BRIEF AS HER fruitless conversation had been, Julia nonetheless had missed her window to duck into Colombia for a necessary dose of what she thought of as real caffeine.
She picked up her pace, rounded the corner to the courthouse, and stopped.
A knot of people stood before it. Two SUVs sporting local television station logos waited at the curb. The imposing double doors with their polished brass handles opened, and Claudette Greene descended the wide marble steps toward a phalanx of microphones. Julia sprinted, elbowing her way through the onlookers until she stood among the reporters at the front of the pack, arriving just as Claudette began to speak.
“These are difficult days for our community. Three of our citizens have been violently taken from us in recent weeks. Allow me to speak frankly.”
A reporter turned her head at Julia’s snort. When had Claudette ever soft-pedaled a single thing? Frank was her default position, with the adverb brutally usually appended. Julia braced herself for ballistic.
“These deaths, these vicious homicides—and the arrest we’ve made in connection—have occasioned little interest from the local press other than short stories reporting they’d occurred. Yet by contrast, the death—at first thought accidental—of a local legislator merited a half page of type.”
All around Julia, shoulders hunched. Nobody liked a public scolding. Julia wondered how much of Claudette’s speech would make it onto the evening news, or the front page. She stole a glance at Chance Larsen. He’d written all the stories in question, including the one in which a host of prominent citizens had sung Leslie Harper’s praises. An appreciation, the newspaper had called it, their term for something that went far beyond a generic obit.
Chance bent his head over his notebook, his hand a blur as he took notes. Julia knew he’d have placed a recorder on the portable podium that had been toted outdoors for the event, but he’d once told her he had never fully trusted them. “Best to go old-school as a backup,” he’d said, waggling his pen.
“That story about Representative Harper—I myself was quoted in it—told us so much about her. Her years of service to the community and our state. The many awards she’d received over the course of her career. Her close relationship with her sister and her niece and nephew, even though two thousand miles separated them. Her wizardry in the kitchen. It even mentioned her new puppy.”
Claudette took a breath and drew herself to her full six-foot height, enhanced today by the four-inch scarlet heels she kept in her desk drawer for just such occasions, when she wanted to push intimidation to DEFCON 2, a level just short of thermonuclear.
“Even if I hadn’t already known Leslie Harper, I would have felt as though I did by the time I’d finished reading that story. I didn’t get that feeling from the newspaper or television stories about William Williams. Or the ones about Mary Brannigan. Or the even shorter ones about Craig Thompson. Maybe they weren’t state legislators. Maybe they didn’t have shelves full of awards. From what I gather, they didn’t even have shelves.
“That doesn’t mean they didn’t have dreams. Aspirations. People they loved and people who loved them in return. But I don’t know any of those things about them because”—her normally booming voice lowered to a hiss—“because apparently nobody bothered to ask.”
She paused. Julia counted the beats.
One.
Two.
Three.
“Because apparently nobody cared.”
One more very long beat.
“But the Peak County Attorney’s Office cares. It cares very much. We don’t give our prosecutions short shrift just because they happen to involve the least among us. We’ve already filed charges in two of these cases and are working hard to develop information that will lead to an arrest in the third.”
Julia scanned the group of reporters until she found a face she didn’t recognize. Someone new, with the fresh-out-of-journalism-school mixture of cockiness and eagerness—not unlike that of her intern—that would serve her purposes. She sidled up to him. “Think she wants a story about the guy they arrested?”
His eyebrows shot up. He too glanced around, taking in his colleagues’ cowed expressions. His shoulders straightened. His hand went into the air. Julia moved away, fast. She didn’t want him to be able to find her when Claudette was done with him.
“What about the person who was charged? Wasn’t he a transient also?”
No, Julia whispered from her new location in the back of the crowd. Not a transient. Not someone just passing through. He lived here too. Just not in a house.
The reporter pressed on. “Would you like to see more stories about him too?”
The other reporters took a few steps away from him, leaving him alone in the white-hot spotlight of Claudette’s glare. Criticizing coverage generally guaranteed an even sharper focus from the press, but if Julia correctly read the shamefaced expressions around her, Claudette had a point.
She raked Julia’s hapless victim up and down with her gaze.
“No questions,” she said. “I know you all are busy people. You have stories to write. Legitimate stories.”
Julie hurried around the corner and entered the courthouse by a side door before he could find her and give her the tongue-lashing she deserved, but in avoiding him, ran straight into Claudette.
“What the hell, Julia?”
Because she’d shared an office with Claudette for so many years, Julia was one of the very few people in the courthouse unafraid—mostly—of her former colleague.
“What the hell yourself? What was that all about? A news conference? What was the news? And why here instead of at your own office?”
Even though she knew the reason. Claudette’s office a few blocks away was befittingly imposing, but it didn’t have the made-for-TV backdrop of the courthouse.
“For exactly the reasons I said. Pisses me off that Billy Williams and Miss Mae and Craig Thompson got short shrift when they were killed. I know you feel the same way.” She stabbed at the elevator button, flashing a new manicure that matched the color of her pumps.
“I do. I just don’t understand …” Julia stopped. She did understand. In just a few short months, Claudette would face the election that could see her ensconced as the county’s official, rather than acting, prosecutor. But her job left her precious little time for campaigning. While it was illegal to campaign on work time, she was following a time-honored tradition of public announcements about her office’s—extra stress on office—priorities and accomplishments, which basically achieved the same thing.
Julia tap-danced away from what she’d been about to say. “I just don’t understand what brings you to the courthouse today. Now that you’re done with your no-news news conference.”
The elevator door opened. Claudette stepped inside. “Just visiting with Tim Saunders to iron out the details of Ray’s plea agreement. Sorry they took you off the case.”
But the grim smile she flashed as the doors closed told Julia she wasn’t sorry at all.