Chapter 2

What the hell am I doing here?

That’s probably the fiftieth time I’ve asked myself that stupid question. Right now it’s especially stupid after last night’s snow; I couldn’t drive myself through the drifts if I wanted to. They’ll clear the road in a couple of days, when they get around to it, because there’s nobody else much up here in winter. Probably a good thing I stocked up. Plenty of food for a month or more.

If I ever get an appetite back.

I suppose I ought to be in a bar somewhere celebrating and letting everybody buy me drinks and congratulate me. Should have been, that is, last week. A week to the day now. Six miserable days I’ve been here, in my dead dad’s vacation cabin in the mountains, sucking my own tit and talking to Daddy’s ghost who probably isn’t even here and wouldn’t give much of a shit if he were. If it were. Whatever, do ghosts still have genders?

I can’t eat. Can’t sleep much either, and every time I do my dreams replay the whole fucking mess.

Why did I go to law school? God, I wish I hadn’t, Sometimes I wish I hadn’t even been born. Or maybe I could have been born stupid, or studied less in school, or anything.

All those young dreams I had, fighting for the right and setting the world on its proper course and doing good, good, good. All the work I put in, summa cum laude out of college, acing the LSATs, making law review, top of my fucking class, right into one of the really good law firms.

They encouraged me! Hell, more than that, they pushed me right in. Do some pro bono work as a public defender, they said, get the experience, learn your way around the system and the courtroom. Oh, you won’t win any cases, or not many, but you’ll get some wonderful grounding for when it matters and you start litigating for the paying clients.

So what do I get? Public defender is usually petty shit, shoplifting and assault and battery from bar fights and that, but oh no, they have to start me right in on murder. And not even regular murder, it’s kidnaping and rape too, and it was a kid. A little girl, eight years old when somebody grabbed her and hauled her off and did some things I don’t even want to think about to her before she died.

They got him, or they thought they did. I could see why when I first saw him in the lawyer’s room at the jail. Ugly as country sin, greasy hair, pockmarks all over his face, kind of guy you don’t want to see anywhere. Homeless, bum on the street; probably had been filthy too before they cleaned him up in the jail.

I got laughed at in the office. “You sure ain’t gonna win that one, girl,” one of the partners told me, grinning. “They’re throwing you in the deep end. Still, be good experience, get your feet wet, give it your best shot.”

The prosecutor told me the same thing. “No deals on this one, we’re going all the way,” he said when I approached him about a plea bargain. “It’s tight, and he’s going to take the long walk. Do what you have to do, but you’re going to take your lumps.”

I should have done what he said. God, I wish, I wish I’d done what he said. Just sloughed it off and moved on. Sure, even the guilty are entitled to legal representation and their day in court, but why did it have to be me?

Because my guy insisted he didn’t do it.

Not at first. At first he was too busy bitching about “little miss Barbie doll” being assigned as his lawyer. “OK,” I told him, “if you want a guy, go get one of the ones who finished behind me in law school. I’m what you have, so get fucking used to it.”

I didn’t ask him if he’d done it. You don’t ask a client that, because you don’t want to hear the answer. You don’t even want them volunteering. But this one did, again and again.

He was so insistent that finally I started to half believe him. Enough, anyhow, to get me pretty fired up by the time we got to trial. It was a real high-profile case, and when I got into it I could see a lot of quick-step in how the cops had grabbed onto him and quit looking elsewhere, and I began to think it was a railroad.

It was sure a hurry-up. The prosecutor was looking to run for state legislature, and he wanted a quick conviction to pad his credentials to the voters, so we went to trial fast. I let it happen, mainly because I couldn’t see any point in stalling.

Then what I’d been hoping for happened. In all the hurry the prosecutor didn’t cover the details. The only eyewitness was the kid’s mom, and with not enough rehearsal she faltered on the stand; I was able to get her to admit she hadn’t had a good look at the perp and couldn’t be sure it was my defendant. And the forensic trail was lousy, gaps in the chain of custody; one wit after another couldn’t tie the DNA, the knife, the shoes to both my guy and the scene.

And when the jury came back it was “not guilty.” I’d done it, I’d won the unwinnable case my first time in court!

At first my guy wasn’t happy. “Shit, they’ll just go after me again, and keep it up until they get me,” he whined. But I told him no, this was it, they couldn’t try him again, not ever. I explained about double jeopardy until it got through his thick skull.

“You mean they can’t—” he said, still not quite believing.

“That’s the law,” I explained. “You can only be tried once for any crime. You’re free.”

“Then I can stop all the bullshit about I didn’t do it?” he asked.

It froze me. I’d been picking up the papers from the table and stuffing them into my briefcase, but I suddenly couldn’t move. I stared at him, and I remember stupidly saying “what?”

He shrugged. “Sure I did it. Didn’t really mean it, I was strung out on some bad shit, so much I didn’t even know it was a kid, didn’t think about it. I’m kind of sorry about that. But look at me, no broad’s gonna lay me, and I got needs the same as anybody else, and, well ... But thanks, lady lawyer. You done good.” And he was up and gone.

All I could think about is what the hell had I done? All the work I put in, all the skills I used, and for what—to put a child rapist and murderer back on the street? I must have sat there for a good ten minutes before I could move again.

I had to do it. I went straight to the prosecutor’s office and just barged in.

“Come to gloat?” he asked me in a harsh voice.

“He was guilty.” I blurted it out. “He just told me. He did it.”

“I know he fucking did it. I told you that all along. You just had to get all smart-ass. He’s out there right now, and you can thank yourself for that!”