False Witness

by Karin Slaughter

Until last night.

  Her hands started to ache. She looked down. Her fingers were wrapped around the bottom of the steering wheel. The knuckles were bright white teeth biting into the leather. She checked the clock. Her angst had eaten up ten full minutes.

  “Focus,” she chided herself.

  Andrew Trevor Tenant.

  His file was still on the passenger seat. Leigh closed her eyes for another moment, summoning the sweet, goofy Trevor who’d loved to run around the yard and occasionally eat paste. That was why Linda and Andrew wanted Leigh to defend him. They had no idea that Leigh was involved in Buddy’s sudden disappearance. What they wanted was a defender who would still see Andrew as that harmless child from twenty-three years ago. They didn’t want her to associate him with the monstrous acts he was accused of.

  Leigh retrieved the file. It was time for her to read about those monstrous acts.

  She took another breath to reset herself. Leigh wasn’t one of those believers in bad blood or apples not falling far from the tree. Otherwise, she would be an abusive alcoholic with a felony assault conviction. People could transcend their circumstances. It was possible to break the cycle.

  Had Andrew Tenant broken the cycle?

  Leigh opened the file. She read the charge sheet in depth for the first time.

  Kidnap. Rape. Aggravated assault. Aggravated sodomy. Aggravated sexual battery.

  You didn’t need much more than Wikipedia to understand the accepted definitions of kidnap, rape, sodomy, and battery. The legal definitions were more complicated. Most states used the blanket term sexual assault for related sex crimes, so the charge of sexual assault could indicate anything from unwanted ass-grabbing to violent rape.

  Some states used degrees to rank the severity of the crime. First degree was the most serious, then the others fell into lesser degrees, usually distinguished by the nature of the act—from penetration to coercion to involuntary touching. If a weapon was used, if the victim was a child or law enforcement officer, or had diminished capacity, then felony charges came into play.

  Florida used the term sexual battery, and no matter how heinous or not-so-heinous the act, unless you were a wealthy, politically connected pedophile, the crime was always charged as a serious felony and could carry a life sentence. In California, misdemeanor sexual battery could land you in county jail for six months. Sentencing for felony sexual battery ranged anywhere from one year in county lock-up to four years in big-boy prison.

  The state of Georgia fell in line with most states so far as sexual assault encompassing anything from non-consensual touching to full-on necrophilia. The term aggravated was used to indicate the most serious charges. Aggravated sodomy meant force was used against the victim’s will. Aggravated assault meant a gun or other life-threatening weapon was involved. A person who committed aggravated sexual battery intentionally penetrated the sexual organ or anus of another person with a foreign object without that person’s consent. The sentence for that offense alone could be life, or twenty-five years followed by probation for life. Either way, there was a mandatory lifetime registration on the sex offender registry. If you weren’t a hardened criminal when you went into the system, you would be by the time you got out.

  Leigh found the booking photo for Andrew Tenant.

  Trevor.

  It was the shape of his face that reminded her of the boy he used to be. Leigh had spent countless nights with his head in her lap while she read to him. She would keep glancing down, silently begging him to fall asleep so that she could study for school.

  Leigh had seen her share of mugshots. Sometimes defendants stuck out their chins or glared at the camera or did other stupid things that they thought made them look tough but played out exactly as you would expect with a jury. In Andrew’s photo, he was clearly trying not to show that he was scared, which was understandable. Scions didn’t often find themselves arrested and dragged down to the police station. He looked like he was chewing the inside of his bottom lip. His nostrils were flared. The harsh flash from the camera gave his eyes an artificial glimmer.

  Was this man a violent rapist? Was that little boy Leigh had read to, colored with, chased around the dirt-packed backyard while he giggled so hard he snorted, capable of growing into the same disgusting type of predator as his father?

  “Harleigh?”

  Leigh startled, papers flying into the air, a scream bleating out of her mouth.

  “I’m so sorry.” Andrew’s voice was muffled by the closed window. “Did I scare you?”

  “Hell yes you scared me!” Leigh grabbed at the loose pages. Her heart had banged into the back of her throat. She had forgotten how Trevor used to sneak up on her when he was a kid.

  Andrew tried again, “I’m really sorry.”

  She shot him a look that she usually reserved for family. And then she reminded herself that he was her client. “It’s fine.”

  His face was red from embarrassment. The mask hanging around his chin came up. It was blue with a white Mercedes logo across the front. The change was not an improvement. He looked like an animal who’d been muzzled. Still, he stepped back so that she could open the car door.

  The tremor was back in Leigh’s hands when she turned off the engine and pulled together the file. She had never been so grateful for the time it took to find a mask and cover her face. Her legs felt weak as she got out of the car. She kept thinking about the last time she had seen Trevor. He was lying in bed, eyes closed, completely clueless to what was happening in the kitchen.

  Andrew tried again, offering, “Good morning.”

  Leigh swung her purse over her shoulder. She shoved the file deep into her bag. In heels, she was at Andrew’s eye level. His blonde hair was combed back. His chest and arms were gym-toned but he had his father’s tapered waist and height. Leigh frowned at the suit, which was exactly the kind you’d expect a Mercedes salesman to be wearing—too blue, too fitted, too sharp. A mechanic or plumber on the jury would see that suit and hate him.

  “Uh …” Andrew indicated the large Dunkin’ Donuts cup he’d placed on the roof of her car. “I brought you some coffee, but that seems like a bad idea now that it’s happening.”

  “Thank you,” she said, as if they weren’t in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

  “I’m so sorry I frightened you Har—Leigh. I should call you Leigh. Just like you should call me Andrew. We’re both different people now.”

  “We are.” Leigh had to get control over her uneasiness. She tried to put herself on familiar ground. “Last night, I filed an emergency motion with the court to establish myself as counsel. Octavia already withdrew herself as attorney of record, so approval should be pro forma. Judges don’t like this last-minute finagling. There’s no way we’ll get a continuance. Considering Covid, we need to be ready to go at any time. If the jail locks down because of an outbreak or there’s another staffing shortage, we have to be ready to go. Otherwise, we could lose our slot and get bumped into next week or next month.”

  “Thank you.” He nodded once, as if he had only been waiting for his turn to speak. “Mom sends her apologies. There’s a company-wide meeting every Monday morning. Sidney’s already inside. I thought I could talk to you alone for a minute if that’s okay?”

  “Of course.” Leigh’s anxiety jacked back up. He was going to ask about his father. She took the coffee off the roof of her car to give herself a reason to turn away. She could feel the heat through the paper cup. The thought of drinking it made her queasiness intensify.

  “Have you seen—” Andrew indicated the file she’d stashed in her purse. “Have you read it yet?”

  Leigh nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  “I couldn’t get through to the end. It’s really bad what happened to Tammy. I thought we hit it off. I’m not sure why she’s doing this to me. She seemed nice. You don’t talk to someone for ninety-eight minutes if you think they’re a monster.”

  The specificity was strange, but he had given Leigh some muc
h-needed prompts. She resurrected the stray words from the summary statement in his file—Tammy Karlsen. Comma Chameleon. Fingerprints. CCTV.

  Tammy Karlsen was the victim. Prior to the pandemic, Comma Chameleon had been a hot singles bar in Buckhead. The police had found Andrew’s fingerprints where they shouldn’t be. They had CCTV of Andrew’s movements.

  Leigh’s memory added a stray detail that Cole Bradley had relayed last night. “Sidney is your alibi for the time of the assault?”

  “We weren’t exclusive then, but I got home from the bar and she was waiting for me on my doorstep.” He held up his hands as if to stop her. “I know that sounds totally coincidental, right? Sid shows up at my place on the very night I need an alibi? But it’s the truth.”

  Leigh knew that both the best and the worst alibis could sound wildly coincidental. Still, she wasn’t here to believe in Andrew Tenant. She was here to get him to a not guilty. “When did you get engaged?”

  “April tenth of last year. We’ve been off and on for two years, but with the arrest and the pandemic, it all brought us closer together.”

  “Sounds romantic.” Leigh struggled to sound like a lawyer who hadn’t survived the first months of the virus by filing dozens of no-fault Covid divorces. “Have you set the date?”

  “Wednesday, before jury selection begins on Thursday. Unless you think you can get the case dismissed?”

  The hopeful tone in his voice took her straight back to the Waleskis’ kitchen when Trevor asked if his mother would be home soon. Leigh hadn’t lied to him then and she absolutely couldn’t lie to him now. “No, this won’t go away. They’re coming after you. All we can do is be ready to fight back.”

  He nodded, scratching at his mask. “I guess it’s stupid for me to believe I’m going to wake up one day and this nightmare will be over.”

  Leigh glanced around the parking lot, making sure they were alone. “Andrew, we couldn’t get into the weeds in front of Sidney and Linda last night, but Mr. Bradley explained to you that there are other cases the district attorney will probably open if you plead guilty.”

  “He did.”

  “And he told you that if you lose your case at trial, those other cases could still—”

  “Cole also said you’re ruthless in the courtroom.” Andrew shrugged as if that was all it took. “He told Mom that he hired you because you were one of the best defense attorneys in the city.”

  Cole Bradley was full of shit. He didn’t even know which floor Leigh worked on. “I’m also brutally honest. If the trial goes sideways, you are looking at serious time.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit, Harleigh. You always put all your cards on the table. That’s why I wanted to work with you.” Andrew wasn’t finished. “You know, the sad part is, the MeToo movement really woke me up. I try hard to be an ally. We should believe women, but this—it’s unconscionable. False allegations only hurt other women.”

  Leigh nodded, though she didn’t find his words persuasive one way or another. The problem with rape was that a guilty man generally knew enough about the prevailing culture to say the same things an innocent man would. Soon Andrew would start talking about due process without realizing that what he was going through right now was exactly that.

  She said, “Let’s go inside.”

  Andrew stepped back so she could walk ahead of him toward the building. Leigh tried to get her head on straight in the interim. She had to stop acting like the worst kind of criminal. As a defense attorney, she knew that her clients didn’t get caught because the cops were brilliant detectives. The client’s own stupidity or guilty conscience usually landed them in legal peril. They either bragged to the wrong person or confessed to the wrong person or, most of the time, stepped on their own dicks, and then they needed a lawyer.

  Leigh wasn’t worried about guilty feelings, but she would have to be careful that her fear of getting caught didn’t somehow give her away.

  She transferred the coffee cup to her other hand. She steeled herself as she climbed up the crumbling concrete steps to the entrance.

  Andrew said, “I’ve looked for Callie over the years. What part of Iowa is she in?”

  Leigh felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise up. The biggest mistake a liar could make was to offer too many specifics. “Northwest corner, close to Nebraska.”

  “I’d love the address.”

  Shit.

  Andrew reached ahead of her to open the lobby door. The carpet was worn in front of the stairs. The walls were scuffed. The inside of the building felt more dreary and sad than it had from the outside.

  Leigh turned around. Andrew had gone down on one knee to untuck the leg of his pants from his ankle monitor. The device was geo-targeted, limiting him to home, work, and meetings with his attorneys. Anything else and an alarm would go off at the monitoring station. Technically. Like every other resource in the pandemic-wracked city, the probation office was stretched thin.

  Andrew looked up at her, asking, “Why Iowa?”

  This, at least, Leigh was prepared for. “She fell in love with a man. Got pregnant. Got married. Got pregnant again.”

  Leigh checked the sign. REGINALD PALTZ & ASSOC was upstairs.

  Again, Andrew let her go first. “I bet Callie’s a terrific mom. She was always so kind to me. It felt more like she was my sister.”

  Leigh gritted her teeth as she rounded the landing. She couldn’t figure out if Andrew’s questions were appropriate or intrusive. He had been so transparent as a child—immature for his age, gullible, easy to pin down. Now, all of Leigh’s finely honed gut instinct was falling to the wayside.

  He said, “Northwest corner. Is that where the derecho hit?”

  She squeezed the coffee cup so hard that the top almost popped off. Had he read everything he could find about Iowa last night? “They got some flooding, but they’re fine.”

  “Did she stick with cheerleading?”

  Leigh turned around at the top of the stairs. She had to redirect this before he put more words in her mouth. “I forgot you guys moved away after Buddy disappeared.”

  He had stopped on the landing. He blinked up at her, silent.

  Something about his expression felt off, though it was hard to tell because all she could really see were his eyes. She silently ran back through the conversation, trying to find out where it could’ve gone wrong. Was he acting strange? Was she?

  Leigh asked, “Where did you move to?”

  He adjusted his mask, pinching it around the bridge of his nose. “Tuxedo Park. We stayed with my uncle Greg.”

  Tuxedo Park was one of Atlanta’s oldest, monied neighborhoods. “You were a real Fresh Prince.”

  “No kidding.” His laugh sounded forced.

  Actually, everything about him felt forced. Leigh had worked with enough criminals to develop an internal warning siren. She felt it flashing bright red as she watched Andrew readjust his mask again. He was completely unreadable. She had never seen someone with such a flat, vacant look in their eyes.

  He said, “Maybe you don’t know the story, but Mom was really young when she met Dad. Her parents gave her an ultimatum: we’ll sign off on the legal stuff so you can get married, but we’ll disown you if you go through with it.”

  Leigh clenched her jaw so that it wouldn’t drop open. The legal age for marriage with parental consent was sixteen. As a teenager, Leigh had thought all adults were old, but now she realized that Buddy had been at least twice Linda’s age.

  “The bastards followed through on their threat. They abandoned Mom. They abandoned us,” Andrew said. “Grandpa only had one dealership then, but they had plenty of money. Enough to make our lives easier. Nobody lifted a finger. Not until Dad was gone, then Uncle Greg came swooping in talking about forgiveness and all this religious crap. He’s the one who made us change our last names. Did you know that?”

  Leigh shook her head. Last night, he’d made it sound like a choice.

  “It ruined our lives when Dad disappea
red. I wish whoever made him go away understood what that felt like.”

  Leigh swallowed down a wave of paranoia.

  “Anyway, it all worked out, right?” Andrew gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Until now.”

  He fell back into silence as he climbed the stairs. There had been an inflection of anger in his voice, but he’d quickly gotten it under control. It occurred to Leigh that her own guilt might not be at play here. Andrew could be uncomfortable around her for his own reasons. He probably felt like she was testing him, trying to weigh his guilt or innocence. He wanted her to believe he was a good man so that she would fight harder for him.

  He was wasting his time. Leigh rarely considered guilt or innocence. Most of her clients were guilty as hell. Some of them were nice. Some were assholes. None of it mattered because justice was blind except when it came to the color green. Andrew Tenant would have all of the resources his family’s money could buy—private investigators, specialists, forensic experts, and anyone else who could be monetarily induced to persuade a jury of his blamelessness. One lesson that working at BC&M had taught Leigh was that it was better to be guilty and rich than innocent and poor.

  Andrew indicated the closed door at the end of the hall. “He’s down—”

  The unmistakable husky laugh of Sidney Winslow echoed from the distance.

  “Sorry. She can be loud.” Andrew’s cheeks turned a slight red above his mask, but he told Leigh, “After you.”

  Leigh didn’t move. She had to remind herself yet again that Andrew was clueless about her role in what had really happened to his father. Only a stupid mistake on her part could make him start asking questions. Whatever sirens Andrew was setting off probably came courtesy of the fact that he could very well be a rapist.

  And Leigh was his lawyer.

  She launched into the spiel she should’ve given Andrew in the parking lot. “You understand that Octavia Bacca’s firm hired Mr. Paltz to do the investigation. And now Bradley, Canfield & Marks hired him to stay on the case, correct?”

  “Well, I brought Reggie into this, but yes.”

  Leigh would deal with the Reggie part later. Right now, she needed to make sure Andrew’s ass was covered. “So you understand that the reason the law firm hires an investigator rather than a client hiring him directly is because any discussions we have about strategy or any advice given falls under my work product, which is privileged information. Which means the prosecutor can’t compel the investigator to testify about what we’ve discussed.”