Nora leaned back against the oxblood leather on the dark mahogany chair.
Resting her bare arms on more oxblood leather trimmed with brass nailheads, she inhaled air that smelled of premium cowhide, furniture polish, and potted plant fertilizer.
She also caught the scent of her quarry, a mix of leather and spice slapped on liberally from a bottle.
The lawyerly aroma lingered though Brad Truesdale had left seconds ago to fetch cold drinks for them both.
She inched forward silently over the thick charcoal carpeting.
The lawyer’s glass-topped mahogany desk was six feet long and four feet wide. A silver-framed photo perched on one corner, angled so a visitor would catch only a glimpse of the five-by-eight-inch snapshot.
Since she’d moved closer, she could see the whole picture.
A thick-bodied man in his forties, Truesdale wore a dark blue suit identical to the one he had on today. His thick sandy-brown hair was neatly trimmed and parted in the same traditional style.
Looked to her like the photo had been taken recently.
Truesdale stood behind a seated brunette wearing a tangerine-colored sleeveless shift. Cuddled up to her one side was a boy in a white polo shirt and tan shorts. On the other was a girl in a blue-and-white striped sundress.
Both had their father’s sandy hair, plus wiry arms and legs like their mother. Given their heights, Nora guessed the boy was six, the girl four.
She tapped her chin with a forefinger. The trailer fire had happened six years ago.
Truesdale was a recent father when he accepted Silvia Simon as a client. During the eight months leading up to the trial, his wife must have gotten pregnant with their second child.
Yet he’d chosen to defend a woman charged with murdering her daughter.
Why?
Nora picked up motion in her peripheral vision. Glancing up at the ten-foot long rectangular window behind the desk, she saw a big gray-and-white bird swoop across cloudless sky.
Truesdale’s office was on the seventh floor of a twelve-story building in downtown Parma.
She pushed herself to her feet and peered out the window. Below, she could see a blue stripe of river.
A much better view than she had from her cramped office at the Center. More nicely furnished, too. No metal filing cabinet sullied the mahogany-and-leather decor.
A fancier office than she expected, given that Truesdale was a criminal lawyer. But appropriate for a partner in a full service law firm.
Truesdale’s five partners drafted wills and trust agreements and settled estates. They established business partnerships and corporations. They sued for personal injury or medical negligence and honchoed clients through bankruptcy.
If a client was nabbed for driving under the influence or his underage kid bought pot with false ID, Truesdale handled the case. The firm was a one-stop shop where a prosperous segment of society could meet all their legal needs, including criminal misdemeanor defense.
Silvia Simon had been charged with two felonies. How had she ended up with Truesdale?
From the hallway, she heard the man’s pleasant baritone.
“A quick conference,” he called to someone out of sight. “I’ll let you know when I’m free.”
Nora lowered herself into the chair and scooted back from the desk. She wanted information from Truesdale. Invading his space wasn’t the way to get it.
“Okay,” he said, stepping into the room. “From the deep pristine aquifers of the Cascade foothills, I bring you the purest spring water available in the Pacific Northwest.”
He set two clear plastic cups on the desktop near her and slid one to the far side. Shutting the door, he reclaimed his chair on the opposite side of the desk and raised his cup.
“Congratulations,” he said. “I hear you had a good morning in federal court.”
Smiling, she lifted hers. She liked Truesdale’s style.
When she’d phoned for an appointment, he hadn’t mentioned her court appearance.
He ’d checked up on her after he’d agreed to see her.
“Thanks,” she said. “I was pleased with the outcome.” Sipping water, she gestured at her jeans-and-T-shirt outfit.
“I was set to hit the road when I phoned,” she added. “I appreciate you inviting me over on such short notice,” she added. “Came straight to you in my traveling clothes. No disrespect intended.”
He laughed. “I’m not insulted. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I’m pretty thrilled by the way you chased the US Department of Justice out of Parma.”
She waggled a finger at him. “DOJ still has lawyers based in Parma.”
“Not many.” His hand went up as he ticked off the body count. “The US Attorney left the state. Two Assistant US Attorneys retired. And one more AUSA had to recuse herself from your case.”
He dusted off his hands. “Nobody was left to prosecute your client.”
“I can’t take the credit.” She laughed. “That goes to the forensic linguist who proved the AUSAs were posting anonymous comments online. He uncovered so much misconduct that it was obvious that the rest of the staff—including the boss—had gotten their hands dirty.”
“I’m still impressed.” He sipped from his cup. “But you want to discuss Silvia Simon. Are you representing her?”
Nora shook her head no. “Silvia wrote to us requesting our assistance. I don’t know yet if we can help her. I thought you might have some insights that I won’t find in the transcript.”
He smiled. “I’m happy to help if I can. What do you want to know?”
Pleased that he wasn’t threatened by her interest, Nora settled more comfortably into her chair.
“I understand you hadn’t previously defended a client facing a criminal homicide charge?”
“True,” Truesdale replied. “I didn’t volunteer to take Silvia’s case. But despite my inexperience, the judge asked if I was willing and available to defend her.”
Truesdale leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “I agreed to represent her. And given the circumstances, I thought my background as a deputy prosecutor might prove helpful.”
His words surprised Nora.
If she needed a criminal defense lawyer, she’d look for one who was good at getting juries to find the defendant not guilty.
Which ruled out most former prosecutors.
Nora kept her expression neutral and repeated Truesdale’s words.
“‘Given the circumstances’.”
She tilted her head and met his gaze. “What do you mean?”
“The usual tactics for fighting a murder charge weren’t available to us,” Truesdale replied.
He raised his index finger. “First, Silvia had no alibi. She told the cops who arrived at the scene that she was in the trailer when fire broke out. We had no opportunity to argue that she was not.
“Second,” Truesdale continued, “Investigators identified no witnesses at or near the scene. And while that meant nobody saw Silvia set the trailer on fire, it’s also true that nobody could confirm her claim that she was asleep when it started.”
He pursed his lips. “Third, she asked to take a lie detector test. The polygraph didn’t find any indicators that she was lying. But she made statements to the examiner that could have been interpreted by the jury as a confession.”
Shaking his head, Truesdale concluded, “Most important, nobody saw a potential firesetter fleeing from her trailer. Video surveillance at a nearby convenience store captured no suspect images. Silvia saw nobody enter her trailer. I couldn’t find a single piece of evidence from which to infer that anybody else started the fire.”
Nora blinked.
Truesdale sounded as if he’d taken a checklist from a law school textbook and ruled out theoretical murder defenses one by one.
If that was true, his brain worked the exact opposite of hers.
She started with the facts and went where they took her.
His monologue hadn’t answered her original question. She tried again.
“How do those points relate to your background as deputy prosecutor?”
Truesdale nodded sagely. “Silvia was charged with first-degree murder and first-degree arson. Both are Class A felonies. If found guilty, she could be sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.”
He lifted his hand again, this time as if warning her not to object.
“I know she had no criminal record. But given the nature of her crimes, I feared the judge would impose the harshest possible punishment.”
Nora nodded to show she understood his reasoning. Washington sentencing guidelines for a first-time murderer topped out at a few months less than twenty-seven years.
But a judge had the leeway to impose a longer sentence. The judge presiding at Silvia’s trial had, in fact, given her a sixty-year sentence.
Truesdale added, “I found nothing with which to build a strong defense case. I concluded she’d be better off entering into a plea bargain agreement.”
Nora wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.
“Are you saying that you accepted the appointment as her defense lawyer because you thought you could make a deal with the prosecuting attorney?”
“It was certainly in Silvia’s interest for me to try. At that time, the prosecuting attorney for this county indicted for first-degree murder only when he had an ironclad case.”
Untrue, but she didn’t bother to challenge Truesdale. She had a more pressing question for him.
“Did Silvia authorize you to negotiate a deal for her?” Nora asked.
“Not specifically. But she was okay with me talking to the PA about alternatives to trial.”
Truesdale lifted his chin. “The PA was willing to drop the murder charge if Silvia pled guilty to arson. She’d serve a twenty-year sentence.”
Nora folded her arms. “Obviously, Silvia rejected that deal.”
He cleared his throat. “She said she was innocent of both arson and murder and she wouldn’t plead guilty to either. I explained that we’d have to go to trial. If we lost, she’d likely get a sentence longer than twenty years.”
“But you couldn’t change her mind.”
“No, she insisted on going to trial. I put on the only defense available.”
Nora remembered what Hugo had told her. “You tried to prove that the cause of the fire was not arson.”
“Tried being the operative word.”
Truesdale sighed.
“I found a private fire investigator willing to work for the limited funds available. He testified that an electrical problem might have caused the fire. But his final report was all hypothetical. The fire had destroyed the trailer’s wiring. He had no hard evidence.”
Making a face, Truesdale added, “The local fire marshal requested assistance from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”
Nora nodded. “I heard that an ATF forensic chemist testified for the prosecution.”
“According to him, ATF operates the largest fire research lab in the world. They have state-of-the-art tools to analyze fire dynamics.”
His mouth turned down, a sad defeated expression on his face.
“The ATF chemist conducted several scientific tests. When the prosecuting attorney compared the reports, he blew my expert out of the water.”
Nora wrinkled her forehead sympathetically. Hugo had made the same observation.
Truesdale glanced at the Rolex on his wrist. A signal that he’d end this conversation soon.
Moving on, Nora asked, “And you didn’t put Silvia on the stand?”
“Luckily, she didn’t want to testify.” Truesdale ran a hand through his sandy hair.
“To be honest, if she had wanted to, I’d have tried to talk her out of it. During the investigation, she made inconsistent replies to a number of questions. If I’d put her on the stand, the PA would have used that to destroy her credibility completely.”
Nora still didn’t have a real sense of the client.
“Silvia was sitting beside you throughout the trial,” she said. “How did the jury appear to react to her?”
“Not well,” Truesdale replied.
“I warned Silvia that the jury would be watching her,” he added. “It was in her interest that they see her as a grief-stricken young mother who’d lost her only child.”
Truesdale sighed.
“I told her, be attentive. Don’t react to any accusations. Show some emotion. Like if she heard something that made her feel sad, she should wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. But she shouldn’t start sobbing.”
He shook his head. “She didn’t get it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She sat there, rigid. And her facial expression—”
Truesdale winced as if the remembered image pained him. “Sullen is the only word that describes it.”
His gaze landed on the framed photo. Flicked to Nora.
“I know this isn’t fair. But I couldn’t help noticing. Silvia didn’t have any burn marks on her face or arms. Apparently, she didn’t get any scars trying to save her daughter from being incinerated.”
He swallowed.
“When the prosecutor called her a cold and heartless killer, a couple of jurors nodded. I had to stop myself from doing the same.”