SOMEHOW JULIA MADE it back to her office, brushing aside Claudette’s offer to walk with her.
She sprinted up the courthouse steps, veering away from the clerks and others who approached her with Have you heard?s, practically shoving Chance Larsen out of the way when he came at her with his reporter’s notebook held high and snapping at Deb as she leapt from her desk in an attempt to get the news firsthand.
“I’m not discussing it with anyone other than our defense team,” Julia said, her words awarding Marie a promotion and including Tim Saunders in the fold. “No calls, no interruptions.”
She felt Deb’s glare all the way down the hall. Marie waited at her desk, not even pretending to work.
She took one look at Julia’s face. “It’s true?”
“Afraid so. Claudette told me herself.”
“I guess that’s that, then,” Marie said with the dead-eyed stare and pursed lips of eternal skepticism she affected in what Julia could only assume was an effort to give herself the appearance of a full-fledged lawyer.
Julia suppressed an urge to slap it away and tried to channel the physical compulsion into a verbal one.
“What was the very first lesson you learned in law school? Surely you haven’t already forgotten.”
“What part of it?”
“Occam’s razor.”
Marie delivered the answer in an aggrieved singsong. “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”
“Looks like you forgot the second rule too. It’s similar to the first.”
Marie didn’t even bother to ask. She folded her arms across her chest and waited.
“KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. As in English, please. Use lawyer-speak in front of a jury and they’ll fall asleep right before your eyes.”
“Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is the best,” Marie mumbled.
“With that in mind, answer me this.” Julia hated her professorial tone but couldn’t help herself. “Why would someone whose lawyer had just pulled off a miracle in getting him released on his own recognizance in a homicide case do something like that? He had to know they’d be watching him. That he’d get caught.”
She hung up her coat and paced the room, which given the small space involved three steps in one direction, then three in the other until her toes bumped up against the beat-up file cabinet that Marie had scrounged from the basement and wedged into the space once occupied by Pavarotti’s cage.
She missed Pavarotti, missed his inquisitive, tilt-headed stare, the way he’d lean his head against the bars for a scratch, then let loose with an operatic trill, lightening the inevitable tension of their days.
“We don’t know that he got caught doing anything. We don’t know why they decided to take him into custody. Last time, it was pretty circumstantial. I don’t know what they have on him this time, but they’ll have to release him after forty-eight hours if they don’t come up with probable cause. Maybe there’s a crazy person out there picking on homeless people. You see it from time to time. There was a case in Colorado back in the late nineties, early aughts, where a whole gang of street kids was preying on them, beating them to death. People don’t like them. They’re unsightly. They smell bad. They make people uncomfortable. Every so often somebody takes it into his head to get rid of them. Because God forbid anybody should help them.”
She stopped, surprising herself with the bitterness that had crept into her voice. She took a breath and forced herself to sit, to log in to her computer, tap at its keys, stare into the screen whose blankness mirrored her own defeated gaze. An old tactic: act the way you want to feel, and at some point you will feel that way. She took another breath and awaited the calm she sought.
“Knock-knock.”
Julia hated people who announced themselves with the faux-cheery greeting rather than just actually knocking. Even if the door was open, as she’d left hers, the jamb offered a perfectly acceptable alternative.
But there was nothing cheery about Tim Saunders’s expression.
He stepped inside without being invited. “Guess you’ve heard.”
“Seems like half of Duck Creek has heard.”
“Hi, Mr. Saunders. How do we handle this one?”
He awarded Marie a tight-lipped smile.
“Here’s the thing. With just one case and only circumstantial evidence, we might have had a chance. Two killings, things get dicey.”
He punctuated his delivery with a sober shake of his head.
Julia had heard enough. “We don’t know that Ray killed one person, let alone two.” Shit. She shouldn’t have called Ray by his first name. Too late.
Saunders’s eyebrows crawled toward the low-hanging curl on his forehead. “No matter your personal relationship with the defendant,” he began.
“Jesus! You make it sound like a love affair.”
The eyebrows inched higher still. “Was it?”
Marie gasped.
Julia looked around her desk for a weapon. Her old-style metal Swingline stapler, if launched correctly, would put quite a swerve in that beautifully straight nose. She slid her hands beneath her thighs on the off chance that she might give in to the impulse.
“I’m not even going to dignify that.”
“I had to ask.”
“No. You did not.”
Saunders held out his hands in a gesture she supposed was meant to be conciliatory. She stared at them, momentarily distracted by the manicure.
“All I’m trying to say is that now more than ever, it becomes incumbent upon us to keep him from going to trial. That first case, a fight between vagrants—the public doesn’t really care how long the punishment is, as long as it’s something. But if they charge him with a second, especially with this one being a woman and the added insult of possible sexual assault, a trial would be beyond ugly. Even if he pleads guilty, he’s looking at decades. But at least if he pleads—especially if it turns out he had help and he can implicate anyone else—there’s a chance he won’t get life.”
Julia stood and flattened her hands on her desk. She leaned across it and spoke very slowly and clearly.
“He’s not going to plead guilty. And he’s not going to get life. He’s not going to get any time at all, because I’m going to get him acquitted.”
As soon as the door closed behind Saunders, Marie turned to Julia.
She didn’t have to ask.
“I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” Julia admitted. “That’s why we’ve got to get as much information as possible.”
“We?”
Before now, Julia had never given much thought to the notion of swallowing one’s pride. Now it felt literal, her own a choking lump in her throat, making it nearly impossible to speak. But she didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t do this alone, and she’d be damned if she’d seek help from Adonis.
She looked pointedly at Marie’s feet, tucked into lady-lawyer low-heeled pumps. “Got boots? Real, functional boots, not the look-good kind?”
“Yes. They’re in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet.” Her voice caressed the words as she cast a glance at her unlovely new acquisition.
“Hat? Gloves?”
Marie nodded twice.
“Shame you wore a skirt today. You’ll be sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because you and I are going to walk up and down the creek and interview every single homeless person we encounter about what they might have seen on the nights when Billy Williams and Miss Mae were killed. And if they didn’t see anything—I don’t expect we’ll find many who did, if any at all—ask what they’ve heard through the grapevine.”
“I have a long coat.” But Marie’s voice had lost some of its brief assurance. She looked toward the coatrack, her wool herringbone number—the sort of thing that screamed Student’s First Grownup Coat—appearing thin and inadequate next to Julia’s sturdy, puffy parka. She knew as well as Julia how the wind would skate up from the icy creek and creep beneath the hem, wrapping itself lovingly around her calves and knees, turning them into reddened, frozen things.
“That’s good. Now. What about pencils? Do you have any?”
Marie slid open the shallow drawer in the center of her desk and withdrew two freshly sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2s, clacking them together like chopsticks. “Right here. Why?”
“Because you’re going to take notes on what people tell you and, to the extent possible, get names and contact information.”
Marie regained a bit of her old, supercilious expression.
“Why not just record them on my phone?”
“Come here.” Julia beckoned her to the window. The bank across the street had a lighted thermometer, at the moment registering fourteen degrees.
“Hold your phone out in this cold for more than a few minutes and it’ll shut down. Use a pen and the ink will freeze. Bring as many pencils as you’ve got. The points will either break of wear down, but at least until that happens, they’ll work.
“Oh, and one more thing.” Julia was feeling better by the moment, focusing on the small tasks at hand as a distraction from the overwhelming, insoluble issue of proving Ray’s innocence. Because no matter what the law said about innocent until proven guilty, the minute someone was arrested, human nature held otherwise.
“You’re going to have to get in the habit of ditching terms like homeless and vagrant and, God forbid, bums. Not even gentlemen of leisure, which Wayne seems to think is funny.”
Marie subjected her lower lip to the same savage chewing she inflicted upon her pens.
“What about just—people? You know, in English. Like you just told me.”
Julia let the jab pass. “Not bad. Let’s go one better, though. At least in court, or when talking to the press—which only I will do, understood?—let’s call them citizens. Because they are. Just like us.”
Thus armed with nomenclature, if nothing else, they donned the necessary extra layers and set out on their mission.