Unfortunately for Ryan, two special prosecutors had been assigned to it. She would have loved to try the case, being that mob cases were rarely handled in state court. But since no money was recovered to forfeit, the Feds didn’t want the case and had taken a pass, allowing the D.A.’s office to prosecute the state charges. Ryan was still indignant that she wasn’t allowed to at least sit second chair.
“But we’re not even doing that one. So we don’t have anything big set for a while.” He seemed as disappointed as Ryan.
“State, call your first case.” Judge Jackson had appeared on the bench while Ryan and Mike were talking, looking peeved, as always. The judge was nearing retirement, and everyone knew that he hated it. Not that Ryan blamed him. Despite his age and graying hair, he was still sharp, with the athletic build from his days in the military. He also had the distinction of being the first black judge to sit on the bench at Orleans Parish Criminal Court.
Ryan smiled, although she knew social pleasantries had little effect on the judge’s disposition. “We’re ready to pick a jury on Jones, and for sentencing on Johnnie Lee.”
“Hmph,” the judge said to no one in particular. “Public Defender, get up here.”
Janet Johnson, a large, bosomy black woman with giant red lips and seemingly hundreds of long, colorful braids exploding out of her head, sauntered up to the bench. “He’s going to plead,” Janet said with a slow drawl. “Ya’ll can go on and sentence Johnnie Lee and I’ll be drawing up Mr. Jones’ paperwork.”
“Donna?” the judge asked the gray-haired clerk.
As usual, Donna knew what the judge wanted without him actually asking anything. “Johnnie Lee’s attorney is on the way.”
The judge looked irritated. “Hmmph. Five minute recess then.” He pounded his gavel and went back into chambers.
A second later, Donna made a sound in her throat like a lion growling. “Take a look at what the cat dragged in.”
Ryan looked up as Shep swaggered into the courtroom, smiling at all of the females in the audience. He stopped momentarily to shake hands with Nero, the court bailiff, and then continued to the front of the court. At the clerk’s table, he nudged Ryan slightly with his hip and grabbed Donna’s hand.
“How’s my favorite clerk?” he asked, giving Donna a smile.
The sixty-year-old clerk smiled back. “I bet you say that to all of the clerks.”
He then put his arm around Ryan’s shoulder and looked her up and down. “I liked you much better in that tight little shirt last night.” He turned to Donna. “Did you know your prosecutor has a belly ring?”
Donna raised her eyebrows and peered over her glasses. Ryan could see the other woman calculating the gossip potential. “Had an interesting night, did you?”
“We were at a crime scene,” Ryan said, her face starting to flush. She ducked from under Shep’s arm and quickly walked over to the state’s table.
“If that’s what the kids are calling it these days,” Shep said with another smile and a wink at Donna, and then followed Ryan.
“What do you want?” Ryan asked. “You don’t have anything in here today.” Shep sat in the chair next to her, so close his leg was touching hers. A masculine, woodsy smell emanated from him. Ryan tried not to notice it.
“You have a motion hearing coming up on a crack possession. Clint Perkins.”
Ryan shifted slightly away. It was difficult to pay attention to what Shep was saying when he smelled so good. “So?”
“Sanchez saw him throw down a bag of rocks. We were on proactive patrol because of the hospital rapes.”
Ryan frowned. “And what?” Sanchez wasn’t with the department any longer, but Shep should have been able to handle the hearing without the other officer. As soon as the judge ruled the evidence was admissible, the defendant would likely plead to two years and Sanchez’s current whereabouts would become irrelevant.
“I didn’t actually see the throw-down,” Shep said. “Sanchez told me Perkins dropped the bag of crack. Maybe you ought to write this up for a deal. He’d probably plead to attempted possession if he got probation.”
“You know I don’t give deals to crack heads,” Ryan said. “And why does Sanchez’s report say that you both saw Perkins throw down the rocks?’
Shep shrugged. “You’d have to ask him.”
“That’s really cute, since you know I can’t.” She tapped her fingers on the top of the table, no longer enamored with the way Shep smelled.
He smiled and put his arm around her shoulder. “Look, babe, if giving a deal bothers you that much, just tell me what to say. You want me to say I saw the throw-down, I saw the throw- down. Problem solved.”
“Have you been smoking crack today yourself?” Ryan asked, trying to keep her voice down as she pushed his arm away. “Of course I don’t want you to commit perjury. Are you insane?” He knew better. Ryan wondered what he wasn’t telling her. She looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure there’s not some other reason you want this guy to get a deal?”
Shep put his hands up. “Why would I care what happens to him? I’m just trying to help you out. You don’t have much of a case without Sanchez. I can either say what you need me to say so your evidence doesn’t get suppressed, or you can give the guy a deal. I thought I was being nice by letting you know now, instead of waiting until you put me on the stand. Give him a deal or don’t give him a deal, it’s nothing to me.”
Ryan was skeptical, but Shep obviously wasn’t going to say anything else. “I guess I don’t have much of a choice.” She scrawled a note to herself on a legal pad. Shep stood up and walked to the door, turning back once to wink at her again. She felt her face turn red, realizing how it would look to anyone who was watching. Luckily, Johnnie Lee’s attorney Louis James walked in at that exact moment, drawing everyone’s attention.
Donna knocked on the judge’s door and a second later he took the bench. “Ready for sentencing, Mr. James?”
Johnnie Lee was led to the podium in the center of the room, shackled at his hands and feet. Louis James stood next to him. “Louis James for the defendant, Johnnie Lee. We’re ready for sentencing, your Honor.”
The judge nodded. “This case comes before me for sentencing, the jury having recommended the death penalty. During the guilt phase, the jury found beyond a reasonable doubt that Johnnie Lee committed the rape of a person under the age of twelve, specifically, his ten-year-old daughter, LaJohnnie Lee.
“During the penalty phase, the jury found eleven aggravating factors and one mitigating factor, thus arriving at their decision to impose death. Finding that the jury’s recommendation is proper, it is the sentence of this court that the defendant, Johnnie Lee, is sentenced to death by lethal injection.”
Ryan stopped listening. Several reporters who were sitting in the back of the courtroom hurried out of the door, while Johnnie Lee was led away, stone-faced. A press conference would be held the following afternoon, and although the D.A. wouldn’t let her say much, she would get to answer a few questions on TV.
There was no way Bo could top this.
Shep couldn’t help but smile as he walked down the hallway. Ryan was pissed. She hated to give deals, and Shep had no doubt she realized something was up. Ryan was too smart not to see through him.
He couldn’t tell her the truth, that Perkins was an unregistered confidential informant, something against department policy. He might have shared this information with a different prosecutor, but Ryan wouldn’t have cared about how useful Perkins was to Shep. She would have still wanted to nail him, despite the fact that it could have gotten Shep reprimanded, not to mention cost him a valuable CI.
He had known that if he offered to lie on the stand to make Ryan happy, she would adamantly refuse. She didn’t have a clue about the real world. To her, everything was black and white.
He smiled at the minute clerk out of habit, but was still thinking of Ryan’s pained look when he suggested she give Perkins a deal. Shep had been close with Se
an for years, and had always thought of Ryan as a spoiled brat — the favorite who could wrap her parents around her little finger to get herself out of trouble, something she was definitely no stranger to. And while she was certainly not hard on the eyes, Shep could never get past her big mouth.
Then, several months ago, something had happened to make him see Ryan in a different light. Shep had testified for her on a case where a retarded homeless man, “working for food” on the corner of Claiborne and Carrollton, was savagely beaten by a group of college students. By the time the drunken frat boys were finished with him, the man was $2.50 richer, but required an extremely painful emergency room procedure to extract the loose change from his rectum.
At trial, Ryan had steamrolled over the defense attorney and the defense witnesses in her usual aggressive way, keeping just civil enough not to alienate the jury. She was good, knowing just when to stop.
And then during her closing argument, tears had streamed down her cheeks as she relived the agony and shame of the victim for the jury, making him seem like a human being to people who ordinarily would have considered him nothing more than a pesky nuisance. Shep had realized for the first time that Ryan genuinely cared about more than just winning cases, and it had caught him off guard.
“Shep!” A high-pitched voice barged through his recollection like a storm trooper. He finally noticed the tall, well-built blonde — not natural, he knew from personal experience — straining to get his attention. She was leaning over her desk, her ample rear sticking out, no panty lines visible through her tight skirt.
“Wanda, how’s it going?” He kept his tone casual.
“Fine, now that you’re here.” Wanda’s red lips formed a pout. “Where have you been hiding? I haven’t seen you around much lately.”
And there’s a reason for that, he thought, but just gave her his number three smile. He and Wanda had a casual, off and on relationship for the past two years. They would date for brief periods of time, if having constant sex was equated with dating, and then they would drift apart. He had decided the last time they had gotten back together would be the final time. Wanda was still having trouble accepting the breakup.
“I’m a little busy these days. We’ve got all of these unsolved homicides, and the captain’s been on my ass.”
“The captain is a very lucky man,” Wanda said, running her hand up Shep’s leg to an inappropriately high spot on his inner thigh. “I would trade places with him in a heart beat. And you know what they say about all work and no play.”
“Yeah, it keeps my job security.” Shep moved his leg out of her reach, keeping his number three smile in place. His number one or number two smiles would have given her too much hope, and he had no intention of giving her his real smile. She hadn’t even gotten that when they were sleeping together.
Wanda gave him a knowing look, her tone no longer playful. “When you’re finished with whoever you’re doing this week, you’ll come back. You always do.”
He shrugged without comment, remembering the last time they were together. After one of their sex marathons, he had tried to have a discussion with her, not about anything deep like Plato’s Dialogues, but about a murder in the tight-knit New Orleans East Vietnamese community. Shep was frustrated with the reticent witnesses, who refused to give him any information because the shooter was also Vietnamese. Wanda’s contribution to the discussion had been to tell Shep about how a Korean woman always cheated at the Bingo game Wanda went to every Thursday evening. That’s when it dawned on him that they had nothing in common, and decided that he had to end the relationship.
Shep was disturbed that it had taken him two years to figure it out. Looking back, he had been confronted with the sad truth that he had never dated a woman with whom he could actually have an intelligent conversation. He guessed that’s what he got for thinking with Shep Jr. his whole life.
“What number is my case on the docket?” he asked.
Wanda wordlessly handed him the docket, turning her back to him and her attention to a defense attorney, in an obvious attempt to make Shep jealous that was completely wasted on him.
TUESDAY
2:00 A.M.
Ryan was just getting into bed at two a.m., exhausted and with the beginning of a headache. She had gone out after work to celebrate her big win. The judge had cancelled court for the next day, something he rarely did, and Ryan didn’t see the harm in kicking back and enjoying herself for a couple of hours.
Shooting tequila had seemed like a good idea then, but the pulsating in her temples now had her questioning her earlier decision. Even if she could sleep late the next day, she still had to go into the office in the afternoon for the press conference, and she did want to look her best on television. Maybe the party should have been postponed until the weekend.
The phone rang. The caller ID registered Unknown.
She frowned as she picked up the receiver. “Yeah.”
“I’m giving you another gift.”
Ryan’s heart sped up. The caller spoke through a voice distortion device that gave his voice a demonic quality. Ryan had received a similar message on her answering machine the night before, and had dismissed the call as a prank. All of the prosecutors received such calls from time to time, but the distortion device made the voice sound so eerie and ominous, she found it difficult to keep her hands from shaking.
“Oh really?” she asked, trying to sound unaffected, eyeing her gun on the nightstand as she waited for the obscene part of the call explaining what the “gift” would be.
But the caller hung up without saying anything else.
Ryan climbed into bed and put her gun on the pillow next to her, drawing the blanket around her body, chilly despite the heat. A second later, the phone rang again.
She thought about letting the machine answer, but didn’t want to give the prank caller the satisfaction of thinking he had scared her. She saw Sean’s cell phone number on the caller I.D..
“Yeah,” she answered, her heart rate returning to normal.
“Another 30. I’m on the way.”
One day down, six to go. Then she would be free for a month before she had to worry about being called out in the middle of the night again. Unless she made Strike Force. The Strike Force attorneys were not on the crime scene duty schedule, yet another reason for striving for the position. She put on a T-shirt and shorts, and pulled her hair back with a clip.
A horn honked. As she grabbed her shoes, the phone rang again. She ran outside, refusing to glance at the phone on her way out.
Sean drove in silence for nearly five minutes, his mind obviously elsewhere. He hadn’t told Ryan where they were heading, but she had an idea from the route they were taking. She didn’t want to mention the prank caller, knowing Sean would blow it out of proportion.
“Why are you so quiet?” Ryan asked, unable to stand keeping silent herself for so long. “Some woman breaking your heart?”
Sean shrugged, a flush creeping into his face. Sean’s problems always seemed to revolve around unrequited love.
“What’s the deal with the pretty boy from Channel Nine?” he finally asked. Ryan assumed he was only trying to take the focus off of himself, but the subject was too tantalizing for her to pass up.
“There’s no deal.” She pulled down the sun visor and looked at herself in the mirror. She still had circles under her eyes, but at least her hair was clean and beer-free tonight. “Why?”
“After you left last night, he came sniffing around. He was up our asses, asking questions about the homicides. And then he mentioned you.”
Ryan couldn’t subdue her smile. “I can’t help it if men find me irresistible.”
Sean cocked a cynical eyebrow. “He asked who the hooker with the captain was.”
Ryan laughed, not offended. “Really? What happened to him?”
“He got away with a warning this time.” Sean parked the Crown Vic in almost the same spot Shep had stopped yesterday. “If he bugs me tonight,
he might not be so lucky.”
“Deja vu,” Ryan said as she and Sean walked to building 21.
The captain was standing by the broken steps, smoking a cigarette. He reached for Ryan’s hand to help her over the gap between the steps and the building.
The captain’s flushed face was beaded with sweat. “Victim is Jeremy Jeremiah.
Forty-five-year-old black male, looks like he was beaten to death.” He tossed his cigarette to the ground as he walked in front of Ryan into the apartment directly across the hall from the one where Smith had been found.
The captain pointed to the body on the floor. “He’s a nobody. No substantial record, just a few DWIs and a domestic on his rap. No drug arrests, and at his age, new gang connections are a little unlikely.”
Ryan stared at the body. “Well, well, Mr. Jeremiah, so nice to see you again.”
The captain’s head jerked in Ryan’s direction. “You know him?”
Ryan nodded. “I had Jeremy Jeremiah in Magistrate a few years ago.” She remembered the day vividly. “He was arrested for beating his pregnant wife with a baseball bat. At the preliminary hearing she backpedaled. She said she got beat up in a bar fight, and that she put charges on Jeremiah because he yelled at her when she came home drunk. I had never seen a pregnant woman beaten before. And instead of being thankful that she was safe from him, she lied to get him off. And then cursed me out in the courtroom for trying to press charges anyway.”
“Got you all riled up, didn’t it?” Shep asked, crouching by the body.
“Somewhat. And I fixed her little red wagon. I had her arrested for filing a false police report.”
Shep whistled. “Why would you put a pregnant victim in jail?”
“I was mad,” she admitted. Arresting the victim in court had been quite a big deal. Even the D.A. had commended her for the action, although Ryan realized in retrospect she could have gotten fired if Peter hadn’t approved. “And I thought after spending a couple of days in OPP for lying for him, she’d realize he wasn’t worth the trouble. She was probably safer in jail anyway.”
Gumbo Justice Page 4
