Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (44 page)

Then it was Warlock’s lawyer’s turn. As short and lumpy as his client was tall and handsome, he jabbed the air with his right
index finger as he talked. He told the audience and the jury about all the good works his client had done. And he talked about
doubt. He said there was just too much doubt for the jury to convict. Proof was needed—and where was the proof?

“Don’t let your emotions put an innocent man in jail,” he said.

While Warlock stared down at the table in front of him, the picture of wounded innocence.

“Make the right choice,” his lawyer said.

The audience seemed to be holding its breath. Watching from the back, Zhenya felt herself grow cold. They were going to believe
him, those twelve people in the jury box. She could tell. They were going to believe all those pretty words, and Warlock was
going to go free.

All around, Zhenya heard people exhaling. Beside her, Bonnie Wright turned her palms upward.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said.

____

“A
ND AFTER THAT
,” Warlock wrote, “I’ll share her with you.”

“Get real,” Yngblood said.

“No, I’m serious—unless, of course, you think she’s too old.”

“I’d still do her,” said Interceptor.

“When is all this happening?” asked BMOC.

“Very soon.”

Zhenya sat looking at the words on the screen.
Very soon
.

“What if she doesn’t want to?” BMOC asked.

“Oh, she will,” said Yngblood. “She’ll do whatever her father says.”

Zhenya wondered if she’d waited too long.

Bending over the computer, she hit the Reply button, typed in, “Hi, guys!” and pressed Send.

A moment later she saw her message pop up, under the screen name The Real Dvina.

Turmoil in the chatroom.

“Do you want me to tell you what I’m wearing right now?”

Torn jeans and a stained sweatshirt, her usual clothes when she wasn’t being photographed. Her mouth had a sour taste, and
she knew she still smelled of vomit.

“Fuck you,” said ScrewU. “You’re just some guy who hacked his way into here to dick with us. I’d like to put my fist through
your face.”

“Oh, it’s me,” The Real Dvina typed. “And I can prove it.”

“How?”

“I have a new custom set, my best ever.”

“Fuck you,” said ScrewU again.

“Only people who ask nicely,” The Real Dvina wrote, “will get it.”

She logged off and went into her room to change. Then she went into her father’s bedroom and retrieved his fancy new camera.
She’d long since figured out how to work the timer, and now she took twenty-seven photographs of herself, doing things she
had never done before.

Including some things she imagined Warlock would like.

When she went back to the computer, all five of the men had asked nicely.

In their fashion.

____

G
UILTY, SAID THE
jury in Shoals, Indiana.

And the one in Philadelphia.

And the one in Fort Worth.

The verdicts were no surprise, according to the audiences in each courtroom. “Cut-and-dried cases” was an odd phrase Zhenya
heard more than once. “We don’t have much tolerance in this country for child porn,” one woman said.

But Zhenya already knew that. She’d learned it from the television.

In each case, the evidence was found right there on the men’s computers. Sometimes the police, the FBI, had found pictures
of more than just Zhenya. Worse pictures, with other girls in them.

Hearing his verdict, Yngblood sat as still as if he’d turned to stone. The coach, BMOC, collapsed, weeping, and had to be
carried from the courtroom. Interceptor and ScrewU cursed the judge and jury, shouted and spat and ended up writhing on the
floor, beefy policemen with red faces sitting on them, clicking on the handcuffs.

Zhenya was there for each of the decisions, just as she’d borne witness to nearly all the testimony. She took little pleasure,
though, because always in the back of her mind was the one case that had not yet been decided. The most important one.

Warlock’s trial was different from the rest. He had the best lawyers, the most money, and (it seemed to Zhenya) the most burning
desire to stay free. His trial was delayed once, again, still another time. And then, when it finally started, his lawyers
fought hard, brought in witnesses of their own, battled the prosecutors fiercely at every turn. By contrast, Warlock himself
was always quiet, respectful, convincing.

When all the testimony was finished, when the lawyers had made their final speeches, the jury left the room and stayed out
for a whole day, and another.

As the time passed, Zhenya became more and more certain that Warlock would go free. And then he would come after her, to punish
her for destroying his life.

If that happened, if he managed to find her, Zhenya knew what she would have to do.

____

H
ER FATHER SLAPPED
her across the face. Her feet left the ground, and for a moment she felt as if she were flying. But then gravity caught her
again, and she fell to the floor. The wood was cool against her bruised cheek, and the taste of her blood was in her mouth.

They’d come home too soon, he and Mikhail.

“What have you done?” he asked her in Russian.

She didn’t reply.

“You are not allowed to talk to those men.”

She was silent.

“Get up,” he said. But when she did, he knocked her down again, a blow to the stomach that made her think she would never
breathe again.

“You think you can take our business? Make money for yourself, not us?”

She didn’t reply.

“Get up.”

She got onto her hands and knees, and this time it was Mikhail who stepped forward and kicked her, his heavy boot thudding
against her ribs. Again she almost flew, but this time when she landed, she rolled and twisted and got back to her feet faster
than they expected. Making low, gasping sounds in her throat, she ran, but not for the front door. For her bedroom.

The two men followed. There was no lock on her door.

They found her lying on her bed, curled into a ball, hugging her pillow. “No,” Mikhail said, laughing. “No time for sleep.”

He reached down, grabbed her shoulder, and rolled her over. That was when she came up with the knife, the one she’d taken
from the kitchen drawer weeks ago. Her arm swung around in a fast arc, and with open eyes she watched the four-inch blade
enter Mikhail’s throat just below his stubbly jaw.

There followed a moment of complete silence. Mikhail’s eyes went wide as he stared at her. Then, choking and gasping, drowning,
he fell backward onto the floor, leaving the knife clenched in her hand. His blood sprayed upward, a red fountain that drenched
her and the bed alike.

Zhenya had been dreaming of this for years. She’d waited so long only because she needed to grow strong enough to carry it
out. Never realizing that when the time came, her anger would give her all the strength she needed.

She came off the bed, and this time she flew, really flew. Landing on her father’s back as he tried to run, hearing him cry
out in terror, ripping upward with her right hand, feeling the blade slice through his flesh until it reached something harder,
and then cutting through that too.

They went down together. Zhenya rolled clear and watched as he twisted and writhed and fought the air, watched until his crow
eyes turned dull and he lay still.

Then she went and took a long, hot shower. When she was done, she inspected herself in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t as bad
as she feared. Nothing seemed broken, and most of the blood hadn’t been hers.

As she always had, she covered up her bruises with the makeup her father had bought for that purpose. Then she went to the
secret drawer where, not believing in banks, he’d kept his money.
Her
money, really. A lot of it, enough to travel wherever she wanted to go in this big, empty country, if she so chose. And no
one would ever find her. No one even knew she was here.

But she wasn’t ready, not quite yet. Her father and Mikhail had come home before she had finished her preparations.

First she went back to the computer and sent her last custom set on its way.

Then she picked up the telephone and made a call to Washington, D.C. Whatever happened next—and she had hopes—she’d learn
about it from the news media, which in this country never stopped talking.

Finally, as she had dreamed of for so long, she packed her clothes and left the apartment for the last time.

____

“W
E FIND THE
defendant guilty,” the foreman of the jury said several times.

Warlock sat down hard on his chair at the defense table, looking as if he’d been hit in the head with a hammer. Beside him,
his lawyer frowned and shrugged and started gathering his papers. The judge thanked the jury.

“Wow,” said Bonnie Wright. “I just wasn’t sure.”

“Will he go to jail?” Zhenya asked.

Bonnie gave her a curious look. “Honey, weren’t you listening? He’s going away for two hundred years.”

Zhenya gasped.

“It’s the law here in Arizona,” Bonnie said. “A mandatory sentence of twenty years per count for possession of child pornography,
with no chance of parole. They found him guilty of ten counts. Do the math.” She looked over at Warlock, who was slowly getting
to his feet. “That man will die in jail.”

As they watched, a pair of officers walked Warlock up the center aisle toward the door. His composure shattered at last, he
seemed stunned, almost blind with shock and fear. As he passed, he suddenly lifted his head and looked directly at Zhenya.
His gaze sharpened, and a muscle jumped in his cheek.

He knows me,
Zhenya thought.

At the same moment Warlock started shouting. “It’s her!” he said. “That’s her—the one who set me up! The one who sent me those
pictures. It’s her—I swear—”

But for the first time Zhenya understood something others didn’t. The officers merely glanced at each other and grinned. One
of them wrenched Warlock’s arm, so hard that his words changed into strange, guttural cries. Before he could get control of
himself again, he was out the door, the sound of his garbled shouts still echoing in the quiet room.

Zhenya forced herself to look at Bonnie, afraid her new friend would see through her. Would she recognize in the face, in
the body, of this short-haired, blond, well-dressed young woman the dull-eyed, half-naked girl of the photos?

But all Bonnie did was shake her head and laugh. “What was
that
about?”

Zhenya gave a cautious shrug.

“Well, good riddance to bad rubbish, I guess,” Bonnie said.

Who knew what that meant? But it sounded like a final judgment she could live with.

____

S
HE AWOKE DISORIENTED
and frightened. Then she remembered and, stretching, leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the bus window.

The landscape outside was dry, sere. Where was she? Utah? Nevada?

It didn’t matter, since she didn’t yet know where she was heading. But one thing she did know: when she got there, when she
chose to step off the bus, her life would begin at last.

BY ANGELA ZEMAN

D
ana, I’m sorry.” Sophie Black’s whispered words sounded unnaturally loud in the glass box of a room. The nurse had disconnected
the noisy machines, useless now, and the silence pressed heavily. Sophie shuddered at hearing a sigh from the man hovering
at her back—like a vulture impatient for the last pump of his next dinner’s heart. Turning her head, she hissed, “Back off!”
He retreated, but didn’t leave the room.

She slipped her square, unlovely tan hand under the thin blanket to grasp what was now a claw with yellowed nails. Her most-loved
friend’s hand.

Parchment-thin eyelids opened. Eyes that could once, with only a glance, daunt a powerful opponent. The wasted remains of
the woman on the bed moved her lips: “Stop.”

Sophie understood. Dana knew how sorry she was. She shouldn’t waste time over it again. Time was against them both.

Sophie edged closer. “You’re nearly dead.” Cruel words, but Sophie knew her friend’s intolerance of lies. Dana never found
kindness in deception. She clenched her teeth, refusing the grief that promised to consume her, although tears flowed silently
down her cheeks.

“Tell me what to do. What do I do?”

Dana’s face twisted as she tried and failed to speak. Sophie rubbed a sliver of ice across Dana’s crusted lips.

The only color left in the ghostly face was the black of her irises, now dull as raisins. Gone the lush swag of rich burgundy
hair. Gone the arches of expressive brows. Few lashes clung to the staring eyes, eyes that still revealed a brilliant mind.
The oxygen feed draped across Dana’s pillow, ignored. A vinyl bag of colorless liquid hung useless from the metal rack, its
tube disconnected from her arm. Her veins had collapsed.

“Nuclear plant,” she finally managed. “Tell them.” She stopped to draw a breath. “Nuclear plant. Fremont.”

Sophie recoiled. “Wait. Tell them? You mean—I’m to stay out of it? No! I can’t let you die like this and do nothing.” She
gripped the hand a little harder, wanting Dana to feel her determination, but not wanting to hurt her.

“No. You’ll die too.”

“I don’t care!”

“I care. Tell them. Nuclear plant.”

“NO!”

Sophie blinked in shocked realization. Dana was dead.

“That’s it.” The voice, coming from behind her, was loud. His impatient tone angered her. She clung tighter to her friend’s
hand. Such extreme suffering had seemed too strange, too unreal, until this moment. Never to be with her or talk with her
again. Sophie couldn’t imagine it.

Since the official had picked her up at JFK from her Panama flight yesterday, she’d seen nothing on his face but a smirk that
seemed permanent. Only his unshaven cheeks and pungent rumpled clothes verified the sleepless hours he claimed to have put
in on this case.
Case
, thought Sophie. She rose stiffly, pulled herself away from the bedside.