JOHN’S SHOULDERS SLUMPED EVEN AS HARRIS TURNED TO hug him. There were a few murmurs in the courtroom, but no gasps, no outraged cries. Only the hollow whump of the door as Jessica’s father stormed out. The judge thanked and dismissed the jury. Then came the business of justice, the rote incantations of procedure and due process slathered over the utter horror of the acquittal: either a man had been tried for a crime he didn’t commit, or a killer had gotten away with murder.
After a tap of his gavel, the judge departed. The assistant district attorneys collected their papers with lowered heads, then shook hands with Harris before leaving the room. They didn’t acknowledge John’s presence. John turned, but Jane was gone.
When he turned back, Harris smiled. “You’re a free man.”
“I’ll never be free of this.”
Harris’s smile evaporated. “There will be press on the stairs. Do you want to make a statement?”
“You make it. Whatever the normal statements are for something like this.”
They found Jane in the hallway outside the courtroom, sitting on a bench. She looked shaken.
“Everything okay?” Harris asked.
She took a deep breath and nodded. Harris extended a hand to help her up.
“We need to walk out together. It will project the right image. Make it easier for the two of you to reclaim your lives. My paralegal has a driver waiting outside. Ready?”
After the dim halls of the courthouse, the bright spring afternoon surprised John. Waiting reporters swarmed them. The entire trial, they had walked purposefully through throngs of press without stopping. Now, though, Harris halted near the foot of the courthouse stairs, two steps from the sidewalk. News cameras, both television and print, would capture the impromptu press conference and magnify it, as if everything in sight was focused on the reporters’ questions, Harris’s sound bites, and John’s face. But John was taken by how small the cluster was in context of Centre Street, the massive building behind them, and the passersby who barely glanced at the street theater coalescing before them.
Harris raised his voice over the babel of shouted questions. “First, my client, his family, and I would like to thank the jury for their service and for reaching a just verdict. As I said from the beginning, this is a case that the district attorney’s office should have never brought. Right now, my client wants to get back to his family and try to restart his life.”
“What about Jessica DeSalvo’s life?” a female local news reporter shouted.
“It would be a terrible tragedy if the police and DA’s office let this case go. As we showed at trial, they should have considered other suspects instead of buying the media narrative. Just because headlines sell a tabloid doesn’t make the story true. Right now, Jessica’s killer is out there. They should look for him.”
“What if it’s your client?”
Harris rolled his eyes and said, “Next.”
“What are Mr. Lo’s plans?”
“He’s going to spend some time healing with his family.”
“Mrs. DeSalvo’s parents made a statement after the trial,” a paunchy reporter called, then read from his notepad. “‘We think the jury got it wrong. John Lo killed our daughter. He is a monster. He will have to live the rest of his life with the knowledge that he took our daughter from us and from her husband. He may find forgiveness from his wife or his children, but he will never have any from us.’ Any reaction to that?”
Harris responded like a good lawyer: “We extend our sympathies to Jessica’s family. We can only imagine what they must be going through. My client is innocent—”
John placed his hand on Harris’s shoulder and stepped forward to speak. Although Harris subtly tried to push him back with his right arm, below the sight line of the reporters, their cameras captured his eyes widening with surprise and fear. John kept his grip on Harris and spoke the first words the press heard him utter, surprised to hear himself speaking.
“I cared deeply about Jessica, as a colleague and a friend. I want to apologize to her family and say I’m terribly sorry about the way things turned out—”
He was nearly knocked to the pavement as Jane looped her arm into his and plunged them through the scrum of reporters and into the waiting car. Harris followed, shouting, “No more questions! Thank you!” As he slammed the car door shut, a final question reached John: “Did you kill Jessica DeSalvo?”
#
Harris never asked him if he killed Jessica.
“I am going to operate from the assumption that you did not kill Jessica,” Harris said back at his office after the night Bauman and McCann brought John to the precinct. Harris hadn’t let John answer any of their questions and walked him out of the precinct after fifteen minutes of posturing. “But as you know, in order to mount the best defense for you that I am able, I am going to need to know everything that they might have or can use against you. Whatever you say to me is privileged. But I cannot suborn perjury, as you know. If you tell me something today that’s the truth, I will not let you take the stand to say something different. Understand?”
“You’re not going to let me take the stand either way.”
“Almost certainly not. But it depends on how your defense shapes up and what the DA’s theory is.” Harris pulled out a legal pad. “What do you think their theory will be?”
John thought it was a clever question. If John had killed Jessica, he would know what evidence might exist, why he had done it, and how the best case against him would be presented. Even if he were innocent, given the circumstances, he was best positioned to speculate why the police were interested in him. If he laid it out like it might be the prosecution’s theory, well then, technically, he wasn’t admitting to anything, was he?
“We were having an affair. They’ll probably find good evidence of that.”
John and Jane had been close with Harris since law school—he was an usher at their wedding—but he took the news of John’s betrayal with nothing other than a nod that conveyed neither approval nor disgust. It was like depositing a coin into a vending machine.
“They’ll start there,” John continued. “With the affair. They may theorize that she wanted to leave her husband. That she thought she was pregnant. That she arranged to meet me at her friend Cathy’s apartment. Maybe she wanted me to join her and threatened to tell my wife in order to make that happen. Or tell the partners at the firm in order to blackmail me. They’ll try to convince the jury that I killed her to keep her quiet.”
Harris took his time to consider John’s statements. John knew that he was trying to decide how much more information he wanted to elicit. Harris picked his next words very carefully.
“Can they place you in Cathy’s apartment?”
“Probably. I’d been there before. We met there sometimes.”
“That night?”
John shrugged. “I took a car from the firm. Not to the building, but two blocks away. I know of at least two affairs because they took a car to the same place, and the dispatchers”—the firm provided cars for attorneys who worked late—“and drivers gossip about it.”
“Where were you going?”
John looked at the corner of Harris’s desk. “There’s a bar I go to sometimes if I work late. O’Malley’s.”
He used those precise words with the cops during the first interview in his office, when they asked him where he was that night. Let them draw their own conclusions.
“Will the bartender remember you?”
“I don’t know what he’ll remember.”
“How long were you there? Did you go right home after you left? When did you get home?”
“I don’t remember and I walked for about an hour before I went home.”
“Is there anything you know that can help you?”
John knew a lot but didn’t see how any of it helped him. He looked away. Harris’s office was half the size of John’s in a building not nearly as nice. It was crammed full of shelves overflowing with files and papers. Harris’s chair—a comfy leather executive piece—was the only item John might have found at his firm. John sat in a fraying green fabric chair that looked like it was pulled from a dumpster.
“John? Anything that can help you?”
“Before we jump to conclusions, let’s see where they go with this, Harris. I’m the likeliest guy next to her husband, right? It’s either the desperate lover or the cuckolded husband. The papers this morning said he was working late. The cops found out about our relationship and brought me in. They’re looking for a quick bust.”
“But can we give them one? You were sleeping with this woman. Do you know anything?”
John shook his head. He wouldn’t ruin anyone else’s life just to help himself. Harris turned to the grimy window beside his desk. He stared at the brick wall of the air shaft for many moments before asking, “Were you there that night, John?”
He didn’t turn to hear John’s answer, and John gave him none. When Harris finally turned back to John, he looked down at his legal pad, devoid of notes except the date. He finally forced his eyes up to John’s.
“How’s Jane handling this?”
#
Jane’s rage seeped through the moment the car door closed, darkening her face like a smoldering sheet of paper, charring at the edges before flaring fully into bright flame. The muffled shouts of the reporters followed them as the car pulled away. Jane fixed her gaze straight ahead. On the other side of Jane, Harris stared out the passenger-side window. Out of sight of the jury and the press, his face was full of worry. It was a short ride to Harris’s office, and none of them spoke except to curtly thank the driver when they exited the car. The silence shrouded them on the elevator ride, but Jane carried her anger like a torch into the conference room Harris had commandeered for the trial.
As John sank into one of the mismatched chairs surrounding the table holding Harris’s files, Jane finally turned to look at him.
“What the fuck were you thinking?”
John stared into the conflagration until he thought her rage might blind him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You sounded like you were guilty!”
“They think I did it anyway!” John shouted back. “What does it matter?”
“It fucking matters, John! Christ! We have to live with this!”
“Jane,” Harris cut in, “it’s not as bad as you think. You managed to cut him off before it got too bad.”
“They think he did it, Harris. If he didn’t say anything, didn’t give them anything to feed on, maybe they could doubt. Maybe, over time, they would give him the benefit of that doubt. But now? It sounded like he was apologizing for her murder. They will have no doubt, and if they do, they’ll remember that apology.”
“What about you?” John asked. “Do you think I did it?”
Harris raised his hands and stepped between them. “Don’t do this, guys. We won.”
The chair John had been sitting in hit the wall behind him before he realized he was standing, and he swept a box of files off the table to the floor. For the first time in months, he felt like he inhabited his body, ecstatic with rage. Jane and Harris, on the other side of the table, stepped back. John gathered himself and caught the edge of the table like a swooning drunk. He imagined flipping it toward them but leaned heavily on it instead. As suddenly as it came to him, the anger retreated, replaced by regret.
“There was no winning this, Harris, except for you,” John said before turning to Jane. “Do you think I did it, Jane? Do you?”
“What does it matter what I think?”
“You’re my wife.”
“I’m the mother of your children.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer. I don’t have the luxury of deciding what I think because I have to think about the kids, which is something you should’ve done before you fucked that—” Jane closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “That trial was about giving Brennan and Hunter a reason to doubt. And you fucking ruined it.”
She shoved past Harris to the door and slammed it shut behind her. Harris followed her but paused before leaving the conference room. John looked up from the files he had scattered across the floor to Harris with an apology. Harris held up his hand.
“Save it, buddy. This is your mess now.”