5

TWO MONTHS EARLIER

CHESAPEAKE, VIRGINIA

Paige Chambers heard the outer door to the restroom open, but it was too late. She let the vomit fly. She was bent over in a stall, the door closed. She would just have to wait this person out. She had read once that the great Roman orator Cicero did the same thing. She hated that she got so nervous before a big hearing like this, putting so much pressure on herself that she literally made herself sick.

This is not me. I’ll be fine.

She kept her hair out of her face with one hand and used the other to wipe her mouth with toilet paper. When she was done, she flushed the toilet, and some of her frayed nerves, disguised as this morning’s breakfast, circled the bowl and went down the drain.

She waited until she heard the bathroom intruder wash her hands and leave. Paige grabbed her coat from the hook on the back of the stall door and stepped out into the bathroom. She checked herself in the mirror, adjusted her pin-striped suit with the skirt that reached just above the knees, and bent over to get a drink from the faucet.

She stood there for a moment, studying herself, a last-minute pep talk rattling around in her brain. She was blessed with decent looks, though she thought her green eyes were a little buggy. She had straightened her shoulder-length black hair for the occasion instead of tossing it up in a messy bun or pulling it back with a headband like she normally did. She had applied only a thin layer of foundation, a little lip gloss, and some basic eye shadow and mascara—nothing fancy. She wanted to be taken seriously as a professional.

Paige was four years out of law school and had already argued in front of the Virginia Court of Appeals nearly fifty times. She had graduated third in her class and now worked for the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She could do this. There was no one better.

She gave herself a quick nod, picked up her briefcase, squared her shoulders, and left the restroom. She took a furtive glance around to make sure nobody was watching and headed straight to the courtroom.

The usual suspects had already arrived. There were a few lawyers, like Paige, who made a living doing appellate work. This court consisted of three-judge panels who decided if the trial court had correctly applied the law. Most of the criminals here were represented not by appellate specialists like Paige but by their trial lawyers, a ragtag bunch who worked for court-appointed rates and seldom offered a real defense. Paige had lost only three times, and she’d seen every one of them coming.

Today, in the back row, sat a reporter for the Tidewater Times. She knew he was here for her case, Markell v. Commonwealth, the most volatile case she had handled in her short career.

Austin Markell was a twenty-eight-year-old trust-fund child of a wealthy real-estate developer from Portsmouth, Virginia. He had been convicted of raping a nineteen-year-old student from Old Dominion University. She reported it to the police the same night, and the DNA was a match. The woman, Grace Hernandez, had bruises on her arms and neck, where she claimed he held her down with his forearm. Markell said the sex was rough but consensual. The jury convicted him in an hour.

A few weeks after the verdict, a juicy rumor surfaced, fueled by a hearing in a divorce case for one of the assistant commonwealth attorneys. It seemed that Markell’s defense lawyer, a young superstar in the defense bar named Lori Benton, had been having an affair with a lawyer in the prosecutor’s office. Markell promptly fired Benton and retained sixty-five-year-old Wyatt Jackson, a local legend, a man who hated the government and turned every case into World War III.

Jackson raised an ineffective assistance of counsel defense, arguing that Benton had not told Markell about the affair. Jackson claimed that attorney Benton had pulled her punches. She didn’t go after the victim’s prior sexual history. She didn’t call character witnesses who would have helped Markell. Jackson even submitted an affidavit from Markell saying he would never have hired Ms. Benton if he had known about the relationship.

Paige popped a mint, draped her winter coat over the rail behind her counsel table, and took a seat next to the embattled commonwealth’s attorney for the city of Portsmouth. The city was divided along racial lines, and Destiny Brown had been voted in as commonwealth’s attorney over her two white opponents. She had fired half the office immediately, and the rest were leaving in droves. The prosecutor caught in the affair had been forced to resign. Defense lawyers like Wyatt Jackson preyed on the chaos.

Austin Markell had already begun serving his sentence and wouldn’t be in court today, but Jackson had managed to fill up an entire row with the defendant’s family and friends. Before court started, he came over to shake Paige’s hand. Jackson was six-five and a full head taller than Paige. She gripped his hand firmly but knew that hers was cold and clammy.

“You nervous?” Jackson asked.

“Not really,” Paige said. It sounded unconvincing even to her.

Jackson was rail thin with sharp facial features. He had a formidable mane of silver hair that he shoved behind his ears. He had grown a mustache that could hide yesterday’s breakfast, and his piercing blue eyes were sheltered by bushy gray eyebrows. His smile was somewhere between a smirk and a grin. “I’d be nervous too if I were arguing your side,” he said.

“Good luck,” Paige replied brusquely. “You’ll need it.”

This caused Wyatt to smile more broadly. “Ah, the bravado of the young.” He nodded at Destiny Brown, who had refused to rise and acknowledge him. “Nice to see you again as well, Ms. Brown.”

“Get lost,” Destiny said.

Wyatt just shook his head. “Didn’t realize we were so touchy today. But then again, you are a little short-staffed at the office.”

He turned and headed back to his side of the courtroom. Paige sat down, but Destiny couldn’t help herself. “What an arrogant jerk,” she whispered, loud enough to be heard by those sitting behind her.

Paige knew better than to underestimate the man. Born just this side of the Virginia/West Virginia line, he combined the charm of a Southern gentleman with the hide of a mountaineer. He reportedly lived in an RV at a KOA campground, but the rumor was that he had more money in a Swiss bank account than most Silicon Valley execs. He was the kind of lawyer everyone loved to hate until they needed one.

Then they called him.