JULIA LURKED OUTSIDE the entrance to the public defenders’ office until she saw Deb take a call.
Moving fast, head down, she hurried through the reception area and toward the hallway leading to her own office.
But Deb was a pro. She put her hand over the phone and snapped her fingers a la the rudest of customers summoning a hapless server. “Julia!”
Julia assembled a smile before she turned.
“George just went home,” Deb said of one of the other assistant public defenders. “Sick kid.”
Spoken with the same disapproval so often directed Julia’s way for the audacity to have a child, the biggest disadvantage to anyone serious about her (George notwithstanding, it was usually a her) career. Kids distracted from the Almighty Job, with their annoying tendencies to fall ill, have demanding school schedules, and call at all hours with all manner of emergencies demanding immediate attention.
“You’ll have to do his initial appearances. He’s done the interviews and left you his notes. I put the files on your desk.”
Because no one else in the office could take his cases? Julia had given up wondering how she’d gotten on Deb’s bad side. She’d whiled away more than one insomniac night on elaborate revenge fantasies, all of which ended with Deb being replaced by someone who knew how to make something stronger than dirty dishwater in the office coffeepot.
She looked at the clock. The initial court appearances, held for people who’d been arrested the day before, would start in five minutes. She ran down the hall, grabbed the files without looking at them, and made it into the courtroom just as the justice of the peace stepped up to the bench.
The prosecutor for the day, a new hire, looked Julia’s way as she rose in response to the judge’s appearance. “Where’s George?” she mouthed.
“Sick,” Julia whispered. For all her displeasure at the extra work forced upon her, she took small satisfaction in the concern flitting across the young woman’s face. Julia had a newly formidable reputation as a result of her earlier success, something that had yet to translate to a raise even though Decker reassured her, as he had for months, that one was in the works.
The judge rapped her gavel. “Be seated.”
Julia looked over her shoulder into the gallery and did a double take at the sight of Deputy Sheriff Cheryl Hayes. It was not unusual to see law enforcement officers in the courtroom during trials, either after they’d testified or in support of a fellow officer called as a witness. But initial appearances were quick, pro forma events. Maybe Hayes was just refreshing her memory on court procedure. Julia shrugged and scanned the rest of the room.
Chance Larsen lounged in the back row, tapping away at his laptop. The newspaper’s offices were several blocks away, and sometimes, rather than going back to the office to write his stories, he simply co-opted a spot in a courtroom where little of interest was expected.
Chance looked up, met her gaze, and nodded a greeting, then looked beyond her. His eyes widened.
Julia followed his gaze to the first inmate being led through the door.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed.
Mack Coates, a sinewy figure cloaked in jailhouse orange, fell into the chair beside her with a wide grin, the tip of his tongue massaging a scar that pulled a corner of his upper lip south.
“Hey, Thumbelina.”
It was her nickname among the frequent fliers, an allusion to her diminutive size and also her seemingly magical abilities to wangle lower bail amounts or even to get defendants released on their own recognizance.
Mack, though, was one defendant she’d have been happy to let languish in jail forever.
It wasn’t just his appearance, which at first glance was deceiving. Mack had the golden curls, soft cheeks, and plump lips of a cherub, and that face, along with his slender body, too often led people to near-fatal mistaken assumptions.
Julia, along with everyone else in the courthouse, knew the story about Mack’s first stint in the Peak County Jail, when an Aryan Nations contingent awaiting sentencing for stomping a Hispanic tourist who’d walked into the wrong bar took one look and called first dibs. But when three of them cornered him in the shower, he spun quick and catlike toward them and, with a winsome smile and a shiv fashioned from a chicken bone, sliced their leader’s face to the bone, molars showing between the flaps of bloody flesh.
The would-be assailants had failed to properly respect what was tantalizingly on display in the shower—the corded biceps, the enviable six-pack, the thighs and calves toned from years of martial arts. Given the ever-shifting jail population, new inmates could be forgiven their ignorance when Mack waltzed in for one of his many short stays, and similar scenes in varying degrees of severity played themselves out again and again, usually ending with Mack ambling away from a whimpering hot mess. Somewhere along the line, someone had inflicted a blow serious enough to cause the scar. It inevitably focused attention on his pillowy lips and distracted from his coiled, menacing quality, the elegant hands in permanent clench, the nearly lashless baby blues fixed in an unblinking stare.
He gave Julia the creeps in a way her more violent clients never had. During court appearances, she usually made sure to stand close to her clients, to touch their arm, lay a hand on their shoulder, demonstrating to all their worthiness. But she’d never once touched Mack and fought hard to keep from leaning away from him as he stood beside her.
Rumor had it he pimped a string of girls that he trucked over to the university town in the next county on football weekends to service the aging stalwarts in the booster club, but no one had been able to pin that on him.
His file rivaled Ray’s in thickness, though it easily surpassed Ray’s in terms of serious charges. But he always skated, never spending more than a few days in jail before witnesses shut up, evidence got misplaced, and the unseen hand of Satan intervened. That last being the only reason Julia could imagine that Mack hadn’t ended up in the state prison long ago.
What was it this time?
She grabbed his file and checked. Surprise, surprise—promoting prostitution. She peeled a sticky note in George’s crabbed, back-sloping handwriting from the page and deciphered it. No surprise there, either. The woman who’d reported Mack for pimping her out had told George she’d made the accusation in a fit of anger, she was withdrawing her complaint, and if he insisted upon pursuing the case, no way, no how would she testify against Mack.
“Your Honor,” Julia sighed, and explained the situation, moving to drop the charge. She didn’t have much choice, even though it meant she’d soon see Mack strolling through town like a solid citizen, turning that lopsided grin her way.
She heard the courtroom door open and close. She turned. Cheryl Hayes was gone. The bailiff approached to usher Mack away to fill out the necessary release paperwork. Give her Ray any day, she thought, smiling at the bailiff in relief. But Mack waved him off and bent to whisper in her ear. It was everything she could do not to flinch.
“This thing with Ray? Let him take the fall now before things get even worse for him. It’s best for everyone.”
His tongue emerged and flicked the scar.
Julia looked away. But his words stayed with her.
“For you most of all.”