The 3rd Victim

by Sydney Bauer

  ‘I'm sorry, Mr Katz, but you had your opportunity to strike Mr Appleby and you declined to do so.’

  ‘But –’ began Katz.

  ‘That's enough. Step back now, both of you,’ said Stein before turning to Appleby once again. ‘Mr Appleby, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the jury, sir.’

  Appleby smiled. ‘Thank you, Judge,’ he said, ‘but I can assure you, the pleasure is all mine.’

  *

  By late afternoon ten of the fourteen jurors had been selected. After the speed bump that was George Appleby, the selection process moved swiftly and saw David use all three of his pre-emptory strikes in a space of two hours. While Appleby was a bonus, things had gone quickly downhill from there, with the next four jurors all being females between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-seven, three of them mothers and the fourth with one on the way. And whereas on paper this group – a sample of Sienna Walker's ‘equivalents’ – might appear to be a defence team's dream, in reality, as Phyl had wisely pointed out, the last thing they needed was a group of women who would compare themselves to the defendant.

  ‘Lower-middle-class to middle-class women twenty-five to thirty-nine are enemy number one,’ was how Phyl had put it in a pre-jury selection meeting. ‘These women are working moms who run themselves ragged day after day playing employee, wife and mother to a pack of demanding snot-nosed rug rats. So the last thing they want to see is an attractive, well-to-do Brit who tops her own daughter rather than dealing with the ideal life God has given her. It's jealousy and resentment rolled into one. Placing your client in front of a twenty-five- to thirty-nine-year old female jury is like placing a group of wallflowers in front of the prom queen who landed the jock, donned the tiara and then pissed the whole fucking lot into the wind. Worse still, these women will react emotionally to the exhibition that fucker Katz will display with every opportunity open to him – poster-sized photos of the blood-spattered bedroom, followed by the main attraction of the kid being dragged from that drainpipe, twisted neck and all.’

  David knew she was right.

  Equally concerning was the speed at which the process was moving. At this rate the jury would be empanelled by noon tomorrow, which meant Stein could announce that the trial would start this week – on Thursday, rather than the following Monday, when it was originally scheduled to begin. There was still so much to do and now even less time to do it in, and David knew he was fast losing control of the case he was so desperate to win. More to the point, he had never been anywhere near controlling this complex web of unanswered questions and eternal dead ends – and now his chances of ever doing so were diminishing by the second.

  61

  Roger Katz loosened the knot of his conservative Hermès tie as he sat back in his padded leather office chair. He closed his eyes and took a breath, grateful that he had made the decision to come into the office before sunrise so that he might make the call to the city where they were five hours ahead, and ideally begin this second day of jury selection on a high.

  He had found her, which was a miracle in itself given her real name wasn't the one listed on the certificate. It had been a fluke, really – a random sweep of travel records and visa applications and professional licence forms and enquiries made to a friend at the Director of Public Prosecutions office in Dublin.

  He'd made the telephone call on spec, but the moment he started speaking he knew that it was her. Not because of what she said but because of the silences that followed his questions. She was nervous, terrified even. She said there were others trying to track her down, and by ‘others’ Katz assumed she meant David Cavanaugh and his motley crew, who must have been keen to find her so that they could Shanghai her testimony (or more than likely shut it down) before Katz had a chance to enter the fray.

  Of course his major concern was that she would not make clear what information she could provide him with. Her priority, at least at this stage, was to establish some sort of guarantee that, if she were to come back to Boston, she would be ‘protected’ by members of the Department of Justice constabulary. Katz had seen this sort of response to a request to provide testimony before, and usually it meant one of two things: that the witness was either crazy or terrified, and in this case Katz was pleased that he sensed it was the latter, given she was of much more use to him scared out of her wits than she was singing loony tunes for her supper.

  No, her fear actually excited him as it suggested that whatever she had to share packed a punch – beyond what Katz had originally hoped for, that being Sienna Walker's unusually high degree of anger at her baby during the birthing process – aimed directly at the defendant, an assumption fortified by her refusal to speak of anything to do with Sienna until she landed safely at Logan. This ultimately convinced Katz that it was definitely worth the investment to fly her here, despite the fact that he already had one other European mooching off his budget – at the five fucking star Four Seasons no less.

  True, her behaviour did seem peculiar, but Katz had been around long enough to know that peculiar often morphed into potential, and potential into possibility and possibility into triumph for someone patient enough to play these things out. And Katz was nothing if not patient when it came to securing a win.

  And so he would book her flight (economy), and her accommodation (budget) personally, so as to plug any potential leaks that might sink his boat. It may have been a whole lot of cloak-and-dagger bullshit but Katz could do high drama better than anyone – and if that meant concealing his intentions to call this final witness from Cavanaugh or Stein or the fucking Queen of England until the very last minute, he would do so. When it came down to it, Katz had learnt to trust his gut and his gut told him that this woman could be the one to supply the nails that he might fix to the lid of Sienna Walker's coffin, enabling him to engage the hammer – which he would do happily – to make sure that Sienna Walker would never see daylight again.

  62

  ‘Why the hell haven't you done it?’ The question came without preface or any attempt at pleasantry, which told Davenport exactly where they had come to, two men who once walked together now sitting at opposite poles.

  ‘You've been keeping track.’

  ‘Of course I've been keeping track. Someone has to, for Christ's sakes, and you haven't answered my question.’

  ‘I am trying to protect us.’

  ‘And how in the hell is disobeying my instructions protecting us, Dick?’

  Disobeying my instructions – he really did believe he was in control. Truth was, he always had been, but this was the first time he had voiced it – the first time he had made his superior status absolutely and unequivocally clear.

  ‘I can't just kill her, for god's sakes. I am accountable legally, as a professional in a profession saturated with checks and balances. I won't put myself under suspicion – doing so is unnecessary and downright stupid. A death in childbirth as a result of an unforeseen haemorrhage gives me an out on both counts. The mother loses too much blood, the baby drowns in her womb as a result of complications.’

  Silence.

  ‘The last thing we need is the police sniffing around us at this point,’ Davenport continued, feeling buoyed by his friend's lack of comeback. ‘You were the one who wanted to do this final deal.’

  ‘Because it's lucrative.’

  ‘Just because it's lucrative?’ There, he had said it, and he was not surprised when his rather gutsy comment was met by silence once again. ‘Look,’ he said after a time, ‘I understand the pressure associated with our current circumstances. But we are so close, close to cleaning up and getting out with a hefty stack of cash in our pockets. And that's why I won't cut corners. That's why I am playing this carefully. I know you broker the deals but it's been my exercising of caution that's got us through, so you have to listen to me when I tell you that this is our best course of action.’

  ‘You're starting to worry me, Dick – all these delays and excuses, your failure to locate the midwife.’

>   Davenport took a breath. He'd heard the chill in his friend's voice and he was smart enough to know that he was currently playing with fire. ‘I have tried to find the midwife but in all honesty whether we locate her or not is of no consequence, and right now I think we need to prioritise. Don't forget that I am in this thing as deep as you are. I am still on board but this trial is going to shift an enormous amount of focus onto Sienna and her late husband and dead child. I'll do what I can on the stand to finish her off, but we can't afford to be careless.’

  Nothing.

  ‘I set up the new deal, didn't I?’ he said, a last-ditch effort at placation. ‘And the order has been placed – at an all-time premium, if I am not mistaken.’

  More silence until, ‘Induce her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Induce her – the girl, Sophia.’

  Davenport felt the slightest tinge of panic.

  ‘You know you can. If you are going to fake a haemorrhage you can fake a pre-birth complication which will make the haemorrhage story more believable.’

  More silence.

  ‘Did you hear me, Dick?’

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘Then get the hell to it, or I swear to god I will screw you over so fast you won't know what hit you. You're a dead man walking, Dick – just remember that when you cut some artery inside of that dumb as all fuck incubator who will drift off to sleep without knowing what the hell ever happened. Watch her blood flow, Dick, watch it flow and remember that that same red liquid lies just as vulnerable inside of you. You're not a god, Davenport, you're just a greedy asshole who trades lives for money. So when you think about it, that makes you a sort of anti-Christ – someone who makes profit from stealing what is supposed to be our most precious resource on earth.’

  Davenport said nothing, his mind drifting back to those ducklings and the mother they depended on for protection.

  ‘Tick tock, Dick,’ said his friend before slamming down the phone.

  And Davenport felt physically sick – sick to his very core, as he got to his feet and stormed into reception.

  ‘What the hell do you think this is?’

  He'd caught her by surprise. She was sitting at her desk with a deck of tarot cards in front of her. Her friend Carina had taken a course in fortune telling and she had told Madonna what each of the seventy-eight cards meant.

  ‘Oh god, I am sorry, Dr Davenport. I was just …’ She went to pick up the deck but the cards went flying. So she opened her desk drawer and scooped them quickly inside it. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘You can start acting like a professional rather than a complete waste of space.’ Davenport's cheeks were scarlet. ‘You think I don't know how completely incompetent you are? You think I don't know how you sit out here and preen yourself like a narcissistic wannabe that is doomed to a life of mediocrity? What the hell do you expect to happen? Do you think that by simply sitting in this office some tall dark handsome stranger will waltz on in and sweep you off your feet!’ He shook his head. ‘You look like a whore. You're an embarrassment to yourself. Take my advice, Madonna, and throw those cards out and start acting on a plan that will dig you out of that lower-class hole you are stuck in. Do you understand me?’ he asked, before turning to walk back into his office. ‘I need Sophia here now,’ he added, before slamming the door behind him.

  And that was when Madonna began to cry, huge convulsive sobs that racked her body and ate into her soul. She was not sure why his words hurt so much – probably because she respected him, and probably because he was right.

  She gulped some air into her lungs before pulling up Sophia's details on the computer and picking up the phone. She blinked away the tears that streamed down her cheeks in torrents, not giving two hoots about the long-lasting mascara which carved charcoal crevasses through her moisture surge foundation.

  And as the girl picked up, Madonna swung in her seat so that she might bend at her waist, and prevent the contents of her stomach from ending up all over her keyboard. It was then that she saw the single tarot card that had landed on the floor in front of her. It depicted a man in colourful motley clothing – a pack tied to a staff, a small dog at his feet and a cliff in the distance. And while most in Madonna's situation would have seen the image of the Fool, the self-absorbed idiot who filled his head with useless visions and daydreams of grandeur like herself, the perhaps not-so-foolish-after-all Madonna saw the image as Doctor Dick Davenport.

  He is losing it, she told herself. His head was too full to see the cliff he was about to fall over, and I have come too far to let him take me down with him.

  Madonna made a decision, right then and there, which is why, after hanging up the phone, she fished deep into her handbag to retrieve the number that that girl had given her one night weeks ago – the pretty girl in that advertisement who worked in the employment agency, the one who would give Madonna a fresh start.

  63

  ‘This is Sara.’

  She was on her way out the door. The second day of jury selection was starting within the hour and Sara and David were running late. David had asked her to sit in on this second day with a view to her questioning any further prospective female jurors. He needed the jury to know they were sensitive to the demands placed on women in general, and if necessary would milk Sara's role as a busy working mother to do it.

  Nora had prefaced the call by coming to Sara's office door to explain that while she would normally take a message, there was a rather distressed young woman, who refused to provide her name, on the other end of the line.

  Sara had no idea who it could be, but considering her career had begun in pro-bono legal aid, she suspected it might be one of her old clients, ringing to ask for help – in which case she would be as patient as time would allow her, taking the young girl's details and promising to return her call later in the day.

  ‘This is Madonna Carrera,’ said the girl. ‘We met at that dinner thing. I was with my friend. I was the prettier one with the dark hair and the pink dress.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Sara, now sitting up in her seat. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I'm crap,’ replied Madonna. ‘How come you have a secretary and why did she answer the phone saying blah, blah, blah attorneys at law or something. I thought you were a secretary to some employment agency person.’

  Sara realised her mistake. She had given Madonna her office number, mainly because she wanted Esther Wallace to know that they were on the team she suspected Wallace also belonged to. She had not expected a call from the girl named Madonna, but she was on the other end of the line now, and Sara suspected this was an opportunity – if only she could pull it off.

  ‘Madonna, are you okay? Did something happen?’

  ‘My boss yelled at me. He was really mean.’

  ‘Dr Davenport?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘I want another job – a good one for lots of money where my boss appreciates everything I do for him – or her … no, scratch that, I don't like female bosses. I tend to communicate better with men.’

  Sara could have been mistaken but it sounded like Madonna was starting to cry. ‘What did he say to you, Madonna?’

  ‘He said I was mediogre. What the hell is mediogre? Is that like medium-sized Shrek or something?’

  ‘No, Madonna. It's mediocre and it means average.’ Sara's heart went out to the girl. ‘And you're not average, Madonna. You seemed kinda special to me.’

  Madonna began to sob, Sara's kindness obviously opening the floodgates.

  ‘Where are you now, Madonna?’

  ‘I'm still at work.’

  ‘And Dr Davenport?’

  ‘He's in his office.’

  ‘Can you meet me for lunch?’ asked Sara, knowing David would understand her opting out of any post-lunch jury selection or, at this point, more than likely the swearing-in process.

  ‘I only have forty-five minutes. He never lets me have an hour.’


  ‘Then I'll come to you. You're in …?’ Sara remembered just in time that she wasn't supposed to know the address of Davenport's surgery. ‘Where is your surgery?’

  ‘Beacon Street, the Public Gardens end.’

  ‘What if I pick up some sandwiches and meet you near the Gardens' suspension bridge at one?’ Sara was talking about the pretty stone bridge that spanned the Gardens' famous swan pond.

  ‘I could do that.’

  ‘Great. I'm already looking forward to it, Madonna. I'm glad you called.’

  ‘I guess I am too.’ She hesitated and then added, ‘I can't have cheese or mayo on my sandwich. I'm on a diet.’

  ‘Okay, no problem. I'll see you at one, Madonna.’

  ‘All right. See you then.’

  Sara was already on her feet as she hung up the phone and rounded her desk to poke her head through David's door. She gestured at Nora on the way. ‘Can you two come into Arthur's office?’ she said to them before moving into the corner office of their mentor, David and Nora not far behind.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Arthur.

  ‘I think I've found a way in with Davenport,’ she said.

  David's eyes lit up. ‘Wallace called you,’ he said.

  ‘Not Wallace – her replacement, the girl named Madonna.’

  David shook his head. ‘Madonna wants to help us?’

  ‘Not yet, but I am hoping by one-forty-five she will.’

  ‘She was upset,’ said Nora.

  Sara nodded. ‘Davenport rang her out. She bought my employment agency story. She wants me to find her a new job. She agreed to meet me for lunch.’ She looked at David. ‘I thought this would be okay …?’

  David lifted his hand to quieten her. ‘Of course it's okay.’ He turned to Arthur. ‘This could be something,’ he said.

  ‘You're hoping hell hath no fury like a love-struck personal assistant scorned,’ said Arthur.

  Sara nodded. ‘I like this girl, Arthur –’ she said, turning to David, ‘– and David liked her too. Even Joe has a soft spot for her despite the sparring he described. She's just a kid, and a scared kid by the sounds of it, and I feel sorry for her. I think she's decent and if I am right about that, she may be willing to help us.’