Saving Grace (Katie & Annalise Book 1) (12 page)

Judge Hutchison’s gavel crashed down three times. “Bailiffs! Get him under control. Mr. McMillan, one more word, and you are out of here.”

Two bailiffs weaved toward Zane, hands on their guns.

But Sherry now jumped to her feet with surprising agility, given the seventh-month state of her belly. “You think you can pay me to lie and then dump me like garbage when I’m carrying your baby? I told you last week I was done lying for you. You raped her. I was there. And you are going to pay for what you did to both of us.”

This couldn’t be happening, yet it so very much was. The drama was electrifying the bored jurors. They’d have something worth talking about over the water cooler for the rest of their lives. I’d have something to ensure years of financial security for my therapist. But what the jury didn’t seem to comprehend yet was that this was not theater. There was no director to yell cut.

“But I gave you more money, you greedy slut,” Zane screamed.

“Yeah, because you’re stupid as shit,” she screamed back. “And guess what? Last week when we met in your car? I taped you on my iPhone, asshole. How about I give your confession to the cops, huh?” She held her phone aloft, her victor’s trophy.

Zane lunged around the table and charged at Sherry. The bailiffs moved faster now, and they made it in time to get between the two. The courtroom went off like a bomb, everyone talking at once.

My brains rattled in my head. I shouted over the melee to be heard. “Your Honor, objection. Please strike the witness’s testimony as non-responsive.”

“Sustained,” the judge shouted back. “Jurors, disregard Ms. Talmadge’s testimony, and  please go to the jury room, at once,” he ordered. “Gallery, please exit the courtroom.”

The jurors stood, looking around at each other, but they didn’t budge. The spectators didn’t even bother standing up, not a one of them willing to give up their prime seats to the drama unfolding before them.

“I said OUT,” Judge Hutchison screamed, “or I’ll hold you all in contempt.”

The crowd had drawn courage from each other in their defiance, and no one moved a muscle. If the judge stuck to his threat, the jail cells would fill to capacity tonight.

The bailiffs pulled on Zane by the arms to no avail as he and Sherry screamed and flipped each other off. They needed to get both of them out of here, but they looked unsure of what to do next. Zane was huge, and he was livid. The judge sat still and quiet. I knew he had a panic button under his desk. Dad had told us about their installation years ago, after a defendant had assaulted a judge in a murder trial. I prayed the judge had already pushed it.

Without pausing to think, I came from behind the counsel table and approached Zane. I stabbed my finger into his chest three times, turning his attention away from Sherry for a moment, hoping it would give someone time to neutralize or remove her. “You knew she was lying, that she had decided to quit lying, and you didn’t tell me?” I asked.

He smirked. “Yeah, well, I had it covered.” When he continued talking, his voice rang through the courtroom as if he was hooked into surround sound. “I didn’t need to worry about nothing because I had Police Chief Daddy’s little redheaded girl getting me off.” Zane chose to illustrate his point by jerking his hand up and down over his crotch, despite the restraining grasp of the bailiff, whose arm moved with Zane’s like a profane puppeteer. “Daddy’s not here to save you now, is he? Too bad.”

My reflexes were still pretty awesome, even if I was thirty-five years old and mortally hungover. Quick as a whip crack, I slapped him across the face with all my strength. Only a desire to avoid jail time kept me from giving him a judo punch to the crotch. I would have loved to end his manhood completely on behalf of womankind, but I congratulated myself on my restraint and leaped out of his reach. Sherry was cheering and screaming in appreciation. The jury and the spectators had abandoned decorum and the room buzzed and crackled. One of the bailiffs jumped between Zane and me.

“Stand down, Ms. Connell,” he warned. “Let us get him out of here.”

A hand grasped my shoulder. I jumped and turned around.

It was Nick.

“What the hell have you done, Katie?” he asked, his voice raised in the din. It took a lot of blood to make an olive-skinned face tomato red.

“What do you mean, what did I do? I didn’t do anything,” I yelled back. “I called Sherry to testify. I had no idea she would turn. You sure didn’t tell me.”

“I left you voicemail last night, I emailed you, I texted you. I told you as soon as I found out she’d turned state, and I absolutely told you not to call her.” His words pounded my skull.

Oh, God. I stared at him. My mouth hung open, but I couldn’t find any words. I’d been scrambling so fast since I woke up that morning that I’d never looked at my iPhone. And then I’d just assumed . . . Oh, God, it was my fault. Oh no, no, no. It was my fault.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, to no one, to my mother who never got her chance to be a lawyer, to my father who dedicated his career to justice. To Nick. To Emily. To everyone, even myself.

What the hell had I done?

“Stay the fuck away from me,” Zane was saying to a deputy, who had rushed into the courtroom from behind the judge and made it to the front of the witness bench, handcuffs in his left hand and his right hand on the stock of his holstered handgun. He was fifteen feet away from where Zane was now dangling one bailiff from each arm, Incredible Hulk-style, and ten feet from Nick and me. “Man, don’t make me do something you’ll regret,” Zane said to him.

Nick jerked me out of the line of fire and back behind the defense table.

“Sir, I need you to put your hands behind your head and stand very still. I am going to move closer, and then you and I will exit the courtroom together.” The deputy eased himself between Zane and the judge.

“Put my hands on my head? Like I done something wrong? I ain’t done shit. The bitch is lying. Arrest her.”

And then ten seconds of pure chaos reigned.

The doors to the courtroom burst open with concussive force, slamming into the walls on either side. Five armed officers barreled in, one screaming, “Everyone down!” I hit the floor in a crouch, hands down. Three officers assumed firing positions and pointed guns at Zane’s head. Two others rushed forward. Zane released the two bailiffs, spun, and assumed a flexed-kneed stance as if he would fight the interlopers off, as if he were fighting for his very life—which he was. His life as he knew it, at least. The bailiffs were behind him now. One had handcuffs at the ready. They both reached for his arms again, and he whirled on them. The two officers didn’t hesitate. They jumped onto Zane’s back, tackling him before his body finished its rotation toward the sounds behind him. Zane and the two officers went down hard, but I couldn’t hear the impact over the screams of the jurors and spectators. Theater had ended and reality hell had set in. The screams subsided into weeping and a cacophony of voices.

I realized I had stood back up, and that’s when I saw her. Or thought I saw her anyway, the nameless woman from Annalise. I was suffering simultaneously from lovesick rejection, sleep deprivation, a hangover, extreme stress, and a punishing wallop of humiliation, so it was possible I was hallucinating. She was standing between me and the door. Her eyes looked hollow with sadness. She was saying something to me, although not loud enough that I could hear her. She motioned me toward her with her hand.

“Order, order, order!” The judge’s gavel punctuated his thin voice, but the crowd ignored him. He turned on his mike and tried again. “I will have order in this courtroom right now!” He slammed down his gavel right in front of the microphone, an echoing rifle shot of sound. This time he got all of our attention. Slowly, the panicked group settled back into their seats and their voices lulled to a buzzing. I jerked my head back around toward my imaginary friend, but she wasn’t there.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve all had a bit of excitement, but the officers have it under control and we need to let them do their jobs,” the judge said.

I heard a keening noise. The kind a cat makes when it’s trapped up in a tree.

Hush. I thought. Just hush. Everyone hush.

I sank to my knees on the courtroom’s tile floor. I put my head in my hands. And that’s when I realized the sound was coming from me.

After I quit mewling like a crazy cat woman in front of the whole courtroom and started acting somewhat attorney-like again, I asked the judge for a mistrial.

He actually considered it for about five seconds. Or at least he stayed completely silent for that long. He could have been devising elaborate torture rituals or plotting my death. When he said no, I knew he meant “Hell No Katie Connell And Don’t Ever Darken The Doors Of My Courtroom Again.” I’m empathic like that.

It didn’t improve things for me when Mack and I were walking away from the bench and the prosecutor said, “Bet you wish your client had accepted that plea bargain now.”

Mack almost became the second person I assaulted that day.

Not surprisingly, the jury found everyone’s favorite basketball star guilty and set a land speed record doing it. They gave him twenty years. It didn’t sound like enough to me, but the law constrained their choices. They would have probably sentenced him to death if they could. Luckily another jury would get a chance to add to his sentence later, because he would be charged with several new crimes, including witness tampering and going apeshit in the courtroom while scaring the bejeebers out of Judge Hutchison—better known as criminal contempt of court.

I wondered if his next attorney would try to get him a new trial by arguing inadequate representation, or if Zane would just sue me for assault. Or malpractice. Or both. Best not to think about it.

I had already used my iPhone to pull up the ignominious pictures of myself online, crumpled and weeping on the floor of the courtroom. Let’s just say they didn’t show off my good side. I didn’t know if I could fall any further or feel any worse.

But it wasn’t the verdict or the pictures that had shattered me. I’d come apart at the moment when Nick said, “What have you done, Katie?” I didn’t think all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could ever put Katie together again. I had screwed this trial up. I had disgraced my father’s name. I had made a sham of my mother’s dreams of being a lawyer. Me. I had done that. And Nick had disappeared in the wake of Zane’s apprehension.

At five o’clock, Emily and I slunk back to the office. I hated her humiliation by association to me. Add another gold star for Katie today. The elevator doors opened onto the seventeenth floor and the lobby of the Hailey & Hart offices. I tried to sneak past the front desk, but it didn’t work.

“Party!” Tina chirped when she saw us. “Bill won a huge case today.”

She handed me a party hat that said “Congratulations” on it. Oh, no. Maybe she didn’t know about my trial? Maybe she hadn’t seen my picture?

Tina told us, “Bob’s Irish Bar is open. Everyone’s gathered in the conference room to celebrate.”

Bob’s Irish Bar was a longstanding tradition, named in honor of the firm’s founder, Bob Hailey, who was definitely not Irish and didn’t even work at the firm anymore. The man had loved his Bushmills then, and he still did, I heard, well into his retirement. You would think a law firm would be concerned about the potential for liability if one of their employees had a drunken wreck driving away from the office, but you’d be wrong. Our office looked for any excuse to throw a party.

“Thanks, Tina,” Emily said.

The original Bob’s Irish Bar had centered around Bob’s office, his Irish whiskey, and an actual bar setup he had installed beside his desk. The modern version more closely resembled progressive drinking, where revelers wandered from room to room to see what people were pouring. Today the firm had a cooler of Miller Lite in the main conference room and Cook’s champagne in the ice-filled break room sink. We weren’t shelling out for the good stuff this time, apparently.

Emily and I had to breach the main party areas to make it to our own offices. The PA system was pumping out “We Will Rock You” by Queen. We accepted plastic champagne glasses as we passed by the break room, victorious Amazon warriors returning from battle.

Only we weren’t.

We crept past the conference room. Celebrants spilled out into the hall. At some point, people became aware of who was making the walk of shame through their midst, and I could see them start to whisper. Tina might have missed it, but my humiliation was, no doubt, the talk of the Dallas legal scene. Hell, all of Dallas. I steadied my chin.
One foot in front of the other, Katie.

I tried not to be obvious as I searched for Nick. I saw him.

“Emily, I have to try to talk to Nick,” I said.

You’d think Emily would have had enough of me by now.

“I’ll meet you in your office in five minutes,” she said. “Not a minute longer. I’m serious, Katie.”

“I promise,” I said.

I crossed the crowd like a salmon swimming upstream to get to Nick. He watched me approach, let me get ten feet away, then turned his back and left. In front of everyone.

I froze. I was Medusa with a head full of red stone snakes. Maybe I imagined it, but his Obsession cologne stayed in my senses long after he’d left, rooting me to his scent. I stood motionless as people streamed past me toward the drinks, the bathroom, another pod of revelers. Their snippets of conversations boomeranged around the room. My ears caught some of them, but only for a few seconds at a time before the sound spun back in the other direction. I could only imagine what they were saying, what I would have been saying in their shoes.

“See Katie standing over there? God, she’s pathetic.”

“I know. Could she be more obvious?”

“Helloooo, girlfriend, you’re the laughingstock of Dallas!”

Peals of laughter, male and female. I recognized  voices, but in the din, I couldn’t place them. I strained to hear as the sounds receded, confusing me further.

“Please tell me we won’t be like her.”

“A dried-up workaholic with a desperate crush on a married private eye? Fat chance.”

“No wonder she drinks so much. Oh my God, and did you hear about her trial today? She was mewing like a cat. It’s on YouTube.”

My brain was playing cruel tricks on my ears, but I somehow knew the words were figments of my imagination, not real. My eyes were on fire with unshed tears. Volcanic lava rushed through the veins over my entire head. I clenched my fists so tightly one of my fingernails snapped in my palm. I didn’t care. I’d started a pivot toward the lobby, away from here, as far away and as fast as I could go, when Emily appeared out of nowhere and grabbed my arm.

“Stop, Katie,” she said.

“Let me go,” I said, pulling hard against her grip. My chest was heaving. “You saw him walk away from me?”

“No. I just saw your face, and I came right over.” She gave my arm a tug. “We’re out of here.”

I didn’t like it, but I let Emily prod me forward. She propelled me out of our offices, down the elevator, into the parking garage, and over to my car, where she insisted on driving me home. I plotted revenge on Nick and my other nameless, faceless enemies while she drove. One of them looked surprisingly like me. I wanted to dismember my foes slowly and boil their bones. My anger dulled quickly, though, and I was still as a corpse by the time we arrived at my place.

Emily had called ahead for a cab to meet her. I walked her to the curb.

“Are you going to be OK?” Emily asked.

I knew she wanted me to say yes. And actually, I kind of was. I was as low as I could ever imagine getting, but I feared that the worst thing now was that I’d live through it. Screw Nick, I thought. Screw everyone. I made one mistake. One. I can run circles around three quarters of the lawyers in town.

“Yeah. I’m over it. I am.” I dug in my purse for a twenty-dollar bill. “You’re a much better friend than I deserve. Let me pay for your cab.”

She did.

“I’ll call you in a little while,” Emily said.

She hugged me hard, then left to return to the office for her own car. I wandered inside, numb, trailing my fingers over the standing marble bust as I passed it in my building lobby. The condominium association aspired to a Greco-Roman theme. Not in a papier-mâché way, but in a classy way that said, “I’m old-school elegant.” Them, not me. I rode the elevator, which dinged nine times, then opened.

The hell of it all was that after this, I had to go out with Collin for his birthday. I had to drag my hungover, humiliated ruin of a self back out the door and appear in public during my moment of infamy. With Collin, who was on the side of apple pie and the American way, good not evil. Unlike me.

Time to pull it together. I spruced and spritzed without much hope for a miracle. The lines between my eyebrows get deeper when I’m upset, and I cursed Zane, Sherry, Nick, and myself as I covered up the furrows with Clinique’s Airbrush Concealer. This me would have to do.