I made my one phone call.
“Mom, can I talk to Dad, please?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jessica.”
I recoiled with the thought of being locked up—for the weekend, at least—without anyone knowing where I was. My vision swam and dark circles narrowed my line of sight. I put my head down to keep from passing out.
“Please, please. It’s the last time—Mom, I’m calling from jail.”
“My God, what have you done?” At last, confirmation that her worst fears were real. There was a heavy clunk and I thought she’d hung up.
I breathed into the silence. Then, “Jessie, is that you?” My father’s voice, gentle, with an undertone of panic. “Your mother says you’re calling from jail.”
“Detective Sabin just arrested me for murder. I think Raisa might be gone for the weekend. I need…” I couldn’t bring myself to say help. Save me. Make everything okay again.
“Hush, hush. It’s okay.” I could almost feel him rocking me. “I’ll try Raisa and if I can’t get her I’ll find someone else.”
“I don’t think Deke knows about this, Daddy. Maybe he can help.”
“Time’s up,” the female cop said behind me. I raised one hand for a moment’s patience.
“…nothing till Monday,” my father said. “But I’ll see what we can do about bail.” My heart broke, remembering what the last murder trial had cost him.
“I didn’t do it.”
“I know, I know.” I heard the change in his voice: steel where only soft silk had been. He’d convinced himself once before that I hadn’t killed anyone. He could do it again.
“Don’t worry, honey, I’ll take care of—” he started to say.
The female officer reached past me and depressed the button on the phone, severing the connection in mid-sentence.
Two hours later, I was the newest resident of the Pima County Female Detention Center. The booking photos were still unflattering, the jumpsuits were still orange, and the strip search was still an act of purposeful degradation.
But there had been a few positive changes since my last visit. The big general population ward that had held over a hundred detainees was now broken up into eight-woman dormitory cells with bunk beds and TVs. And based on the What Not to Wear program that my roommates were watching, it looked like there were more channels now.
No way I’d be arraigned before Monday. Sabin had made sure of that, the asshole. And then what? Did they even offer bail for multiple murder? This might be the beginning of another yearlong wait for a trial. And then? And then? My vision dimmed again.
A bell rang and a voice called “Lights out!” Like a city in a brownout, the shadows raced grid by grid toward our dorm. When the TV went off and the only light left was on the other side of the bars, I kicked off the plastic jailhouse sandals and stretched out on the thin mattress. One woman near the door was praying in Spanish and another in the bunk just opposite me cried in gulping sobs.
Unlike my neighbor, I cried silently.
Welcome home, Jessie.
“You have a visitor,” the guard said. I had taken advantage of the less-than-ninety-degree October temperatures to do sit-ups and push-ups out in the quad. Many of the women had family show up for Saturday visiting hours; I didn’t want to be reminded that I would probably have none.
“Who is it?”
The woman shrugged, her badge and pinned-on nametag (“Delta Bragg”) rising with the gesture. I followed her inside. She gave me a cursory pat-down then unlocked the metal door that led to the visiting room. My father was seated on a plastic chair on the other side of the glass in the second booth from the end.
“I got in touch with the public defender’s office,” he said when I sat down in the facing chair, his palm pressed flat against the Plexiglas. “They said there’s nothing they can do before Monday when you’re arraigned, and Raisa Fortas will be back by then.”
I’d thought as much. “That’s okay, Dad. Thanks.”
“We can get a real lawyer if you want.”
I knew he couldn’t afford that.
“Raisa’s good. She’ll be fine.”
He hesitated, fingering the scratched initials in the laminated desk in front of him. P.K., it said in sawtooth letters. “Can I bring you anything?”
I shook my head, then reconsidered. “Maybe some pin money.” Any money you had on you got credited to your account when you were booked, and you could use it for things like snacks, socks, and underwear. Visitors could add to it. I didn’t know how long I’d be in here, but the twenty-seven dollars I’d had on me wouldn’t go far.
“Your mother,” he started. “She’s pretty shaken up by this.”
I nodded. If there had ever been any hope of reconciliation, it was gone now.
I needed to get a message out to Guillermo. Or even better, to someone who had no ties to me. Tell somebody to place an anonymous call to the Tucson PD, and get them to search Chaco’s car. But I couldn’t involve my father in that. I’d have to find another way.
“I’ll put some money in,” he said, drawing a well-creased twenty from his wallet.
I returned to the yard, and was halfway through the next hundred sit-ups when a shadow fell over me.
“Didn’t think I’d see you back here.”
“Lisa!” I jumped up and hugged her. Lisa Goodrich was the old cellmate who had given me that jittery jacks tattoo. She hadn’t changed much—still stocky with a Jay Leno jaw and heavy upper body. Back then she’d been up on charges of domestic abuse. “I’d say the same about you. What’s up?”
“Corey again. I love him, but when I get mad, I just can’t stop myself from whaling on him.”
“Jesus, girl. What did you do?”
“Nothing, Officer.” She held her hands up in mock surrender. “But he’s still in the hospital. Damn. I really didn’t mean to hurt him.”
Lisa must have had forty pounds on her bantam-weight husband, Corey. And he never fought back.
“How did you make out last time?”
“I did nine months of a three year. I’m headed back up to Perryville on Monday.” She wouldn’t even have to wait for a trial this time. She’d busted her parole.
“My ex-sister-in-law’s up there. Paula Chatham. You’ll have to look her up.” I couldn’t really picture my Bible-spouting ex-sister-in-law cozying up to fight-ready Lisa, but you never know. Maybe Lisa would be good protection for her.
“Have you got any visitors coming in?” Lisa might be the conduit I needed to get the cops sicced on Chaco.
“My mom’s coming by tomorrow. Want her to bring you something?” Lisa swung her arms forward and back, almost simian in her gesture.
“No. But here’s what I want you to tell her.”
Raisa showed up on Monday morning. The same guard who’d taken me to see my father led me to the interview room where detainees met with their lawyers. It was a small space with three metal-legged chairs and a plastic laminated table. Mesh-covered fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.
I wrapped my arms around Raisa in greeting, her head mashed squarely into my chest. She smelled like freedom.
“How was your weekend?” I asked to be polite.
“Better than yours, I’m sure.” She separated papers into two stacks in front of her and opened a notebook with a lined yellow pad in it. “We don’t have much time. The bus to the courthouse leaves in a half hour.”
“What’s going to happen?”
She tapped her pencil hup-two-three on the table. “Even with a rush on it, they can’t possibly have DNA results back yet. But the judge will most likely say there was probable cause for an arrest. You’ll plead not guilty and they’ll set a trial date.”
“And if there’s any new evidence that comes in that exonerates me?” I didn’t know how fast the anonymous call from Lisa’s mom would be acted on. Hell, I didn’t know if the police would follow up on it at all. And even if they searched Chaco’s car and found the knife, they still had to test the blood on it and make sure that Chaco had no alibi for the time that Reuben was killed. Shit, I wish I knew where he’d been that night we raided his uncle’s place.
“What kind of new evidence?” Raisa asked, sucking the pencil like she was ready to light it.
I told her about our trek across the border and the story Ricky Lamas told about the children.
“You’ve got to get Deke in here. Carlos had one of the kids with him and now he’s dead.”
She nodded. “I’ll set up a meeting with Deke, but you’re going to tell an abridged story. Nothing about sneaking across the border or the knife fight with the Braceros. Just what you heard Lamas say. And I’ll make sure Guillermo Ochoa knows what we’re doing.”
After a minute’s silence, she slammed the notebook shut. “Okay. They probably won’t set bail, but we’ll try. Can your family come up with anything?”
“Talk to my dad. He’s been working on it all weekend.”
I stood up when she did, but we parted ways at the interview room door. Raisa was headed for the sunshine. I was on my way to the Corrections Center bus.
We pulled up to the back entrance of the courthouse. The men were let off first, then the four of us women in the back. Shackled at the ankles, waist, and wrists, we danced in a short conga line with clanking metal instrumentation.
The holding pen felt subterranean, cavelike in the Arizona heat. The eleven o’clock timing of the arraignment must have been just a suggestion. I was still waiting when they brought a cheese-on-white bread sandwich at one o’clock.
At one-thirty, a guard at the end of the corridor called my name and I approached the bars. He let me out and I walked ahead of him down the hallway to the courtroom.
A woman judge today. The Honorable Rose Griffiths, the name plaque said. She had hawk eyes and a beak to go with them. Raisa stood when I came in, leaning to pat my father’s hand in the first row behind her. I tried to give him a smile, but it came out like a grimace. His eyes were wide with concern.
The bailiff read the charges. First-degree murder.
Raisa did her best, saying that the state’s case was purely circumstantial, that I had family in the city, and that I’d never been convicted of a crime.
Judge Griffiths seemed to have heard of me before. She dismissed that “no previous convictions” comment with the wave of a turquoise-jeweled hand.
“The defendant has no job and no permanent residence here, your honor. We ask for remand.”
I spun around, gutted by the sound of that voice. It was Ted Dresden, the county attorney who had prosecuted me for Walter Racine’s murder. The man who’d already tried to send me to prison for the rest of my life. The man who’d said I was “a card-carrying member of Liars Anonymous.”
And now he was going to prove it.