Текст книги "Maximum Security"

Автор книги: Rose Connors

Соавторы: Rose Connors
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CHAPTER 19

Judge Long called a thirty-minute recess to give the defense time to examine the Commonwealth’s surprise exhibit, time to digest the contents of the lab report, time to construct our own version of what it all means. Normally, the prosecutor is required to disclose all such evidence before presenting it in court. Trial by ambush went out with the Dark Ages.

The disclosure rule is always malleable at this stage of the game, though. The government’s version of probable cause came to light today, not yesterday. And since Geraldine’s office received the report from the Commonwealth’s crime lab just an hour or so before open session began, Judge Long ruled that the Common-wealth’s failure to disclose was harmless.

As a practical matter, of course, the judge is right. This judge usually is.

We’ll be given ample opportunity to have an independent lab examine the brass swan before this case gets to trial. We’ll hire our own forensic experts to analyze DNA, to determine blood type, and to identify fingerprints. But the answers I want right now can’t come from a lab or a physician or a scientist. They have to come from Louisa Rawlings. And so far at least, she doesn’t seem to have any.

She’s shivering, though it’s not the least bit cold in here. We’re in the jury deliberation room, across the hall from the main courtroom. Louisa and the Kydd are seated at a long, narrow table; I’m on my feet. The Commonwealth’s documents are spread out in front of the Kydd and he’s still wading through them. The bagged brass swan is in front of Louisa. She doesn’t touch it.

I take it from the table and hold it up to the fluorescent light. It’s the mother swan, not one of her two cygnets. Portions of the skin fragments Geraldine referred to would have been scraped off at the crime lab for analysis, but two remain affixed to the brass. Even through the plastic, the fragments are easy to see with the naked eye. And I’ll be damned if they were there twenty-four hours ago.

We’ll get to the swan in a minute. I have another issue on my mind. “Louisa,” I ask, “did you have brunch at the club last Sunday morning?”

She stares at me for a moment before she answers. “No,” she says. “I didn’t. Truth is, I found my companions rather dull. And I had a lot on my mind. I bought a coffee and drove to Lighthouse Beach with it.”

“But you told Mitch Walker you ate at the club.”

“No, I didn’t. I told him exactly what I told you—that I’d been invited to play nine holes and have brunch. He didn’t ask anything else about it.”

I shake my head at her.

“What was I supposed to do?” she asks. “Volunteer that I needed time alone to think about my impending divorce? Tell the cop I didn’t want to go home until I was pretty sure my husband had gone for the day?”

She can protest all she wants. Her eyes tell me she knows how stupid she was.

“Well, your clever little answer is what landed you here, Louisa. And this”—I hold the swan out toward her—“just might keep you in.”

I set the wrapped fixture back on the table, closer to Louisa than it was before, hoping she’ll shed some light on its current condition. She recoils from it, shaking her head. “I can’t explain this,” she says, her voice trembling along with the rest of her. “It makes no sense.”

“Hold on,” the Kydd says, pulling a page free from a stapled packet. I walk behind him, so I can look over his shoulder and read. He’s holding a sheet divided into three columns. It’s the inventory of items confiscated by the two guys from the state crime lab. The swan is near the bottom of the list.

The Kydd runs his finger horizontally across the page on the swan line. The middle column, the widest of the three, gives a brief description of the item identified in column one. The final entry, in the third column, tells where it was found. The brass swan, the state guys claim, was discovered in the Rawlings’s basement.

“What was it doing down in the basement?” the Kydd asks Louisa.

She looks blank. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I take the inventory sheet from him and put it in front of her, on top of the bagged exhibit, my index finger directing her attention to the swan line. “Did you remove it from the hot tub for some reason?” Surely Louisa would have noticed if the mother swan had migrated from the Queen’s Spa.

She’s silent. After a moment, she sits a little straighter, tapping the sheet. “Wait,” she says, “that must be the other swan.”

“The other swan?” I wonder how many brass swans one household can support.

“Yes,” she says, more animated now. “When the plumbing fixtures first arrived, just a week or so before we moved in, the plumber called us in Greenwich to say the largest master-bath faucet was defective, stripped threads or some such thing. Anyhow, there was no way he could create a proper seal. It was leaking from the base of the neck.”

“So you ordered a replacement?” I ask.

“Herb did,” she says. “He called the plumbing supply company—a place in Ohio, I think it was—and they agreed to ship a new one right away. We’d spent a buck or two on them, after all.”

“What happened to the first one?”

“The plumber left it on top of one of the bathroom sinks. I found it the day we moved in. Herb was out on the dock, fussing with the boat as usual, and I carried the swan out to the back deck to ask him what I should do with it.”

Hence her prints. “And what did he say?”

“He said to just leave it there, on the picnic table; he’d take care of it. He said he’d agreed to ship it back to the company. They thought it could be refurbished. He must have moved it into the basement and then…”

“And then he never got around to it,” I finish for her.

She nods, her spurt of animation visibly fading.

“Who had access to the basement, Louisa?”

Her eyes grow wider. “Anyone who wanted it, I suppose. Herb always went down through the bulkhead in the yard. He kept his tools and boating equipment down there.”

“Is that the only way to get there?”

She shakes her head. “No. There’s a stairway from the kitchen, but it’s steep. Herb never used it, as far as I know. He always used the bulkhead.”

A rhythmic series of knocks breaks the silence and then Wanda peeks in. “You folks ready?” she asks. “The judge wants to wrap it up.”

“Two minutes,” I tell her. She nods and leaves, the wooden door clicking shut behind her, and I turn back to Louisa with Taylor Peterson’s theory running through my head. “Shift gears with me for a minute,” I tell her.

She nods.

“Who did your husband normally take out on the boat with him?”

She laughs. “It’d be easier to tell you who he didn’t take. Herb would have taken the mailman if the mailman would have gone. Herb loved that damned boat, loved showing her off as much as anything.”

“Did you go with him?”

“On occasion,” she says. “It’s not my cup of tea, tossing about on the waves. But I’d go with him once in a while to keep him company.”

“What about Glen Powers?” I ask. “You mentioned he and Herb had boating in common.”

She shakes her head. “They weren’t that chummy,” she says. “Herb and Glen would talk about boats occasionally. But they never went out on one together.”

“Steven Collier?” I try next.

“Sometimes,” she says. “They’d take the Carolina Girl out on a weekend afternoon every now and then. But Steven has his own boat, so it wasn’t that often. They spent more time together talking about gear than they did on the water.”

I’m not getting much here, but I may as well finish my short list. “Anastasia?” I ask. “Lance Phillips?”

She laughs again. “Herb had Anastasia around boats all the time when she was a child, hoping to get her hooked. But alas, the dear girl grew up to loathe the great outdoors. And Lance gets sea-sick in the shower.”

Well, this discussion has got me nowhere.

“We’d better head across the hall,” I tell her. “I think we’ve used up our two minutes.”

I take the inventory sheet from her and hand it back to the Kydd. He restacks his documents and then leads the way out of the jury room. Louisa follows. Mother Swan and I bring up the rear.

“Louisa,” I say as we cross the hallway, “when we go back inside, it’s probably best if you let me do the talking.”

She glances over her shoulder as we enter the courtroom, her perfect eyebrows arched. “All of it?” She’s incredulous.

“Yes,” I tell her. “All of it.”

She looks disappointed, as if I’ve just taken all the fun out of this for her. She settles into the chair the Kydd offers and then turns to face me. “I went to law school too, you know.”

“I’m aware of that,” I remind her. “So did Clarence.”

She glances over at young Clarence and nods, conceding my point, and her expression grows more somber. The bailiff tells us to rise as Judge Long emerges from chambers, but Louisa leans closer to me before she complies. “Who would do such a thing to Herb?” she asks. Genuine sadness fills her dark brown eyes.

I shake my head as we stand, but say nothing. My question is more basic than that. It makes perfect sense that Louisa’s prints are all over the Commonwealth’s exhibit. But where the hell are Herb’s?

CHAPTER 20

Judge Long isn’t a particularly tall man, but he reaches the bench with just five energetic strides. He nods a greeting into the gallery as he climbs the few steps and takes his seat. A handful of newcomers has arrived in the courtroom, and a flurry of activity is now audible behind us.

Among the new arrivals is Woody Timmons from the Cape Cod Times. He’s the reporter regularly assigned to the Barnstable County Complex and it’s no surprise that he’s here. He seems to be hardwired into these buildings. Rarely does any case of import escape his radar.

Woody has scores of cronies among the staff of the county complex—intake officers, victim advocates, and docket clerks—many of whom get the earliest glimpses of each new matter as it arrives. Along with most other county staffers, they congregate after work every Friday at the local watering hole, the Jailhouse. They spot one another drinks, shoot darts, and exchange well-informed opinions on the county’s latest crises. Woody takes good care of his courthouse contacts; he almost never misses the Friday festivities. Any number of his cohorts would have telephoned his office this afternoon to deliver this week’s hottest scoop.

But Woody’s not the only late-afternoon arrival. Three still photographers pace the length of the bar, their shutters clicking steadily. Judge Long is one of the only judges in the county who allows flash photographs in his courtroom. “It’s all part of the process,” he always says. “The citizens deserve accurate information from their courtrooms, and photographs provide part of it.” The press, of course, agrees.

The photographers’ partners—guys with notebooks open and pens poised—crowd into the front bench with Woody, prompting Woody to move back a few rows. Their press badges identify them as representatives from the Providence Journal, the New Bedford Telegraph, and The Boston Globe. Word is out, it seems. And it’s already over the bridge.

I’m taken aback by their appearance here so soon, but I realize, after a moment, that I shouldn’t be. Any woman charged with the murder of her husband ignites a media fire. She’s hot news. But adding wealth to the story is like pouring gasoline on the flames. If the accused is a socialite, she’s more than news. She’s a front-page photograph, a screaming, large-print headline.

Louisa appears oblivious to it all. She seems not to hear her name whispered repeatedly from the other side of the bar, not even to notice the flashbulbs that explode each time she turns her profile to the gallery. She’s leaning sideways, toward the Kydd, scanning the Commonwealth’s lengthy documents along with him, pointing to a particular entry now and then to ask him for an explanation. I’m glad she’s willing to participate; I want her to be proactive in her own defense. I just hope the Kydd remembers how to comprehend the written word while she’s breathing over his shoulder.

Judge Long repositions his half-glasses and signals for the rest of us to sit. With the solitary exception of Geraldine Schilling, we do. Few directives apply to our District Attorney. She wouldn’t take a seat at this stage of the proceedings unless a lit cigarette and a dry martini were waiting on the table in front of it.

“Attorney Nickerson,” the judge says, “I trust you and your client have had sufficient time to examine the Commonwealth’s evidence?”

“We have, Your Honor.” I stand and approach the bench. Geraldine follows, as if the judge and I need a chaperone, and I spin to fire a silent warning in her direction. I imagine Pedro Martinez might get a comparable feeling when he hurls an inside pitch and edges Derek Jeter away from the plate. She stops a few feet behind me and folds her arms, a reluctant concession to the fact that I’m up.

“At this time, Your Honor, we believe the Commonwealth’s exhibit is a plumbing fixture Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings purchased when they were renovating their home. It proved to be defective and the retailer replaced it. It was stored in the basement so eventually it could be shipped back to the vendor.”

Geraldine moves closer to the bench and turns to face me, her thin eyebrows arched. Her question couldn’t be any plainer if she flashed it on a neon billboard. So what? she telegraphs. Geraldine is a master of dramatic presentation; no attorney in the county spends more time painting each painful detail than she does. The rest of us, though, should just get on with it. Every word we utter is a waste of the court’s time.

“The point is, Your Honor, it’s no surprise that Mrs. Rawlings’s prints are on the fixture. Just as it would be no surprise to find my prints on the fixtures in my home, your prints on the fixtures in yours.”

“That’s not the point at all,” Geraldine interrupts. She moves past me, closer to the bench. “The point is that Mrs. Rawlings’s prints share space with skin fragments, hair, blood—all from her bludgeoned husband. Those aren’t things we’d expect to find on the fixtures in your home, Judge.” She turns and faces me again, her scowl saying she’s not about to comment on what she might find in mine.

“The exhibit proves the deceased was attacked with that fixture, Your Honor. Nothing more.”

“Nothing more?” Geraldine moves closer to me and her green eyes grow wide. “My Sister Counsel is mistaken,” she says to the judge. “The exhibit proves a good deal more than that.”

Geraldine “Sister Counsels” me every chance she gets. It’s one of those archaic traditions the Massachusetts Bar Association seems unable to part with—lawyers calling one another siblings. I find it utterly irritating. And Geraldine finds that irresistible.

She turns and points first at Louisa, then up at her captured swan on the bench. “The exhibit does prove the victim was attacked with it,” she says. “It also proves the defendant wielded the murder weapon. And it proves she’s the only person who did.”

“It proves no such thing,” I counter. “Anyone who watches Law & Order once in a while knows how to avoid leaving prints behind. The exhibit proves only that the murderer had access to the house, or at least to the fixture.”

Geraldine looks up at the ceiling and raises both hands, as if she just scored a touchdown. “Ah,” she says, her expression brightening, “my Sister Counsel brings us directly to my next point.”

Her Sister Counsel didn’t intend to do that, of course.

“Two people lived in that house,” she continues. “And now one of them is dead. The house has a security system, Judge.”

“But they didn’t use it, Your Honor.” I step closer to the bench. “It wasn’t activated.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Geraldine holds up one of the police reports. “There was no sign of forced entry.”

She’s right about that. The cops found no indication of surreptitious activity anywhere near the Easy Street estate. And Louisa noticed nothing out of the ordinary when she returned home from the club—and Lighthouse Beach—last Sunday.

“That’s true,” I tell the judge. “But like so many of us on the Cape, Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings weren’t big on locking their doors. And plenty of people had access, anyhow. Deliverymen, construction workers, landscapers…”

Geraldine lets out a small laugh and shakes her head. “We all know what happened here, Judge.” She stares up at the bench and points back at Louisa. “We may not know the details, but we’ve got the big picture. This woman knocked her husband out with a single blow. Maybe she was enraged, maybe not. Maybe she did it for the money, maybe not. Maybe she intended to render him unconscious, maybe not.”

Geraldine turns and locks eyes with Louisa. “But render him unconscious she did. And when she realized what she’d done, she decided to finish the job. She—”

“You have no business saying any of those things, Miss Geraldine.” Louisa’s voice isn’t trembling anymore; it’s steady and strong. She’s on her feet, leaning over our table, her dark eyes like lit coals. She’s mad. She stares up at the judge as everyone else’s eyes fix on her. “Surely this woman isn’t permitted to say such terrible things about me, Your Honor. There’s not a shred of truth in what she’s saying. I’m going to ask you to stop her.”

So much for my “let me do the talking” admonition.

Judge Long tucks his chin in and peers down over his half-glasses, the slightest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Oh, but she is, Mrs. Rawlings. She is allowed to say such things about you. It’s part of her job. And frankly, it’d be easier to stop a freight train.”

“But the woman doesn’t even know me,” Louisa protests. “Her story is ridiculous.”

“Your Honor.” I glare at Louisa as I address the court, silently telling her to put a lid on it. “The bottom line is that the Commonwealth has nothing more than the accused’s fingerprints on an item where we’d expect to find them.” I pause and walk back toward our table, to stand beside Louisa. “Mrs. Rawlings is an attorney, Your Honor, a graduate of Yale Law School.”

Judge Long is obviously surprised by this revelation. He looks out at Louisa with heightened interest. Even Geraldine seems mildly intrigued. I pause a moment, to let them assess her demeanor, before I continue. “I guarantee you, Your Honor, if she’d used that fixture to attack her husband, her prints would not be on it.”

Geraldine throws her hands in the air and claims center stage again. “A defendant who’s smart enough to know better,” she says, “too smart to do something so stupid. Now there’s something we don’t see more than ten times a day.”

I stay focused on Judge Long, ignoring Geraldine’s sarcasm. “There’s not enough here, Your Honor. Her prints in her own home. It’s not enough to bind over.”

He raises his hands, palms out, to silence me. “Brief it,” he says to both of us. “I’ll hear argument in the morning. First thing.”

I turn to catch the Kydd’s eye and he’s waiting for me. He leans back in his chair and sighs, nodding repeatedly. He gets it, he’s telling me. We have a long night ahead.

The poker-faced matron returns to our table with the cuffs and directs Louisa to put her hands behind her back. Flashbulbs begin popping again as Louisa complies. She looks up at me as the cuffs clang shut, her tears flowing freely now, her eyes panicked. She has a long night ahead too. And she knows it.

CHAPTER 21

Tuesday, October 17

Nothing packs the Barnstable County Superior Courthouse like a case that gets top billing on the late-night news. The Kydd and I were in the office until well after midnight, but at eleven we flipped the conference room TV on to see if the coverage of Louisa Rawlings would be as inflammatory as we expected. It was worse.

The parking lot is full when I arrive. It takes ten minutes and more than a little creativity to find a spot. When I approach the back doors of the Superior Courthouse, a small circle of the nicotine-dependent moves aside without changing shape. Little white clouds rise up from the center of the ring. Smoke signals.

The courthouse hallway is jammed. I push my way through, doing my best to avoid reporters and photographers, but they’re everywhere. Their lights blind me and their boisterous, never-ending questions are indecipherable. Woody Timmons isn’t among them, though. I spot him as I climb the stairs to the second floor. He’s in an alcove talking with Officer Holt, their heads close together as if they might be keeping their voices low. They’re the only people in the building who’ve entertained that idea.

It’s a few minutes before eight when I reach the main court-room’s side door and I’m relieved to be here. This entry is reserved for attorneys, parties, and select witnesses. It’s protected from the press on this particular morning by a burly guard with a shaved head. He looks altogether forbidding even before the fluorescent light catches the shiny metal on his hip. He nods as I pass, never taking his eyes from the crowd.

Every seat in the gallery is already filled. Two court officers are stationed at the double doors in back, directing those spectators just arriving to line up single file against the side walls. They call out reminders to those forgetful souls who double up. The officers are trying to keep a small portion of the side aisles clear, but they’re losing the battle.

The space reserved for the press corps has tripled. Three front benches to the right of the center aisle are roped off now and most of the faces there are familiar: local guys from the small, town-based papers, even a reporter I recognize from the Nantucket Mirror. He looks a bit bedraggled; his suit coat is wrinkled and he could use a shave. He must have crossed the big pond on a Cape Air red-eye into Hyannis.

The city boys showed up too. All the major players from the off-Cape presses are here, The Boston Herald’s Lou McCabe front and center. He occupies far more than his share of space on the front bench, his physique not unlike Jabba the Hutt’s, his papers and supplies strewn around him in piles. I’m always a little uneasy when Lou shows up to cover a case I’m handling. He nurtures a flair for the melodramatic.

The first row on the left of the middle aisle is also filled with faces I recognize. Steven Collier is on the closest end. Anastasia Rawlings is next to him, dressed either in Sunday’s costume or a duplicate. The boyfriend Lance is just about sitting in her lap and I wonder if the beast Lucifer is underneath his coat. Taylor Peterson and one of his crewmen have ended up next to Lance somehow, and Glen Powers is on the far end of the bench, keeping his distance from the others.

Woody Timmons comes through the back doors, but he doesn’t take advantage of the press’s reserved seating. He goes off on his own, leaning against a side wall amid the general public. I’ve noticed this about Woody before. He keeps his distance when his out-of-town colleagues pay us a visit. This is his turf. He understands the rules of the local game better than any of them. And he plays his cards close to the vest.

The Kydd is already here. He’s on his feet in front of the prosecutors’ table, trading paperwork with Clarence Wexler, who’s standing behind it. The Kydd isn’t paying much attention to Clarence, though. He’s listening intently to Geraldine, his expression somber. Geraldine looks downright happy, comfortable and relaxed in her tall leather chair.

The Kydd turns toward me as I drop my briefcase on the defense table. He puts a hand up to stop Geraldine’s recitation and signals for me to join them. His worried blue eyes tell me to do it now, not later.

The Kydd’s mouth has been open since I walked in, his lower jaw slack. He loosens his tie, as if he’s desperate for air, as I approach. He looks dazed, peaked. I know that look; I’ve seen it on his face before, more than once. Something is wrong.

Geraldine’s ready smile is my second clue. Things for Louisa Rawlings almost certainly have taken a turn for the worse. She beams up at me as I reach her table, her green eyes aglow. “Oh, good,” she says, looking genuinely pleased. “The gang’s all here.”

“What’s up, Geraldine?” I had been hoping to sound nonchalant. I’m pretty sure it didn’t come off that way, but I pretend it did.

Her smile expands. “More lab results,” she says, pointing to the stack of new documents in the Kydd’s hands. She rolls her high-backed chair out from the table and crosses her lean legs. She continues smiling up at me, her hands steepled beneath her chin. Whatever she’s got is gloat-worthy.

“And?”

“And it seems the little missus has done quite a bit of housework,” she says.

I doubt Louisa Rawlings has done a day of housework in her half century of life, but I don’t say so. Instead, I fold my arms and wait. I know Geraldine. If she’s hell-bent on dragging this out, a five-alarm fire in the next room wouldn’t change her mind.

“The master bath,” she says, shaking her blond head, “it must have been a bloody mess.”

“The master bath?”

The Kydd hands me a new report from the crime lab. The Received stamp from Geraldine’s office says it came in an hour ago. The specimen is identified by number only. The Kydd offers me the inventory sheet, the same one we reviewed yesterday, so I can match the number with the typewritten list. The specimen came from the floor in the master bathroom, Louisa’s Queen’s Spa, a ten-by-ten cutout from the pale oak floorboards near the hot tub. The undersides of the boards contain blood. A lot of blood. Herb’s.

“She did a commendable job cleaning up,” Geraldine says. She stands, leans over the table toward me, and feigns a pout. “But it wasn’t quite good enough.”

I’m pretty sure the Kydd is no longer the only sickly looking person in the courtroom. I glance over at him, then back at Geraldine. Words fail me. And I don’t think I’ve taken a breath for a while, either.

If Herb Rawlings was attacked in the Queen’s Spa—and he was, blood evidence doesn’t lie—then Taylor Peterson’s theory is all wrong. Herb wasn’t at the helm when the Carolina Girl left the dock on Sunday. Someone else was. Someone who knew how to negotiate the cut. But someone who didn’t know a pop-up when he saw one.

“Oh, look,” Geraldine says, her downturned mouth doing a flip. “You can break the news to her now.”

The noise in the gallery escalates dramatically as the side door opens and Louisa Rawlings appears. The matron had the common decency to remove Louisa’s cuffs before she entered the camera-packed courtroom, a courtesy not often afforded to high-profile prisoners. It seems Louisa has added at least one member of the prison staff to the long list of mortals she’s charmed.

She holds her head high as she walks to our table, not looking directly at the cameras, but not shying away from them either. She’s wearing the standard prison-issue orange jumpsuit, a far cry from her usual sartorial elegance. Her auburn hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail and her face looks scrubbed; no makeup. When she reaches our table I realize her eyes are bloodshot; she probably didn’t sleep much last night. And still, Louisa Rawlings is stunning.

“You!”

The Kydd and I twist in our seats. Geraldine and Clarence do too. It’s a voice from the gallery, a deep one, and I recognize it from just that syllable.

“You murdered my father!” Anastasia is on her feet and all cameras in the room turn in her direction now.

“Murdered him!” She thrusts her fists at Louisa amid a hailstorm of flashbulbs.

The crowd’s moderate roar rises a few decibels. Still, Anastasia is louder. “Murdered him!”

Two court officers rush down the center aisle, direct Steven Collier out of his seat, and then yank Anastasia from hers. Each of them takes one of her arms and together they drag her toward the exit. She shouts nonstop but she’s sobbing now too. “Jesus,” the Kydd mutters, “if those are real tears, there’s going to be a hell of a huge black puddle on the floor.”

Steven Collier and Lance Phillips hustle down the center aisle behind Anastasia and her escorts. So does half the press corps. “Murdered him!” Anastasia shrieks again, the loudest one yet, just as the heavy double doors slam shut behind the entourage.

The Kydd and I face front again but Louisa’s gaze remains on the back doors a moment longer. “Some college students major in history,” she says calmly. “Anastasia chose histrionics.”

“We have a problem,” I whisper as she sits.

“Tell me about it,” she replies.

“A big one.”

She laughs a little and leans toward me. “Did you think I hadn’t noticed, darlin’?”

“A new big one,” I add.

She turns to face me. She’s not laughing anymore.

Joey Kelsey has been the bailiff in this courtroom for the better part of a year now. He races through his morning Oyez! Oyez! litany and the crowd quiets. We get to our feet along with everyone else in the room, Louisa’s worried eyes glued to mine. I can’t explain anything to her now, though. Judge Long is already halfway to the bench and I need to address him at once, before he signals for Wanda Morgan to call the case. And before Geraldine Schilling starts talking.

“Your Honor.” I’m on my feet before he has any chance to sit. “We need a sidebar.” I leave our table and head toward the bench before he says a word. I don’t intend to take no for an answer on this one.

A murmur swells in the gallery and Judge Long bangs his gavel. He’s still standing.

“That won’t be necessary, Judge.” Geraldine is on my heels. “Everything we have to say this morning can be said on the record.”

What she really means, of course, is that she’d like to begin trying this case today—to the public and the press. This crowd will devour what she has to say. And the reporters will distribute it to the masses in vivid detail. Such a pity to waste it all on a sidebar.

Judge Long apparently has abandoned all hope of taking his seat. He hesitates for a moment, gavel still in hand, his eyes darting from me to Geraldine and back again. He moves to the side of his bench and faces away from the spectators. “Counsel,” he says, “approach.”

We’re already there.

“More surprise evidence,” I tell him.

“For Christ’s sake,” Geraldine snaps, “we got it an hour ago.”