“Your Honor, with all due respect,” Desiree said. “You’re not a prosecutor anymore. I am. And I’m declining to go forward with these charges.”
“This is ridiculous. This is a small town. Of course I’m going to have business with some of the citizens. There’s nothing improper about that.”
“Yes, sir. There may be a perfectly good explanation for everything. If you’d like, you can talk about it to FBI Agents Steve Quisenberry and Samantha Randazzo, who have flown in from Washington, D.C., for exactly that purpose.”
Desiree motioned behind her. Anna glanced into the audience and saw her two favorite FBI agents standing in the aisle. More tears came to her eyes, she was so relieved to see their familiar, reliable faces.
The judge adjusted his glasses with trembling hands. He looked at the agents in dark suits, standing by the doors. “Certainly,” he said. “Certainly. Certainly. I look forward to the chance to straighten this all out. I just need to change out of my robe. Agents, please come to my chambers in ten minutes.”
The judge stepped off the bench so abruptly he tripped on his robe. His clerk caught him, and the judge straightened up. “Thank you, son.” He hurried out of the courtroom. The young law clerk looked around at the packed, silent courtroom.
“Um,” the clerk said. “This case is adjourned?”
The courtroom erupted in noise.
“Oh my God,” Jody stood. “We won?”
“We won,” Anna said. “They dismissed with prejudice, which means you can never be charged with this murder again. It’s over.”
Jody started crying. Anna put her arm around her. A slew of reporters came up to Anna with questions. She didn’t want to comment on the facts, not if the FBI was investigating the judge. She said, “We’re happy and relieved that justice was done. My sister is innocent. We are so gratified that the prosecution had the honor to dismiss the charges when all the information was available.”
Anna went over to the prosecutor. “Thank you, Desiree. For everything.”
Desiree didn’t have to dismiss the charges with prejudice. The prosecutor could have requested a mistrial, and tried to convict Jody in a new trial. Maybe Desiree had made a strategic decision about the continuing viability of her case. Maybe her office had made a political decision about the atmospherics. Or maybe Desiree had simply decided to use the tools at her disposal to achieve some justice in a situation where the justice system had failed for so many years. Whatever the case, Anna was humbled and grateful.
Desiree shook her hand. “Good luck, Anna. Hope to see you back on the other side of the courtroom soon.”
Anna smiled. “Thanks.”
She wended her way to the back row, but her FBI friends were no longer there. She heard a screeching noise from outside. She and several other people looked out the courtroom window. A blue Cadillac careened out of the courthouse garage and onto the road that encircled the town square. Several protesters had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit.
“That’s Judge Upperthwaite’s car!” said the stenographer.
The Cadillac sped away, disappearing onto a side street. A minute later, a dark sedan with government plates followed. The FBI sedan screeched around the same turn that the judge had taken. Anna smiled. A chase was exactly the sort of thing Randazzo loved. Quisenberry would be holding tight to the armrest and shouting for her to watch out for pedestrians. From above, Anna heard the thwump-thwump-thwump of a helicopter.
Her heartbeat picked up with the thrill of the chase, the instinct to go after the bad guy. Her adrenaline surged. She shook her head, smiled, and walked away from the window. She had only one task here.
She went to Jody with a smile. “Let’s get you home.”
“No.” Jody shook her head.
“Why not?”
Jody held her stomach and smiled through a grimace. “This baby isn’t gong to wait any more.”
60
Anna waved good-bye to Cooper, hustled Jody down to the garage, and rushed her to the hospital. By the time they filled out the hospital paperwork, Jody’s contractions were coming once every five minutes. She was quickly admitted and given a bed.
The ob-gyn examined her, and looked up, surprised. “You’re dilated to seven,” the doctor said. “And this is your first baby. You’ve probably been in labor for a day or two. Did you feel the contractions?”
“Yep.” Jody smiled at Anna. “I felt ’em. But I couldn’t have this baby until I was sure that my sister was okay.”
It was too late for an epidural. Anna held Jody’s hand, recited encouraging platitudes, and told Jody to breathe, just like she’d learned in the prenatal class. Jody panted, pushed, and told Anna to fuck off. The doctor said it was a textbook delivery.
At 3:13 P.M. on March 3, the baby girl came into the world with a loud, healthy cry. The nurses wrapped her up and placed her on Jody’s chest. The infant quieted and looked up into her mother’s eyes. Jody gazed adoringly down at her newborn.
“Oh my God. She’s so beautiful. She’s so beautiful.”
Anna looked at her sister and niece and thanked God that this happened here rather than in a prison infirmary. Anna held the baby, who looked back at her with surprised blue eyes. Anna felt her heart expanding to fill with more love than she’d ever thought possible.
“Thanks for hanging in until your mama was ready, little bean,” Anna whispered.
“I’m going to call her Leigh Anna,” Jody said. “After you.”
Anna blinked back happy tears. “That’s the greatest honor I’ve ever had.”
She rocked Leigh until the baby started making squeaky little cries. Jody held out her arms. “Let me give this a try.” Anna set the infant in Jody’s arms. Jody pulled the baby to her breast. The child rooted around, the new mama shifted things about, and then Leigh latched on and began suckling. “There you go, little one,” Jody said. “Good job.”
“Wow.” Anna watched with amazement. “You’re going to be a great mother.”
“Thank you, Annie,” Jody said. “For everything you did to make that happen.”
“I had to keep you out of jail. I wasn’t ready to take a kid myself.”
The next day, Anna sent e-mails to everyone she knew. Cooper visited the hospital with flowers. Two days later, Jody checked out.
“Taking your baby home is such a special time,” said an orderly, as Anna loaded the baby and car seat into the Yukon.
Anna shot a sympathetic glance to her sister. Jody still didn’t have a home. She had an empty lot, some charred bricks, and a lot of paperwork from the insurance company. There were many things for Jody to figure out about her life postbaby and posttrial. For now, Anna drove them to Detroit.
With the sisters’ help, Cooper’s house had undergone a transformation over the winter. The foyer floor was no longer covered with a tarp, and the wood floors were polished to their former glory. A new iron handrail laced the stairs. Peeling wallpaper had been torn down and the walls were painted in deep, warm colors. Rotten wood had been replaced, old wood had been polished, and everything shone with a new coat of lacquer. Anna had done much of the work herself. She felt a sense of ownership, not the kind you get with money, but the kind you get from building a home. A bouquet of ivory roses sat on the kitchen table, with a note of congratulations from Grace.
That night, Anna woke up at 3:00 A.M. to help Jody with a feeding, then climbed back into bed with Cooper. The moonlight streamed in through the bedroom windows and lit up the white walls. They faced each other, looking at each other’s eyes, stroking each other. The pleasure of his skin against hers was particularly powerful tonight.
“Coop,” she whispered.
“Hm?”
“I’m not sure I can go back to D.C.”
“Why?”
“Jody. The baby.” She met his eyes. “You.”
“Well, that makes it easy.” He grinned. “Stay.”
Amazing, the power that single word had. Stay. She hadn’t thought about it before, hadn’t allowed her mind to peek past the point where her sister might go to jail. But here she was. She grinned back.
“Maybe I will.”
• • •
The next morning, as Anna and Cooper were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and trading sections of the newspaper, there was a knock at the door. Anna got up and opened it. She found a large, handsome man holding a giant bouquet of pink roses. His cheeks were freshly shaven and he wore a spotless yellow polo shirt, from which a few tattoos peeked.
“Grady,” she said. “Hi.”
“Hi, Anna. Can I come in?”
Cooper walked over and stood with his hand on her back. She liked how that felt.
“Sure. Wait here with Coop.”
She went upstairs to the bedroom. Jody sat in bed, holding Leigh over her shoulder and patting her back to burp her.
“You have a visitor,” Anna said. “A very tall, very cute one. Carrying a florist’s worth of pink roses. What do you think?”
Jody kept patting the baby’s back. Leigh let out a resounding belch.
Jody smiled. “I think the kid wants me to go for it.”
They laughed. Anna took the baby so Jody could take a shower. Twenty minutes later, Jody came out of the bathroom, gussied up and looking as pretty as Anna had ever seen her. She gathered Leigh from Anna’s arms and changed the baby from her MSU onesie into a pretty pink dress.
“Let’s go see your daddy, little one,” she whispered.
Jody went down the stairs. Anna followed.
Grady stood from the couch in the den. He looked at Jody, and then at the child in her arms. A smile spread across his face, and his eyes shone like this was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen, which maybe it was.
Anna and Cooper went to the kitchen so the new parents could have some space to get to know each other.
When Grady left two hours later, Jody was beaming. She stood on the front porch holding the baby and waving as he drove off. Anna stood next to her sister.
“How’d it go?” she asked, although she could tell by the dreamy look on her sister’s face.
“He’s coming back tomorrow,” Jody said. “And he’s bringing his mom.”
• • •
Later that afternoon, Jody got her second set of visitors. Kathy, Wendy, and Isabel came carrying balloons and colorful bags of baby presents. Anna, who by now guessed that they shared some secrets, was glad they hadn’t visited in the hospital. It wouldn’t do to be seen in public together. Not for a while. Anna led them back to the living room.
“Oh my God! Let me get a look at the baby,” Wendy said, sitting next to Jody. “She’s gorgeous! She has your eyes.”
Kathy sat next to Wendy and reached out to touch Leigh’s tiny hand. The infant grasped her finger, and Kathy smiled. The woman looked healthier. She had some color in her cheeks and her figure no longer looked so emaciated. Jody had mentioned that Kathy was going to AA. Anna hoped she’d be able to find some measure of peace.
Isabel frowned at the baby. “She looks like an old man,” said the girl. “A wrinkly, pickled, pink old man.”
“That’s what all babies look like,” Wendy said. “It’s what you looked like when you were a newborn.”
“It’s what Hayley looked like,” Kathy said softly. Wendy put her arm around her shoulders.
Anna’s phone rang. It was Jack. She excused herself and went out to the foyer.
“Jack! Hi! Guess what? Jody had her baby. A little girl.”
“Congratulations! Tell me all about it.”
She told him about the baby’s birth and the judge’s arrest.
“Well done,” he said. “I’m proud of you. And maybe the timing was meant to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anna, I called to ask you to come back to me and Olivia. There’s no question, nothing left to be sorted. I love you. You’re the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. You’re everything I ever wanted. There’s a beautiful white dress hanging in the closet. There’s a diamond ring sitting here in a box, just waiting for your finger. Come home, and let’s put it to good use.”
“Oh, Jack. I . . .” She stared out the window, at the community garden. She looked inside, at the floors she’d helped polish. Had her time in Michigan just been a brief interruption in the already-scheduled program of marrying Jack? Or had her life shifted so inexorably that it was now on an entirely different course? She heard her niece mewling, her sister and the other women laughing. She saw Cooper walking outside, Sparky trotting at his heels.
“I don’t know.”
• • •
After the women left, Anna sat on the couch and handed Jody today’s Detroit News, which featured a story about Judge Upperthwaite. The Department of Justice had opened an investigation into his conduct. He had resigned his seat on the bench, and the courthouse was being renamed. Below the headline was a picture of workers prying the words LAWRENCE P. UPPERTHWAITE from the entrance.
“So,” Anna said. “It’s done.”
“It’s done. Thank you.” Jody said, putting down the newspaper. “What you did was amazing. As a lawyer and a sister. I never thought you’d be happy for a group like Anonymous to get involved in one of your cases.”
“I never realized how much I was willing to bend the rules until they were all stacked against you.”
“Maybe a little of me rubbed off on you, and a little of you rubbed off on me.”
“I have been swearing more.”
Jody laughed. “Do you want to hear the whole story now?”
“Of course I do.”
“What about your lawyerly obligations? Will you have to report the stuff I tell you if, hypothetically, it involved some criminal activity?”
“Not as long as it’s done. If you’re planning to go kill someone tonight, I might have an obligation to tell somebody. But past crimes are the opposite. As your lawyer, it’s my duty not to disclose any confidences you share with me.”
“Okay,” Jody said. “I wanted to tell you. But it wasn’t just my secret. It belonged to two other women, who were in equal danger. The three of us had a pact. We swore we’d never tell anyone. And I was going to do whatever I could to protect them. I didn’t want you to throw them under the bus to save me. But just now, while Isabel was outside playing, Wendy and Kathy told me I should tell you. So now it’s a pact of four.”
“Okay.”
“Where should I start?”
“Start at the beginning.”
Anna would close her mouth and try to refrain from questions and commentary. This was Jody’s story, and Anna had waited and worked a very long time to hear it. All she had to do now was listen.
Leigh let out a hungry cry. Jody shifted the baby, pulled up her shirt, and unclasped her nursing bra. Leigh latched on, making happy cooing clucks between swallows.
“Well, let’s see. I guess it all started with the high jump.” Jody stroked the soft hair on Leigh’s head. “When I was fifteen, my favorite place in the world was the high-jump setup at the school track. The bar provided a simple obstacle with a certain solution. You either cleared it or you didn’t. In a world of tangled problems with knotty answers, that was bliss . . .”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The rape-kit backlog referenced in this novel is a real and scandalous problem in America. Most jurisdictions don’t even keep track of how many rape kits are processed. While no one knows the precise numbers, it’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of rape kits are sitting in warehouses, untested. Some have been rotting there for years—even decades—the forensic value of their DNA samples degrading with each passing month. As a tool for solving crime and getting predators
off the streets, rape kits are worth their weight in gold. For example, when Detroit started testing its more than eleven thousand untested rape kits, the city found over one hundred serial rapists in the first sixteen hundred tests. But these kits only work if they’re tested. Apathy and lack of funding still contribute to the national backlog. To learn more about the problem and how to end it, visit www.endthebacklog.com.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of my favorite steps in crafting a novel is the research that happens before a single word is written. I owe thanks to many generous people who shared their time, knowledge, and experience, and provided so many rich details for this story. Any mistakes are my own.
I am very grateful to my friend, Gemma D’eustachio, and her boyfriend, Johnathon Mullen, an Army veteran who lost both legs in an IED blast in Afghanistan. Their candor in speaking to me about their experiences—as a military amputee dealing with his return to America, and as the strong young woman who fell in love with him—helped me envision Cooper’s life and the relationship between Anna and Cooper. Johnathon’s sacrifice to this country is awe-inspiring, as were his kindness and humor when my young sons asked about his “robot legs.” I was also inspired by Johnathon’s determination to reinvent himself stateside as a photographer. He took my author photo; if you flip this book over, you’ll see his talented work.
Thank you to Detective Jeff Folts of MPD’s Major Crash Unit for sharing his expertise on car accidents and automobile deaths; Dr. Joseph Scott Morgan, a death investigator and acclaimed author, for his keen and startling forensics insights; and defense attorney Steven Levin, for his sage advice on how not to bribe public officials (because, of course, none of his clients would do such a thing). Thanks to Toni Kalem, from whom I stole the line, “Sisters are each other’s witnesses.”
I am grateful to the wonderful authors in my critique group: Alma Katsu, Kathleen McCleary, and Rebecca Coleman. They helped me fashion this story as I wrote it, and their wise advice improved it remarkably.
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