Motion to Suppress

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  new Nina Reilly novel

  Perri O’Shaughnessy’s

  UNFIT TO PRACTICE

  Now Available from Dell

  Please turn the page to read a preview.

  PROLOGUE

  AFTER BEING DROPPED OFF at a filthy parking lot underneath a gloomy concrete overpass, Nina Reilly stopped in for coffee at the Roastery on the corner of Howard and Main Street. A river of chilly air flowed through the tunnel-like streets around the skyscrapers of the Financial District. The buildings seemed to lean in at her, threatening. She had her pick of caffeine oases, not that it mattered. She was not here by choice. Any black bile would do.

  At the bottom of Howard, the Embarcadero and Bay Bridge buzzed unseen, angry hives of energy. The tall building’s glass reflected the sun’s intense beams right at her. People glowed like aliens, or so she projected. San Francisco wasn’t her city anymore. The town of South Lake Tahoe had sheltered her for the last few years after she left the Montgomery Street law firm where she had begun the practice of law, and the city had become a stranger.

  Nina sank into a rattan chair. A young man at the next table, his Chinese newspaper close to his nose, blew steam across his cup.

  Women like her, wearing expensive jackets and gold earrings, waited anxiously in line, then carried their medicine right out the door, swallowing on the run.

  Where was Jack?

  She watched a boy from some cold country, bearing a heavy backpack, lounge against the counter, waiting for his espresso. Next to him a balding man, not very much older but with the suit and briefcase of one who has settled into his life, took an apple from a bowl while the woman behind the counter heated up a muffin. The scent of cinnamon moved through the room, smelling of home, its effect immediate and painful. She thought of Bob, who was staying with her brother, Matt, back in Tahoe. She needed her son beside her but she didn’t want to put him through this. It would hurt him too much.

  She looked around. Jack should be here by now.

  What a strange and terrible day, she thought, taking in the sounds of traffic and the city through the open doors.

  Here she sat waiting for her ex-husband, a man she had never expected to see again, but as a result of this six-month-old legal case they had a closer relationship now than when they were married. Jack as a colleague was a savvy, reassuring presence beside her; a much better lawyer than he had been a husband.

  Jack blew through the door from Main Street, tossing a raincoat on the chair next to hers. "Sorry I’m late."

  "I just got here myself. We got stuck in traffic coming off the Bay Bridge. How much time do we have?"

  "A few minutes. What time did you leave Tahoe?"

  "Four-thirty." A long, long time before the dawn. She tried to smile back, remembering that attitude is everything. Reinforcements had arrived and she should straighten up.

  Jack looked spiffy in his suit, his square jaw scraped clean. Fresh from the blow-dryer, his ginger hair stuck out as if fired by electricity.

  Smoothing his hair down with one hand, he read from the green boards. "I’ll be right back," he said, getting up and walking over to the counter.

  Nina watched him sneak in front of a pale office worker, apologizing as if he hadn’t seen her, offering to wait in line behind her, but the girl was already bewitched and said, oh, no, you go ahead. Jack had charm, that rare quality that eased the tensions in the courtroom as well as in life. Good. He would need that magnetism over the next few days.

  He returned and slurped, careful of his white collar. Then he took her hand. "Relax, now. It’s just another day in court." His eyes moved over her in a mix of personal and professional interest. "I like the suit. You could pull your hair back."

  Nina considered the measure of control Jack now had over her, found a barrette in her purse, and pulled her long brown hair back.

  "We should go in a couple of minutes. We’ll be more comfortable if we have a minute to settle in before the judge shows up. You look worried. No, you look mad. Mad and worried. What’s up?"

  "I’m ready to fight, only who are we fighting? I can’t stand this feeling that we’re being manipulated."

  "So we use the hearing to find out. We focus on that. Meanwhile, don’t get weird on me."

  "I’ll look confident. But don’t tell me how to feel." His eyes moved to her hand, where she had bitten a nail down to the quick. She rubbed her lips with her finger, opened her briefcase and withdrew a delicate mirror, then looked herself in the eye. The eye was still brown and showed no panic. Amazing.

  "Why didn’t you come down from Tahoe yesterday? I can see how tired you are, and we’re just starting. You should have stayed with me in Bernal Heights last night, saved yourself that drive. What did you think I would do? Jump you?"

  She didn’t answer, telling herself, this is not the time. Lack of sleep and the months of tension building to this moment were unfettering them both.

  "Sorry," Jack said after a moment. "The shoes are nice. You look remarkably respectable today. Like someone I might marry." He smiled, and the smile invited her to play along. He always wanted to brush the edge off, smooth things over with humor. "Life is folly," his eyes told her. When she didn’t smile back, his face hardened and he turned back into Jack the Knife, his lawyer-self. She preferred that. She believed it to be the real him.

  His eyes flitted to his watch. "Time to go. "

  They left, hustling although they were still early.

  Nina’s new briefcase felt heavier with every step. Its contents, tagged paper exhibits, represented months of work. This was the most important hearing of her career. Still, she was not ready. She could never be ready for this.

  They moved through a warren of skyscrapers into a dank alleyway. At an outdoor stand, more coffee shot into impatiently jiggling cups. The whole city seemed to be fueled with caffeine, hyper, irritable, on the move. Pushing through double doors, they walked up to a security desk. "Good morning. Do we need to sign in?" Jack asked.

  A friendly black woman eyed their attaches. "You going up to the court?"

  "That’s us. Is the judge in a good mood?"

  "You tell me when you see him. Sign in up there," she said. "Sixth floor."

  The elevator gleamed bronze and silver. They rode up in silence, exited toward a sign that read, "Quiet, please. Court in session," and laid their nail clippers, keys, and coins on a brown plastic tray before passing through the metal detector. As Nina walked through, the alarm sounded. The attendant, a young man in a starched white shirt, motioned her back. He looked down at her feet. "Hmm. No buckles," he said.

  She removed her watch and walked through again. Again it rang. By this time other people in a small waiting area to the left, several that she knew, were staring at her. She swallowed and tried to think what in the world she was wearing that would make the thing go off. An underwire bra? No, she’d gone for the soft athletic one, invisible under her suit jacket and more comfortable for a long court day. She was already ridiculous. She felt an urge to flee.

  "Your barrette, Nina," Jack said.

  Nodding, she removed it. Her hair billowed out, but she walked through soundlessly this time. The guard smiled at her and handed her the barrette. "Sign in here." He pushed a lined pad toward her. "Put 9:22 as when you checked in. You don’t have to sign out if you leave for a few minutes. Just at the end of the day."

  "Can we go on in?" Jack asked. "We’re scheduled in Courtroom Two, I believe."

  "The clerk is already in there. Go ahead."

  Nina felt the eyes on her back as they walked inside.

  "Your hair," Jack reminded her.

  "To hell with it." She slid her barrette into her pocket.

  Small and windowless except for two lengths of frosted glass that ran alongside the door to the waiting area, the courtroom formed a long rectangle. On the right, the trial counsel for the California State Bar, Gayle Nolan, sat at an L-shaped table behind two large black notebooks. Nina and Jack took seats at an identi
cal table on the left, Jack seated on the outside, Nina tucked into the L, feeling the unnatural chill of an overactive ventilation system, grateful for a warm jacket.

  Jack put papers on the table and handed her one of two bottles of spring water that were sitting there. She unpacked the briefcase swiftly and efficiently as she had done so many times before in her legal career, getting into it, appreciating the tight organization resulting from so many hours of work.

  A study in neutrality, the courtroom walls were brown, white, and gray. The chairs they sat in bore innocuous stripes. The furnishings were affectless, designed to suck moods right out of the air. Details like the clock on the wall, circular, simply numbered, the judge’s podium, and a large digital clock, right now showing dashes instead of numbers, were strictly functional. Behind them a dozen chairs for observers or witnesses lined the back wall of the court.

  She could be in Chicago or New York. She could be back in her home courtroom in South Lake Tahoe, the room was so stylized. It reminded her of the set of a play she had seen not too long ago at a little theater, Sartre’s No Exit, a black place presumably surrounded by the Void. Purgatory, timeless and eternal.

  But this wasn’t Tahoe. The mountains outside beyond the gray were tall buildings. The dreamlike element, the clash between the bland courtroom and the often terrible events that brought people there, gripped her. What am I doing here? she thought. Who has done this to me?

  Jack reached over and ran his hand along her arm.

  "Okay?" he whispered.

  "Totally freaked out," Nina whispered back.

  "How you can feel that way and still look so Darth Vader-tough I’ll never understand." Jack fingered an empty Styrofoam cup, a scraping, ghastly wakeup. Gayle Nolan got up, ignoring them, and wheeled in a cart marked Chief Trial Counsel weighted down with thick notebooks, folders in file boxes, and code books. So many papers. Nina tried to enjoy the sight of her struggling with the load. No eager law clerks helping here. Light gleamed off Nolan’s specs as she stacked the paperwork onto her table. Finally, she sat back down.

  "Hey, Gayle," Jack said. "And how are you on this fine morning?"

  "Hello, Jack."

  "You can still back out."

  "Don’t make me laugh."

  "This whole thing is a laugh."

  "Yeah? I notice she’s not laughing."

  "She wants the last laugh."

  The judge entered from one of three doors at the front of the room behind the podium. They all stood. Extra tall, with a full head of gray hair he had brushed back, he sported a small, neat moustache, not bushy like the one Jack used to wear. He didn’t look at them. The file engaged his attention as he sat down, allowing them to sit too.

  A placard at the front of his desk read, Judge Hugo Brock. "We’ll go on the record," he said. Sitting on his left with headphones over her ears, the clerk clicked on a keyboard. The digital clock at the front flashed to brilliant red life. It was the brightest spot in the courtroom, and they all stared at it as if the day had exploded.

  "California State Bar Proceeding SB 76356. In the matter of Reilly," said the judge.

  Welcome to the exciting world of Nina Reilly, "one of the most interesting heroines in legal thrillers today."*

  *San Jose Mercury News

  MOTION TO SUPPRESS

  THE SUSPECT CONFESSED. NOW HER ONLY

  HOPE IS A LAWYER WHO BELIEVES SHE LIED.

  Misty Patterson only remembered the fight, the polar bear statue she used as a bludgeon, a trail of blood, and the comatose sleep that followed. When she awoke, her husband and the statue were missing. Only the blood was left. She had come to attorney Nina Reilly’s office seeking a divorce. But when Anthony Patterson was found on the bottom of the frigid lake, Misty needed a miracle.

  Barely a week before, Nina Reilly had been a happily married San Francisco lawyer. Suddenly she’s a single parent, opening a shoestring practice in Lake Tahoe. And now Nina finds herself embroiled in a case that’s going to change everything she believes about the law. It’s going to rock everything Misty Patterson believes about herself. And it’s going to give both women a look at the damning piece of evidence that will challenge their faith in each other. Or give them their one and only chance to win ...

  "A GRIPPING LEGAL THRILLER ...

  A DELECTABLE MYSTERY ... A HECK

  OF A READ."

  — San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  "A RAPID-FIRE SERIES OF SURPRISING

  REVELATIONS. JOHN GRISHAM HAS

  A NEW AND WORTHY COMPETITOR

  IN PERRI O’SHAUGHNESSY"

  — BookPage

  INVASION OF PRIVACY

  LIGHTS, CAMERA, MURDER

  The bloodstains on the courtroom floor belong to attorney Nina Reilly. Months earlier she’d been shot during a heated murder trial. She should have died that day. Instead, Nina has returned to the same Lake Tahoe court. Her only concession to her lingering fear is to give up criminal law. She figures that an invasion of privacy law-suit is a nice, safe civil action that will help her support her young son and pay the bills for her one-woman law office. She figures wrong.

  Nina’s client is Terry London, a filmmaker whose documentary about a missing girl is raising disturbing questions. The girl’s distraught parents believe the film invades their privacy. But Terry’s brutal murder changes everything. Breaking her promise to herself, Nina decides to defend Terry’s accused murderer, a man she’d known years before and hoped never to see again. Suddenly the secrets of Nina’s past are beginning to surface in a murder case that gets more dangerous every day. The evidence against her client is shocking and ironclad—a video of Terry’s dying words. The only chance Nina has to save the man may be illegal. And if it fails, Nina may lose the case, her practice ... and even her life.

  "[AN] EXCELLENT LEGAL THRILLER"

  — Library Journal

  "[A] DEFT, MULTILEVELED TALE OF LEGAL

  AND CRIMINAL TREACHERY"

  — Publishers Weekly

  OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

  LIGHTNING STRIKES

  Two people have died in Lake Tahoe in shocking accidents. In a nearly empty parking lot, a hit-and-run driver kills probation officer Anna Meade Hallowell. High up on a jagged mountain, wife abuser Ray de Beers gets what he deserves: he’s struck by lightning. Attorney Nina Reilly, hiking on a rare day off from her one-woman law practice, sees him die. So does her date, Tahoe deputy DA Collier Hallowell. Still shaken from his wife’s violent death, Hallowell is hit hard by the accident. It’s a bad end to a first date ... and the start of a case that will test Nina’s ethics and her heart.

  Nina is certain de Beers’s death is an act of God. But his aging father wants to exhume the body to rule out foul play. De Beers’s frantic wife and teenage twins hire Nina to stop the disinterment. What gets unearthed are secrets that raise new questions about Anna Hallowell’s death, an indictment against one twin for murder, and a damning piece of evidence that can convict the boy ... unless Nina obstructs justice by hiding it. No good lawyer will take that kind of risk. But a brilliant lawyer, one with a passion for truth, just might ...

  "INTRIGUING."—San Francisco Chronicle

  "A ROLLER-COASTER RIDE ... A TALE NOT

  TO BE MISSED."

  — The Midwest Book Review

  BREACH OF PROMISE

  BROKEN HEARTS. BROKEN PROMISES.

  DEADLY CONSEQUENCES.

  In glitzy Lake Tahoe, couples break up every day. But few are as successful as Lindy and Mike Markov, who built a $200-million business together—before Mike took up with a younger woman. Now he’s claiming that he doesn’t owe Lindy a dime since they never married. Attorney Nina Reilly, struggling to make a living in her one-woman office and raise a young son alone, agrees to take Lindy’s case. Nina knows winning is a long shot, even with a brilliant jury consultant and a palimony expert on her side. It’s the kind of case—full of passion and explosive secrets—that could make a fortune for a young lawyer. Or
drive someone to commit murder — for love, money ... or the right verdict.

  "INGENIOUS ... MOVE OVER, KINSEY

  NINA’S COME TO TOWN!"

  — Monterey County Herald

  "A LEGAL MYSTERY FOR THOUGHTFUL

  READERS ... THE SURPRISE TWISTS ARE

  WONDERFULLY EFFECTIVE."

  — San Francisco Chronicle

  ACTS OF MALICE

  Amid the sparkling snow-swept mountains of Lake Tahoe, Nina Reilly has made a home, juggling the demands of her one-woman law practice and raising a teenage son alone. Now Nina has taken on a case that will threaten everything she holds dear, drawing her into a tangled web of loyalties and alliances within one of Lake Tahoe’s most prominent families. Her client: a man accused of murdering his own brother—on the ski slopes of Tahoe. The law says Nina must give Jim Strong the best possible defense. But Strong’s family has turned violently against him, and suddenly Nina is at the center of the storm. As she works a flawed and troubling case and gets swept into an unexpected love affair, the two sides of Nina’s life come crashing together ... in the ultimate act of malice.

  "PLEASANTLY TWISTY ... [A] WHAM-BAM,

  HEART-RACING CLIMAX."—USA Today

  "[O’SHAUGHNESSY’S] BEST COURTROOM

  THRILLER TO DATE."

  — Kirkus Reviews

  MOVE TO STRIKE

  Nina Reilly thought she’d seen it all. An attorney and single mother, Nina isn’t afraid to tackle the toughest cases and trickiest defenses. But she is wholly unprepared for her latest client—sixteen-year-old Nicole Zack, rebel, thief, and best friend of Nina’s teenage son, Bob. Did Nikki steal something from her uncle, a prominent plastic surgeon, then kill him in cold blood? To find out, Nina calls in Paul van Wagoner, a P.I. and ex-lover whose bravado conceals a troubling personal secret. As Paul investigates the eerily coincidental death of the surgeon’s son—killed in a plane crash the same night his father was murdered—Nina sorts through the twisting lies surrounding Nikki, uncovering a seething mystery, some enraged former patients, and two very old crimes. Finally, Nina must confront the central question she must answer in order to save her client: What did Nikki really see the night of her uncle’s murder?