45

Ella called David Slade’s office. She wanted to give Slade the number of the new burner phone she’d use to communicate with him in the future. She told Slade’s secretary that she was Judge Martinez’s clerk, and Martinez wanted to speak to him. She figured Slade would take a call from the judge.

Slade came on the line, sounding vexed. “Yes, Your Honor. What can I do for you?”

“It’s not the judge, it’s me,” Ella said.

“Where the hell have you been?” Slade said. “I’ve sent you a dozen text messages.”

Ella started to tell Slade to calm down but before she could, Slade said, “The case has fallen apart. We need to meet. Immediately.”

“What do you mean it’s fallen apart?” Ella said.

“Not on the phone,” Slade said.

Ella hadn’t told Slade that a DA investigator named DeMarco was hunting for her—and she decided not to tell him now; he didn’t handle stress all that well. But she was afraid that DeMarco would follow Slade and Slade would lead him to her. She told him, “If we meet, you can’t be followed to the meeting place.”

“Why would anyone follow me?” Slade said.

“You just never know,” Ella said.

“Well, I’ll be careful,” Slade said.

“Being careful won’t be good enough,” Ella said. “The cops could put a dozen people on you. They could use a helicopter to track you or stick a GPS device on your car.”

“They’d never do that,” Slade said. “I’m a lawyer.”

Ella laughed, though it wasn’t exactly a laugh.

Then Slade said, “Does it really matter if they follow me? The thing that’s important is that they don’t know we’re meeting. My mother-in-law has a beach house on Long Island, and she’s not using it now. If you’re sure the cops aren’t following you, you need to get to the beach place before me; the front door key is under this little lawn statue of a leprechaun. There’s no way for the cops to know that you’ll be inside. Then we’ll talk and I’ll leave first and you can leave after I do. Just don’t park near her place.”

“That’ll work,” Ella said. Slade gave her the address of the beach house, and Ella arrived there an hour before he did and parked a mile away.

“So what’s going on?” she asked Slade as soon as he stepped into the house.

“There was a meeting yesterday with the judge who’s presiding over Toby’s trial.”

“Why?” Ella asked.

“He just wanted to get a sense of how long the trial would last.”

“So what’s the problem?

“The judge asked about the number of people we’d both have testifying so he could get an idea how long it would take to present our cases. And that’s when Porter said she had four witnesses.”

“Four?” Ella said. “There should be only three.”

“Yeah, well, that’s when I heard that Edmundo Ortiz is planning to testify.”

“Goddamnit!” Ella shrieked.

“For whatever reason, the damn guy decided to come back. Which means that now we’ll have two people testifying that Toby did it, and two who will say they’re unsure.”

“Get another delay,” Ella said. “I need time to deal with this.”

This was the last thing she needed, with DeMarco hunting for her. She also knew there was no way Slade was going to pay her the million he owed if he had to walk into court facing two honest witnesses. He could still win; he might be able to create enough reasonable doubt with half the witnesses saying they couldn’t identify Toby as the shooter. The problem now, though, was that the bartender and the barmaid had been a fair distance away from Toby when he shot DiNunzio, but Toby had run right past Quinn’s table and almost ran into the busboy. So the prosecution was going to argue that the best witnesses had identified Toby and the jury should take that into account. She needed time to unravel all this, but then Slade said, “I can’t get another delay. Martinez told me today he wouldn’t give one. So what are you going to do?”

Not ‘What are we going to do?’ What are you going to do?

Ella walked over to one of the windows and looked out at the ocean. This was her dream: a place with an ocean view, her reward for becoming so much more than Ella Sue Fieldman from Calhoun Falls, South Carolina. Now everything she had worked for might go up in smoke.

“Which of the two witnesses is more important?” she asked Slade.

“What do you mean?” Slade said.

“I mean, if you had to pick between Rachel Quinn and Edmundo Ortiz, which of the two would you prefer to testify?”

“Ortiz, of course,” Slade said. “He was shakier on his identification at the lineup, he never saw Toby shoot Dominic, and then there’s the fact that Quinn will come across better than him. She’s well educated and most likely articulate, and Ortiz … Well, you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do,” Ella said.

She had to do something about Rachel Quinn, and she had to do it quickly.