Justice

by Karen Robards

  There was a quick tap on the door, and a worried-looking Lenore stuck her head in.

  “Excuse me, but I have the Humane Society on the phone.” She started out directing her words to Pearse, but then her gaze slid around the table. “Does anybody have any idea how to get in touch with Allison? They’ve picked up her cat. Apparently it’s microchipped, and since she’s not answering the phone, we’re the backup number to call. I tried calling her, too. Nothing.”

  “I haven’t heard a word from her since that e-mail saying she was quitting.” Pearse looked inquiringly at the rest of them.

  “Me, neither.” Andrew shrugged.

  “Well, she wouldn’t be getting in touch with me,” Hayley said.

  “We all know that, Miss Congeniality.”

  “Shut up, Andrew. That whole Passion in Paradise thing was a crock anyway. She’ll be back here with her tail between her legs before Christmas, just you watch.”

  “Me-ow.” Andrew was grinning.

  Jess’s expression must have revealed the concern she was feeling, because Pearse said to her, “Don’t worry, even if Allison does come back your job’s safe.” Then he shook his head at Lenore. “I don’t know what to tell you. If you can’t reach her by phone, try sending her an e-mail. That’s the best I can do.”

  “I’m worried about the cat,” Jess clarified as alarm bells went off in her mind. For a moment she was tempted to tell them her concerns about Allison, but then she thought better of it. After all, what did she really have to impart? Besides Allison’s phone call to Lucy’s cell, the missed luncheon, and the similarity of Allison’s Facebook postings to Tiffany’s, the rest—seeing, or thinking she saw, Allison in her office, the sense of being watched she had when she was in there—wasn’t anything in her best interests to reveal if she wanted to continue to be taken seriously. Moreover, if she brought Tiffany into it, Pearse might very well order her to leave off anything to do with Tiffany.

  “I am, too.” Lenore gave Jess an approving look. “They told me the cat got turned in yesterday, and I’m pretty sure they only hold them for three days.”

  “Then …?” Andrew finished his question by raising his eyebrows and slicing his hand across his throat.

  Lenore nodded unhappily, while Hayley said to him, “How old are you, ten?”

  “Call Paloma DeLong at Shelter House,” Jess suggested. “She told me she watched Allison’s cat during her last business trip. Paloma was worried about the cat, actually, because she didn’t know who was watching it after that.”

  “Good idea.” Looking pleased, Lenore withdrew.

  “Okay, people, we’re done here, so get to work. We got hours to bill, remember. And don’t forget to be in the lobby at seven.” Pearse looked pointedly at Andrew. “In black tie.”

  Andrew grinned.

  “I’m impressed by the way you’ve jumped into the job with both feet,” Pearse told Jess quietly as they were leaving. “And I’m even more impressed that you’ve already started in on the pro bono work. I knew you’d be an asset to the team.”

  “Thank you.” Despite a niggling sense of disquiet concerning Allison’s cat, Jess felt a little glow. Then Pearse was talking to Andrew, and Hayley was giving Jess a look like she had overheard and sucked on a lemon at the same time, and Mark was coming down the hall, summoning her with a beckoning finger.

  She narrowed her eyes at him—armed neutrality was the best term to describe the state of their relationship so far this morning—but nevertheless moved to his side.

  “I’ve got some business that will take me out of the building until late this afternoon.” His voice was low, meant for her ears alone. Jess was conscious of Hayley’s sidelong glance as she passed them. Mark lifted a hand to Pearse, who was behind Jess, still talking to Andrew, the silent message being, Hang on a minute, I’ve got something to say to you. Then his attention was once again focused on her. “Don’t go heading out anywhere alone.”

  “Well, there goes my plan to go exploring the darkest, most deserted alley I can find.”

  “Smart-ass,” he said with a sudden, flickering grin, and left her.

  Whether it was because of the news about Allison’s cat or not, Allison’s presence felt particularly strong when Jess returned to her office. Turning on the light, opening the blinds and leaving the door ajar did not help appreciably. The sense of being watched was almost unnerving, but short of asking for a new office—or an exorcism—there didn’t seem to be anything Jess could do about it. Except, maybe, find Allison. Hopefully a message about her cat would move her to respond. If it didn’t … well, that was something to think about later. For now, if she wanted to keep her job, she had work to do.

  Jess plunged into the background checks, which helped them gauge the credibility of various witnesses and, thus, the relative strength of both their own case and the prosecution’s as well. Jameson involved an Episcopal bishop and his church bookkeeper wife who had been accused of embezzling over a million dollars from their building fund. Their pockets were apparently deep enough to allow them to hire Ellis Hayes for the defense, and the goal was to keep Mrs. Episcopal Bishop from going to jail. Regardless of the evidence, the case should have been fairly easy to plea bargain out, because, absent a murder charge, white, upper-middle-class women were almost never sent to jail. Unless, of course, she was truly innocent and insisted on proving it by going to trial, which always involved a degree of risk, or the prosecutors had a bee in their bonnets about this case for some reason.

  The landline, which was strictly for business, rang only occasionally, when a caller made it through to Lenore and her assistants and was directed on to Jess. But when her cell phone rang, she had to scramble to answer it herself, because it was still in her purse.

  “Miss Ford?” The voice, which was a woman’s, was hesitant, almost tremulous. Jess didn’t recognize it, but the caller ID gave her the name: Mona Isaacs. It rang a bell, but before Jess could place it the caller herself explained who she was. “I’m Tiffany Higgs’s mother. You left your card when you were out here yesterday. Tracy—my other daughter—said you said we should call you, that you’re on Tiffany’s side now.”

  Immediately Jess pictured her: short and heavy-set, round face, small features, a cap of slick black hair.

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Isaacs?”

  Mrs. Isaacs took a deep breath. “That prosecutor, Sandra Johnson. The one that was so nice to Tiffany through everything. She called the house this morning and said that they’re going to be charging Tiffany with perjury for changing her testimony during that damned trial. She said Tiffany ought to get a lawyer. Tiffany—she didn’t take the money she was offered to drop the charges against Rob Phillips. She should’ve took it, I knew it, I told her. But she said he raped her, he was meaning to kill her, and she had to tell. The thing is, though, she don’t have a lot of money now to pay a lawyer.”

  “Wait a minute: Tiffany was offered money not to go forward against Rob Phillips?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who made that offer?”

  “I don’t know. I only know what she told me. Two hundred grand, they offered her. But she didn’t take it, and then she ended up having to back down anyway, and she got no money for it, so that was a shame. Now they’re going to put her on trial, which just isn’t right.” She sounded on the verge of tears. “And I can’t get ahold of her, and you left your card, and calling you was all I could think to do. Will you help us?”

  This had to bring into play all kinds of conflict-of-interest problems. If she agreed, Jess had an instant mental picture of Pearse’s head exploding.

  “The situation is a little difficult because of our representation of Rob Phillips. I can’t serve as your permanent counsel. But I can advise you until you get one, and I can find someone else to represent you,” she said, and Mrs. Isaacs said, “Oh, thank you. Thank God. Thank God.”

  Jess waited a minute while the woman composed herself. “For now I’m Tiffany’s lawyer of re
cord, which means anything you tell me is protected. I can’t tell anybody anything you say, understand? But if I’m going to help Tiffany, I need to know the truth: why did she recant on the stand?”

  Heavy silence was her answer. Then Mrs. Isaacs started talking in a hushed voice, as if she was afraid someone would overhear.

  “She got threatened. She went out to lunch that last day and she got threatened. She told me later this man came up to her and said that if she didn’t say she’d been lying about the rape her kid would disappear and never be seen again. Then he showed her some pictures of Trevor, her little baby, my grandbaby, playing outside on the swings, that he’d taken. She said she knew he meant it then, and she was scared to death.”

  Jess had a sudden flashback to the man she’d seen grabbing Tiffany outside the metro station, and her heart sank.

  “I didn’t know Tiffany had a little boy.”

  “He’s two. Tiff never married his dad, and Trevor lives with him and his parents. But Tiffany sees him, we see him. She loves him, and she said she was lying up there on the witness stand to keep him safe.”

  “Oh, my God.” Jess felt sick to her stomach. “Have you told anybody else? Has Tiffany?”

  “Tiffany told me not to. She was afraid. That’s why she went away.”

  Disquiet slid like a cold finger down Jess’s spine. “Mrs. Isaacs, where is Tiffany?”

  “I-I don’t know. She came home with me, after the trial, but there were all these reporters and TV cameras around the house, so she wouldn’t stay. She sent me an e-mail later saying that she was going out of town until everything died down. But she didn’t say where, and when I try to call her I just get her voice mail.” Mrs. Isaac’s voice shook at the end.

  Jess was getting a real bad feeling about Tiffany.

  Don’t jump to conclusions. It’s only been a few days.

  Jess said, “When I was talking to Tracy, she said something like somebody—what she said was ‘they’—got Tiffany out of here.”

  “Well—we wondered where she got the money to go. She didn’t have much, you know? So Tracy thought that after, maybe somebody paid Tiffany to leave. So none of those reporters could talk to her, you see. But Tracy don’t know about that man threatening Tiffany. Tiff was so scared, she only told me. She was so scared, she might have found the money to go on her own.”

  “I’ll deal with Sandra Johnson,” Jess promised. “You keep trying to get in touch with Tiffany. Let me know if you succeed.”

  “Don’t tell Mrs. Johnson what I told you.” Mrs. Isaacs sounded panicked. “Tiff’ll kill me for sure. And if something happened to Trevor, that would be worse than anything.”

  “At some point, we may need to tell her. I want you to understand that. But we don’t need to do it yet, not until we find Tiffany, and I can’t do it at all without your permission, so you don’t have to worry about that.” Jess took a deep breath. “There’s just one more thing: did Tiffany know another lawyer in this office named Allison Howard?”

  “Not that I know of,” Mrs. Isaacs answered. “I know I’ve never heard that name.”

  “Okay. Well, if you’ll do your best to contact Tiffany, I’ll handle everything else.”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Isaacs said, to which Jess replied, “You’re welcome,” and disconnected.

  Then she sat staring into nothingness for a long moment while mentally running through the conversation and its ramifications.

  Her first impulse was to head straight to Pearse and lay all this out for him. Once the team knew what had happened …

  What? Double jeopardy precluded Rob Phillips being prosecuted a second time. Even if prosecutors found some way around that, Tiffany now would be absolutely not credible as a witness, having recanted once. And without Tiffany’s testimony, there was no case. However, whoever had tried to bribe Tiffany would be subject to prosecution, as would whoever had threatened her son. Tampering with a witness was a felony. If they could find out who did it. If there was enough evidence to build a case.

  Rob Phillips was Ellis Hayes’s client. Ellis Hayes’s loyalty would be to him.

  Has it ever occurred to you that maybe your people got Tiffany out of here?

  She could almost hear Mark saying it. As she thought about it, the sound of her pulse was suddenly loud in her ears. Not fast, but loud, and deliberate. As if her body was working hard to stay calm.

  Something’s wrong: she’d known it from the moment Tiffany had recanted. Now she knew a little bit about what that something was. But there was more. She was convinced of it. Too many loose ends were left, too many connections needed to be explained. Until she knew where this was going, she couldn’t tell Pearse, or anyone else on the team, or at Ellis Hayes.

  The gladiators might turn on her.

  Mark was who she needed, but Mark wasn’t there. And spilling the whole story to someone else wasn’t something she was ready to do.

  In the meantime, the first order of business was to find Tiffany.

  Jess pictured Tiffany as she had last seen her. At the time, she’d thought she’d been able to read fear in Tiffany’s body language. Now she was more certain of it than ever.

  But who had the man been?

  She tried to remember what she’d seen: a tall, dark-haired man in a suit. What precise shade had his hair been? She had only seen him at night, when the light had been too uncertain to be sure. His height? Tiffany was about Maddie’s height: five-six. Jess pictured Tiffany and the man together again. Therefore, the man was around six-one. Broad-shouldered, substantial, so probably one hundred ninety to two hundred pounds. His face—Jess tried to call it to mind. Complexion fair rather than swarthy. Lean cheeks, narrow jaw. Thin mouth. Clean-shaven. Straight, dark eyebrows. Eyes looking away from her, looking down at Tiffany, so she hadn’t ever really gotten a look at them. She tried to focus more intensely, to form a precise mental image of the face, but she couldn’t. She’d been too far away.

  Would she recognize the man if she saw him again? She thought so. Maybe. Oh, get real: who knew?

  Abandoning the background checks for the time being, Jess went into her computer, meaning to check Tiffany’s Facebook page to see if she’d posted anything new. Maybe there was something there, or something on other social media sites, that would help in tracking her down.

  Jess was just glancing over her shoulder for the umpteenth time that morning in response to that now familiar feeling of being watched when a quick knock sounded on her door. Startled, Jess almost jumped but managed to control the impulse in time. Instead, she calmly (she hoped) looked a question at Lenore, who stood in her open doorway.

  “Mrs. DeLong just called. She said she tried to call you on your cell phone, but it was busy. She wants you to call her as soon as possible.”

  Ignoring her pounding heart, projecting what she hoped was a facade of unflappable calm, Jess nodded. “I’ll call her right now. Thanks, Lenore.”

  Lenore left, and Jess picked up her cell phone once more.

  When Jess reached her, Paloma sounded harassed. “I’m at the Humane Society trying to pick up Allison’s cat, but they won’t release it to me. I told them the owner is out of town, but they said in that case the cat can only be picked up by the listed emergency contact, and that’s Ellis Hayes.”

  “Who at Ellis Hayes?”

  “They said Allison listed her employer Ellis Hayes as the emergency contact. So I guess that means anyone who can show an Ellis Hayes ID.” She had a brief conversation with someone on her end that Jess could only partly overhear. Then she spoke to Jess again. “Yes, that’s right. And you should know, I have to be at the airport at four, so …” Her voice trailed off, but Jess understood: the matter was urgent.

  “What’s the address?”

  Paloma told her.

  Jess checked the time. It was just after one. “You’re there now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t go heading out anywhere alone”—she could almost hear Mark saying it.
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  So she would call him. If babysitting was his new pastime, then he could just come back and babysit. Because she was going to get that cat.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Saying good-bye to Paloma, she next called Mark. And got his voice mail. She left him a message, then made up her mind.

  She could be there and back within the hour. It was broad daylight on a busy Friday afternoon. Taking the metro should be perfectly safe, even if there was someone out there wanting to kill her, which she was becoming less and less convinced was the case.

  Of course, she was worried about the cat because it was a cat, and she liked cats. But also, for some strange reason, she felt an obligation to Allison. Probably because she couldn’t shake the sensation that the other woman was there in the office that had once been hers, too.

  If Allison’s cat had turned up at the Humane Society, then there was a problem. Either the arrangements that Allison had made for its care after Paloma’s tenure had ended had gone badly awry, or something else had happened.

  Something not good.

  The Humane Society was on Georgia Avenue in Northwest. When Jess got off the metro at the nearest stop, she was greeted by the smell of hot, fresh asphalt. A work crew with a big white mixer truck was patching potholes, she was relieved to see as she hit street level, which meant there were at least a few city workers around to whom she could turn if she needed help. The grinding noise the truck made was almost comforting, because even as she walked away from it she still knew it was there. Still, she felt a little jumpy as she hurried up the street. Over and above concern about any possible risk to herself, thoughts of Allison, Tiffany, and the runaway girls churned relentlessly through her brain. Allison and Tiffany she could connect through the Phillips case, and possibly their Facebook postings. Allison and the runaway girls she could connect because of Allison’s call to Lucy’s phone, although it was always possible that Allison had called the wrong number and thus that connection didn’t mean anything. Other than that, and the fact that all four of them were either out of contact or outright missing, she could come to no conclusions. All she knew was that something just felt wrong.