Never again, I promised myself. No more criminal trials, ever.
“Are you ready, Ms. Connell?” Judge Hutchison asked.
No, Your Honor, but I have no choice in the matter. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“Call your first witness,” he said.
I wished I could stay seated, but the judge would never permit it, so I stood, careful not to jostle my brains. I needed all the cells I had left fully functioning. While the court reporter swore my first witness in, I drained a bottle of water and then concentrated on holding it down. I’d never brought a hangover to trial before. It would have devastated my mother.
“Shame on you, Katie,” she used to say when I chose badly, like when I bent the legs of Collins’ favorite GI Joe in the wrong direction until they broke.
Actually, I was pretty much ashamed on her behalf. “Shame on me, Katie,” I thought, then pushed it aside. Any more of that would border on self-pity.
The first two witnesses went fine, better than I deserved. They were our experts on the crime scene evidence. We weren’t contesting that the evidence existed—that it was his semen and shoelaces, that the shoelaces had abraded Tabitha’s wrists and ankles, and that her body had been covered with bruises. We were simply arguing that it wasn’t rape. The only important point I needed to establish with them was that nothing about the scene or her injuries precluded a conclusion that Tabitha had consented to sex with Zane. The longer I knew him, though, the less I believed in the possibility of anyone consenting to having sex with him.
In a truly shocking turn of events, Junie cross-examined the experts. What was Mack up to? She did a competent job, but they both held up quite well. Score one for defense, times two.
I began to think everything would turn out OK despite me. I hadn’t tossed my cookies, and I’d still have time to put Sherry Talmadge on before lunch. That meant we could deliver closing arguments immediately after the jury got back from lunch. If so, we could send the case to them before the end of the day. That would make the jury happy with me and meet the judge’s deadline of three days.
And then I could relax for a nanosecond and figure out what the hell had happened in my life since Bloody-Mary-thirty last evening.
I cleared my throat. “Your Honor, the defense calls Sherry Talmadge.”
A short, pregnant Caucasian woman made her way from the back row of the courtroom to the stand. This was my first time to lay eyes on Ms. Talmadge. She was cute bordering on pretty, or on used-to-be-pretty. Her straight brown hair clung to her head. The dark bags under her eyes over sallow skin told us all about her lifestyle, bun in the oven or not. I reached up and touched my own face. I shuddered.
I shook it off. It was show time. As I stood to start my direct, I looked around the courtroom for Nick. It was our last day of trial, and I hadn’t checked in with him last night. He wasn’t here. Our possibly-last trial together was almost over.
I took Ms. Talmadge through the easy parts of her testimony first—her name, her address, her occupation—while I got a feel for her rhythm and tempo. She fiddled with the cuff of her long-sleeved mauve maternity dress. She stuttered some and looked down more than I would have wanted, but testifying in trial was scary, and lots of people did far worse than she. Once we had established her presence for the events in question, I got to the point of her testimony.
I opened it wide for her. “Ms. Talmadge, please tell me what you observed and heard happen on the night in question, from the time Ms. Brown and Mr. McMillan got to your apartment, until Mr. McMillan left.”
Sherry drew a deep breath and blew it out forcefully, and took her time with both. When she spoke, she spoke rapidly, looking at Mack and Junie instead of the jury or me. “Tabitha came home and tried to lock Zane out but he pushed his way in after her and dragged her to the bedroom and shut the door and then she screamed at me to call the police because he was raping her and he threatened to kill me if I did.” She stopped speaking and looked down.
It took me a moment to realize what I had just heard, which wasn’t what I had expected to hear. It didn’t take Zane nearly as long as me. He jumped to his feet, taller by seven inches and heavier by a hundred pounds of muscle than anyone else present. His jacket fell open, exposing the shirt I hadn’t seen earlier. It read, “Ladies, wait your turn.”
“Bitch,” he screamed. “What the fuck do you mean, you lying fucking bitch?”
Everyone gasped.
Chapter Twenty-one
Judge Hutchison’s gavel crashed down three times. “Bailiffs! Get him under control. Mr. McMillan, one more word, and you are out of here.”
Two bailiffs weaved toward Zane, hands on their guns.
But Sherry now jumped to her feet with surprising agility, given the seventh-month state of her belly. “You think you can pay me to lie and then dump me like garbage when I’m carrying your baby? I told you last week I was done lying for you. You raped her. I was there. And you are going to pay for what you did to both of us.”
This couldn’t be happening, yet it so very much was. The drama was electrifying the bored jurors. They’d have something worth talking about over the water cooler for the rest of their lives. I’d have something to ensure years of financial security for my therapist. But what the jury didn’t seem to comprehend yet was that this was not theater. There was no director to yell cut.
“But I gave you more money, you greedy slut,” Zane screamed.
“Yeah, because you’re stupid as shit,” she screamed back. “And guess what? Last week when we met in your car? I taped you on my iPhone, asshole. How about I give your confession to the cops, huh?” She held her phone aloft, her victor’s trophy.
Zane lunged around the table and charged at Sherry. The bailiffs moved faster now, and they made it in time to get between the two. The courtroom went off like a bomb, everyone talking at once.
My brains rattled in my head. I shouted over the melee to be heard. “Your Honor, objection. Please strike the witness’s testimony as non-responsive.”
“Sustained,” the judge shouted back. “Jurors, disregard Ms. Talmadge’s testimony, and please go to the jury room, at once,” he ordered. “Gallery, please exit the courtroom.”
The jurors stood, looking around at each other, but they didn’t budge. The spectators didn’t even bother standing up, not a one of them willing to give up their prime seats to the drama unfolding before them.
“I said OUT,” Judge Hutchison screamed, “or I’ll hold you all in contempt.”
The crowd had drawn courage from each other in their defiance, and no one moved a muscle. If the judge stuck to his threat, the jail cells would fill to capacity tonight.
The bailiffs pulled on Zane by the arms to no avail as he and Sherry screamed and flipped each other off. They needed to get both of them out of here, but they looked unsure of what to do next. Zane was huge, and he was livid. The judge sat still and quiet. I knew he had a panic button under his desk. Dad had told us about their installation years ago, after a defendant had assaulted a judge in a murder trial. I prayed the judge had already pushed it.
Without pausing to think, I came from behind the counsel table and approached Zane. I stabbed my finger into his chest three times, turning his attention away from Sherry for a moment, hoping it would give someone time to neutralize or remove her. “You knew she was lying, that she had decided to quit lying, and you didn’t tell me?” I asked.
He smirked. “Yeah, well, I had it covered.” When he continued talking, his voice rang through the courtroom as if he was hooked into surround sound. “I didn’t need to worry about nothing because I had Police Chief Daddy’s little redheaded girl getting me off.” Zane chose to illustrate his point by jerking his hand up and down over his crotch, despite the restraining grasp of the bailiff, whose arm moved with Zane’s like a profane puppeteer. “Daddy’s not here to save you now, is he? Too bad.”
My reflexes were still pretty awesome, even if I was thirty-five years old and mortally hungover. Qu
ick as a whip crack, I slapped him across the face with all my strength. Only a desire to avoid jail time kept me from giving him a judo punch to the crotch. I would have loved to end his manhood completely on behalf of womankind, but I congratulated myself on my restraint and leaped out of his reach. Sherry was cheering and screaming in appreciation. The jury and the spectators had abandoned decorum and the room buzzed and crackled. One of the bailiffs jumped between Zane and me.
“Stand down, Ms. Connell,” he warned. “Let us get him out of here.”
A hand grasped my shoulder. I jumped and turned around.
It was Nick.
“What the hell have you done, Katie?” he asked, his voice raised in the din. It took a lot of blood to make an olive-skinned face tomato red.
“What do you mean, what did I do? I didn’t do anything,” I yelled back. “I called Sherry to testify. I had no idea she would turn. You sure didn’t tell me.”
“I left you voicemail last night, I emailed you, I texted you. I told you as soon as I found out she’d turned state, and I absolutely told you not to call her.” His words pounded my skull.
Oh, God. I stared at him. My mouth hung open, but I couldn’t find any words. I’d been scrambling so fast since I woke up that morning that I’d never looked at my iPhone. And then I’d just assumed . . . Oh, God, it was my fault. Oh no, no, no. It was my fault.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, to no one, to my mother who never got her chance to be a lawyer, to my father who dedicated his career to justice. To Nick. To Emily. To everyone, even myself.
What the hell had I done?
“Stay the fuck away from me,” Zane was saying to a deputy, who had rushed into the courtroom from behind the judge and made it to the front of the witness bench, handcuffs in his left hand and his right hand on the stock of his holstered handgun. He was fifteen feet away from where Zane was now dangling one bailiff from each arm, Incredible Hulk-style, and ten feet from Nick and me. “Man, don’t make me do something you’ll regret,” Zane said to him.
Nick jerked me out of the line of fire and back behind the defense table.
“Sir, I need you to put your hands behind your head and stand very still. I am going to move closer, and then you and I will exit the courtroom together.” The deputy eased himself between Zane and the judge.
“Put my hands on my head? Like I done something wrong? I ain’t done shit. The bitch is lying. Arrest her.”
And then ten seconds of pure chaos reigned.
The doors to the courtroom burst open with concussive force, slamming into the walls on either side. Five armed officers barreled in, one screaming, “Everyone down!” I hit the floor in a crouch, hands down. Three officers assumed firing positions and pointed guns at Zane’s head. Two others rushed forward. Zane released the two bailiffs, spun, and assumed a flexed-kneed stance as if he would fight the interlopers off, as if he were fighting for his very life—which he was. His life as he knew it, at least. The bailiffs were behind him now. One had handcuffs at the ready. They both reached for his arms again, and he whirled on them. The two officers didn’t hesitate. They jumped onto Zane’s back, tackling him before his body finished its rotation toward the sounds behind him. Zane and the two officers went down hard, but I couldn’t hear the impact over the screams of the jurors and spectators. Theater had ended and reality hell had set in. The screams subsided into weeping and a cacophony of voices.
I realized I had stood back up, and that’s when I saw her. Or thought I saw her anyway, the nameless woman from Annalise. I was suffering simultaneously from lovesick rejection, sleep deprivation, a hangover, extreme stress, and a punishing wallop of humiliation, so it was possible I was hallucinating. She was standing between me and the door. Her eyes looked hollow with sadness. She was saying something to me, although not loud enough that I could hear her. She motioned me toward her with her hand.
“Order, order, order!” The judge’s gavel punctuated his thin voice, but the crowd ignored him. He turned on his mike and tried again. “I will have order in this courtroom right now!” He slammed down his gavel right in front of the microphone, an echoing rifle shot of sound. This time he got all of our attention. Slowly, the panicked group settled back into their seats and their voices lulled to a buzzing. I jerked my head back around toward my imaginary friend, but she wasn’t there.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve all had a bit of excitement, but the officers have it under control and we need to let them do their jobs,” the judge said.
I heard a keening noise. The kind a cat makes when it’s trapped up in a tree.
Hush. I thought. Just hush. Everyone hush.
I sank to my knees on the courtroom’s tile floor. I put my head in my hands. And that’s when I realized the sound was coming from me.
Chapter Twenty-two
After I quit mewling like a crazy cat woman in front of the whole courtroom and started acting somewhat attorney-like again, I asked the judge for a mistrial.
He actually considered it for about five seconds. Or at least he stayed completely silent for that long. He could have been devising elaborate torture rituals or plotting my death. When he said no, I knew he meant “Hell No Katie Connell And Don’t Ever Darken The Doors Of My Courtroom Again.” I’m empathic like that.
It didn’t improve things for me when Mack and I were walking away from the bench and the prosecutor said, “Bet you wish your client had accepted that plea bargain now.”
Mack almost became the second person I assaulted that day.
Not surprisingly, the jury found everyone’s favorite basketball star guilty and set a land speed record doing it. They gave him twenty years. It didn’t sound like enough to me, but the law constrained their choices. They would have probably sentenced him to death if they could. Luckily another jury would get a chance to add to his sentence later, because he would be charged with several new crimes, including witness tampering and going apeshit in the courtroom while scaring the bejeebers out of Judge Hutchison—better known as criminal contempt of court.
I wondered if his next attorney would try to get him a new trial by arguing inadequate representation, or if Zane would just sue me for assault. Or malpractice. Or both. Best not to think about it.
I had already used my iPhone to pull up the ignominious pictures of myself online, crumpled and weeping on the floor of the courtroom. Let’s just say they didn’t show off my good side. I didn’t know if I could fall any further or feel any worse.
But it wasn’t the verdict or the pictures that had shattered me. I’d come apart at the moment when Nick said, “What have you done, Katie?” I didn’t think all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could ever put Katie together again. I had screwed this trial up. I had disgraced my father’s name. I had made a sham of my mother’s dreams of being a lawyer. Me. I had done that. And Nick had disappeared in the wake of Zane’s apprehension.
At five o’clock, Emily and I slunk back to the office. I hated her humiliation by association to me. Add another gold star for Katie today. The elevator doors opened onto the seventeenth floor and the lobby of the Hailey & Hart offices. I tried to sneak past the front desk, but it didn’t work.
“Party!” Tina chirped when she saw us. “Bill won a huge case today.”
She handed me a party hat that said “Congratulations” on it. Oh, no. Maybe she didn’t know about my trial? Maybe she hadn’t seen my picture?
Tina told us, “Bob’s Irish Bar is open. Everyone’s gathered in the conference room to celebrate.”
Bob’s Irish Bar was a longstanding tradition, named in honor of the firm’s founder, Bob Hailey, who was definitely not Irish and didn’t even work at the firm anymore. The man had loved his Bushmills then, and he still did, I heard, well into his retirement. You would think a law firm would be concerned about the potential for liability if one of their employees had a drunken wreck driving away from the office, but you’d be wrong. Our office looked for any excuse to throw a party.
&
nbsp; “Thanks, Tina,” Emily said.
The original Bob’s Irish Bar had centered around Bob’s office, his Irish whiskey, and an actual bar setup he had installed beside his desk. The modern version more closely resembled progressive drinking, where revelers wandered from room to room to see what people were pouring. Today the firm had a cooler of Miller Lite in the main conference room and Cook’s champagne in the ice-filled break room sink. We weren’t shelling out for the good stuff this time, apparently.
Emily and I had to breach the main party areas to make it to our own offices. The PA system was pumping out “We Will Rock You” by Queen. We accepted plastic champagne glasses as we passed by the break room, victorious Amazon warriors returning from battle.
Only we weren’t.
We crept past the conference room. Celebrants spilled out into the hall. At some point, people became aware of who was making the walk of shame through their midst, and I could see them start to whisper. Tina might have missed it, but my humiliation was, no doubt, the talk of the Dallas legal scene. Hell, all of Dallas. I steadied my chin. One foot in front of the other, Katie.
I tried not to be obvious as I searched for Nick. I saw him.
“Emily, I have to try to talk to Nick,” I said.
You’d think Emily would have had enough of me by now.
“I’ll meet you in your office in five minutes,” she said. “Not a minute longer. I’m serious, Katie.”
“I promise,” I said.
I crossed the crowd like a salmon swimming upstream to get to Nick. He watched me approach, let me get ten feet away, then turned his back and left. In front of everyone.
I froze. I was Medusa with a head full of red stone snakes. Maybe I imagined it, but his Obsession cologne stayed in my senses long after he’d left, rooting me to his scent. I stood motionless as people streamed past me toward the drinks, the bathroom, another pod of revelers. Their snippets of conversations boomeranged around the room. My ears caught some of them, but only for a few seconds at a time before the sound spun back in the other direction. I could only imagine what they were saying, what I would have been saying in their shoes.
Saving Grace (Katie & Annalise Book 1) Page 12
