her. We had to. Because it wasn’t fair to you! Or
poor poor Deacon Davis.”
“Rachel.”
“What?” I hate that tone. It’s like he thinks I’m an idiot.
“Rach? You think it’s random that you wound up in Martha Gardiner’s office?”
“I don’t want to argue with you, honey,” I say. “You know we never argue. But wait. Martha said—you could decide what to tell me about what you talked about his morning. What’s ‘this morning’?”
A sharp rap on the door. I look up, frowning. They’re not supposed to interrupt us until we say it’s time.
“Jack? What happened this morning?”
“Come in,” Jack says.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
MARTHA GARDINER
“One more thing.” Martha kept one hand on the conference room doorjamb. Kept her body in the hall. In the room, but not in the room.
“We were talking,” Rachel said. “Are you supposed to interrupt?”
“Rachel?” Jack shot his wife a look. Martha tried to read his face. She felt sorry for him. Yes, they were adversaries, but they played fair, or equally fair. No one was perfect. And winning was the goal for both of them. Only one side could prevail, though. That was the accepted and indelible reality. Signing on to the law was signing up for war.
Martha almost laughed at herself for the unexpected sentimentality.
“One more thing,” Martha repeated. “Rachel, do you remember that day in the car? When you oh-so-casually asked me about cold cases? Like you thought I had no idea what you were really asking about?”
“Don’t say anything, Rachel,” Jack said.
“You asked me, What’s the reason most cold cases are solved? And what did I say?”
Rachel opened her mouth as if to answer, but Jack clamped a restraining hand on her forearm.
“I remember,” Martha said. “I told you—it’s if a new witness emerges.”
Martha turned, with a certain lift in her heart, and opened the door wider. It was dramatic, she knew, and she might have handled it less sensationally. But life was dramatic. The law was dramatic. It revealed the truth.
“I’m sure you all know Nina Rafferty,” she said.
Martha could tell Rachel didn’t know where to look. At Jack or Martha or Nina. But Nina stood framed in the doorway, elegantly cool, hair slicked back and wearing a reserved dress, sleeveless and so charcoal it was almost black, so fashionably effortless it almost didn’t exist. No earrings, no jewelry. Not even a wedding ring.
The senator’s ex-wife stood motionless. Martha had advised her not to sit down, but to stand there, let them see her, and then observe what happened. She was a brave woman, with cards of her own to play and a game of her own to lose. She’d already lost personally, that was for sure. But Martha herself, believing what Rachel North had told Annabella Rigalosa, had—with only the most honorable of intentions—almost ruined this woman’s life. And that’s what made Nina Perini Rafferty brave. That even at such a cost, and even in service of a one-time adversary, she’d come forward to find justice.
Martha might have been furious over what Nina told her. But it meant she’d made a mistake with Nina. Martha had admitted it to her, and then apologized.
“Ms. Perini?” Martha used Nina’s now-preferred surname.
“What’s this all about?” Jack stood, as of course he would. And faced his former client. The one he’d saved from prison. “Nina?”
“Nina?” Martha turned to the woman, giving her the cue to begin. Nina had legal problems of her own. And Martha could never condone what Nina had decided six years ago. But four weeks ago, Nina had called her. And justice delayed, Martha had decided, was justice nonetheless.
“I saw you, Rachel,” she said. “I saw you in the parking lot.”
“Saw what?” Jack said. “When?”
Of course it was only Nina’s word now, Martha thought. But she needed to see what would happen as a result.
“I lied to you, Jack, about where I was.” Nina’s voice was sorrowful. Contrite. “But the alibi was good enough, wasn’t it? And you believed me. And for that I thank you.”
“What?” Rachel rose from her chair, standing, looking at Nina eye-to-eye. Twenty years separated them, and a lifetime of decisions.
“Rachel? I hated her, too, frankly. Danielle.” Nina pressed her palms together and touched them to her lips. Took a deep breath. “It’s embarrassing, and I feel so—guilty. But—I didn’t care that you killed her. She deserved it. She tried to steal my husband. Does it sound old-fashioned to say it? Though he and I had long parted over his statehouse flings. Danielle Zander wasn’t Tom’s first, Rachel. As I’m sure you know.”
“He gave her a gold necklace!” Rachel pointed at Nina, her face flushing, her eyes wide. “A Tiffany necklace. An expensive necklace. And he told me it was for you! How do you feel about that? He lied to you, every single day. Cheated on you.”
Nina put up two palms, stopping her. “There’s nothing you can say to upset me anymore, Rachel. I’m sorry he hurt you. And I’m sorry he drove you to this. But he ruins everything he touches. I managed to leave him, though at that time he was so self-absorbed he didn’t know it. You, on the other hand, didn’t. Leave.”
“Are you kidding me, Nina?” Jack stood now, too. Almost pushed his wife behind him as he widened his arms, entreating. “You perjured yourself? Why didn’t you tell the truth?”
Martha had never seen his face like that, fierce in anger. And sorrow. In court—who knows how many times?—Jack Kirkland weathered whatever surprises ambushed him. This time was different.
“I’m so sorry, Jack.” Nina shook her head, pressed her lips together. “But I couldn’t. If I had said where I was? Who I was with? It would have ruined his life, too. And I loved him too much to do that. But I wasn’t in Maine, I was in a townhouse on Beacon Hill. A townhouse that overlooked the parking lot. Not to mention that you were my lawyer, the best in Boston, and the person I saw was—Well.”
“That’s cra—” Rachel began, but Jack shushed her again.
“If my hearing had gone the other way, I would have told you,” Nina said. “He—and, no, I’ll never tell you who it was—had given me permission to go ahead. But if all went as we hoped, he promised to stick to our story. He’d alibi me in Maine, say we’d happened by chance to be at the same place. And as long as the case stayed cold—I wanted to protect him. I could leave Tom. Let the scandal be his scandal, and not mine. He deserved it. I deserved it.”
“Go on,” Martha encouraged her. It had been obstruction of justice as well as perjury, and Nina knew the sword that was hanging over her.
“But a few weeks ago, Ms. Gardiner’s interns came to see me, to interview me. They said Ms. Gardiner had seen some video and was reopening the case and talking to everyone involved. They told me that you, Rachel, had tried to ruin Tom. Poison people against him. And they asked me if there was anything I hadn’t said back then—anything I knew about Tom and Danielle. But it wasn’t only what Danielle did that I knew about. It was what you did.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
MARTHA GARDINER
Martha handed Jack the envelope. Friday afternoon at Salamanca, deserted and empty. The Charles River, uncaring and having witnessed endless human dramas unfold, flowed outside the vast picture window. Sal had left them alone with iced tea and turkey sandwiches. She watched Jack open the envelope, take out the piece of paper inside. He’d agreed to talk to her here, where no one would witness the two adversaries conferring.
“It’s blank, Martha!” He waved the paper at her, frowning. “Is this a goddamned joke?”
Jack Kirkland was angry with her, and rightly so. He’d demanded the return on the warrant, the list of what they’d discovered in the search of his home. Of course there was nothing. Martha never expected there would be. But she had to make sure.
“Rachel’s not dumb,” Martha said. “You think she’d keep an incriminating earring? Or an incriminating anything?”
Jack shrugged, worried a stra
w around his iced tea. “The whole thing is—”
“We did find a stash of, I guess, memorabilia. From Rachel’s statehouse days. But we can’t make a murder case out of a bunch of newspaper clippings and photos of Tom Rafferty.”
Martha let that linger, hoping Jack would realize that Rachel latched on to whatever power figure she thought would help her. She’d tried it with Rafferty, and then Jack, and then Martha herself, signing on to the prosecution side without so much as a whisper of loyalty.
“We shouldn’t be talking,” Jack said.
“We’re not,” Martha assured him. “But we have the same goal, don’t we? That the system works. That there’s justice? And we all do that the best way we can.”
“I can’t envision it.” Jack shook his head. “My mind won’t accept it. It cannot be true. There’s got to be another explanation.”
“Nina saw her. And Jack? Rachel asked me herself, when she felt confident enough to discuss the investigation of the murder she herself committed—”
“Allegedly.”
“Sure. But Jack? Rachel had the nerve to ask me who I thought was the killer. I’d suspected her from the beginning, but back then we had nothing. No way to prove it. And then—she went to law school.”
“My idea,” Jack said. “We were gonna be partners.”
“Was it your idea?” Martha paused a beat, to let Jack consider that. “Because here’s the thing. The whole thing. As prosecutor—God forgive me for this, but you’d get it on discovery anyway.…”
Outside, a duck flapped in the Charles, and both turned to watch the iridescent mallard and then the dusky female slash off into the sky.
“I took Rachel with me on a few so-called interviews. Did she tell you? But they were all shams, set up in advance with the interviewees’ knowledge and preparation. The other interns helped with that. But we needed to see how she would respond. To see what she’d do and say. And every time, we got a bingo. When Logan Concannon told about her betrayal by a coworker, Rachel acted as if she’d never heard such a thing. She also feigned surprise that Annabella Rigalosa had received complaints about Tom Rafferty. Completely phony, because she’s the one who complained. But Tom Rafferty himself was the clincher.”
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