Only now Curry was screwing with the plan. She scowled at him before she could stop herself. Luckily, Moran's attention had already swung back to the defense attorney.
"Mr. Curry, you want to give Ms. White and me a quick idea of who this witness is and what he is prepared to testify to before I rule on admissibility?"
Curry glanced at her again. Kate could see the craftiness at the backs of his eyes. He knew his witness was full of crap. He knew that there was no way anyone could testify truthfully that Soto was not at the scene of the crime, because Soto
was
there,
had
committed the crime, and all the evidence proved it. Her gaze shot to the judge, whose expression was solemnly unctuous.
Doesn't he see it? Doesn't he see that Curry knows this is bullshit? Doesn’t he get that he's being had?
Apparently not.
"My witness—and I don't want to give his name here in open court, for his protection, but he is a longtime acquaintance of the accused and his family—says Mr. Soto has a cousin who ..."
The cheerfully funky notes of the Pussycat Dolls hit "Don't Cha" blared without warning from somewhere in the courtroom. While Judge Moran stiffened and Curry glanced over his shoulder, his expression surprised as he sought the source of the disruption, Kate froze in horror.
She knew the source of the disruption without any possibility of mistake. It was her cell phone. She—and this was another big courtroom no-no—had forgotten to turn it off. The mortifyingly unprofessional ringtone only made things worse. Ben and his friend Samantha had been experimenting with her phone yesterday when she had driven them through the McDonald's drive-thru on the way to returning Samantha home from a playdate.
This
had been their favorite ring-tone.
This
was what they had left on her phone.
This
was what she had forgotten all about, and thus hadn't gotten around to changing back to its usual businesslike chime.
She always turned her phone off before walking into court.
Always.
But in all the rush, today of all days, she had simply forgotten.
"Whose cell phone is that?" Judge Moran asked awfully.
A stricken glance at Bryan's face told her that he knew the distracting sound was emanating from somewhere around their table.
Her briefcase, to be precise. Nestled against the far leg of the counsel table, there on the floor beside her chair. Although she couldn't see the black leather rectangle from where she stood, she guessed the thing was practically vibrating with the energy of the song.
Her phone let loose with the bouncy melody again, and she felt about two inches tall.
"I want an answer!" Moran said.
Everyone glanced around, searching for the culprit. The three deputies stationed around the courtroom looked at one another, then at the judge for a cue as to what to do. Knowing Moran, this was going to get nasty fast.
Kate faced the awful truth: There was no way out. She had to confess.
"It's mine, Your Honor," she said, doing her best to keep her chin up even though she felt like sinking straight down through the floor. Right on cue, the ringtone sounded again.
If only the damned thing would shut up. Please, let it just shut up.
I m so sorry, I ...
"Turn it off." Moran's voice was like thunder. His face was taking on color like a quickly ripening tomato. "Now."
"Yes, Your Honor."
Toddling off in the direction of counsel table while doing her best to maintain some semblance of professional cool, she was hideously conscious of being the cynosure of all eyes. Bryan's face was a study in dismay. Beyond him, in the galleries, Kate faced a sea of wide eyes all focused on her. Except for another exuberant burst of melody from her damned phone, the silence in that courtroom was absolute.
Oh my God, I don't believe this. I've made an absolute fool of myself and Bryan and the entire district attorney's office. Moran's going to wipe the floor with me. How could I have let this happen?
Those, and more along the same line, were only some of the happy droughts that pounded through Kate's head as, teeth clenched, she crouched beside the prosecution's table, flipped the clasps open on her briefcase, and thrust her hand into the side pocket to grab her vibrating phone.
Kate found the button and turned off the ringer with a quick, vicious jab even as recognition dawned: The phone number dancing across the little digital display on the front of the phone was that of Ben's school.
Even so, her uppermost feeling for the next split second was relief that blessed silence now reigned.
Then anxiety of a different sort raised its head, playing havoc with her already frazzled nerves.
Ben.
She had dropped him off at seven-thirty, as she did every morning so she could get to work on time. He was part of the breakfast group, which was maybe a quarter of the school's population of two hundred under-twelves, basically the kids whose parents had to be at work by eight. They had juice and cereal or whatever in the cafeteria until seven-fifty, when they were allowed to go to their classrooms for the official beginning of the school day. This—fourth grade—was Ben's first year at the school, because they'd moved into the district at the beginning of the summer when she'd been hired on at the DA's office.
So far, he had told her, it had been "okay." Which in Ben-speak meant he didn't want to talk about it. Which worried her. Which was no surprise. Practically everything to do with raising Ben worried her.
She was so afraid she wasn't doing it right.
Now the school was calling, and the knowledge made her stomach tighten with anxiety.
Was Ben sick? Was he hurt? Or was it something else that the school wanted, something administrative maybe? Yes, that was probably it: a form she'd forgotten to fill out, a check she'd forgotten to send, something of that nature. Whatever it was, though, she couldn't possibly return the call now. The best she could do was wait until she could somehow manage to squeeze in a break.
Please don't let Ben be sick or hurt,
she prayed as she stuffed the now silenced phone back into her briefcase, slid Bryan an apologetic look, and, cringing inwardly in anticipation of what she knew she was about to face, rose to her feet.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
The sounds, faintly muffled, came out of nowhere.
With her peripheral vision, Kate caught a blur of sudden movement: a door—the tan metal door to the secure corridor where prisoners were kept in a series of holding rooms until their presence was required in court—flew open. As she whirled to face it, someone in the gallery screamed.
Those are gunshots
was her instinctive first thought as the courtroom erupted into chaos around her.
To her astonishment, Little Julie Soto sprang to his feet and ran around the far end of the defense table, his wiry, five-feet-six-inch frame conveying a surprising amount of menace despite its diminutive proportions and the ill-fitting gray suit he wore for the benefit of the jury. His long black hair and pale blue tie bounced as he moved, and his narrow face was alight with savage triumph. From somewhere he had acquired a pistol; it was in his hand.
Kate sucked in air. Her heart gave a great leap.
No!
But her throat didn't work; her lips didn't move. She screamed it only inside her head.
"You ain't putting me back in jail," Soto shouted to the accompaniment of an explosion of frantic screams.
Judge Moran was on his feet, she saw as her disbelieving gaze followed Soto's. The judge raised his hands, palms outward, as if to ward off the threat. His eyes were wide and his mouth was opening, as if he was about to speak, or yell, or something. Whatever he meant to do, she never knew, because she was just in time to watch—
bang!
—as his head was blown to pieces.
C h a p t e r 4
KATE EXPERIENCED the horror of Judge Moran's murder like a punch to the stomach. She gasped. Her ears rang. A sour taste sprang into her mouth.
This can't be real.
Blood and brains splattered the wall behind the bench. The gruesome cloud of red-tinged mist that was left where the judge's head had been just a split second before was still hanging in the air when his body dropped like a rock, disappearing from view. Kate's knees buckled at the same time. She collapsed into a kneeling position right there at the far side of the counsel table, eyes huge with disbelief, heart pounding. Her clenched fists pressed hard against her mouth. After that, she couldn't move. She couldn't breathe. She felt suddenly disembodied, as if she was viewing what was happening from a great—safe—distance.
Please, oh please, let this be a bad dream.
Men—two of them, at least one a prisoner, judging from the shortsleeved orange jumpsuit he wore—burst from the secure corridor. Pistols were in their hands. Soto glanced over his shoulder at them.
"Vamonos! Let's go! "
Crack/ Crack/
More shots rang out, coming from roughly the direction of the jury box. One of the deputies firing back, Kate thought, although she couldn't see who was shooting exactly because she still couldn't move. At the same time, panicked confusion erupted everywhere. In the space of just those first few seconds, the courtroom turned into a terrifying kaleidoscope of color and sound and movement.
Ducking low, Soto and the newcomers ran toward the front of the courtroom as one of them—the one in the orange jumpsuit—shouted at him, "What the hell did you just do?"
"I killed him, so what?" Soto yelled back.
''You stupid shit!"
"Go to hell!"
With two of the three cursing at each other, they converged, dashing around the side of the bench toward the window, dodging bullets and snapping off shots as they ran. Curry hit the ground in front of the bench, his arms flying to cover his head as a bullet smacked into the smooth mahogany not two feet above where he lay. Hands in the air, the court reporter fled shrieking toward the jury box. The deputy nearest the bench—the one whose sleep-inducing drone Kate had tuned out earlier—screamed and dropped; he'd been shot, she knew, even before she saw the blood rolling out from beneath his head. Screams and curses and pounding feet and gunfire—even after all these years, Kate would recognize those sharp bangs anywhere— mingled hideously, exploding off the walls and floor and ceiling like rapid-fire thunder, filling the room with deafening, terrifying noise. The smell of cordite and carnage was everywhere.
The blood now pouring from the slain deputy's head continued to roll toward her like a scarlet river across the black-speckled stone floor.
The smell hit her.
Human blood smells like raw meat. Oh, God, I remember that smell...
Kate's stomach turned inside out. She wanted to gag, but she couldn't. She seemed to be paralyzed. Shock—it was good that she could at least recognize that cold, dead feeling as shock, wasn't it?— rendered her immobile, rooting her to the smooth, hard terrazzo beneath her bent legs.
Blood
—
so much blood... blood everywhere ... splashes of scarlet on the walls, splatters of scarlet on the floor, gushers of scarlet pumping from destroyed flesh ...
Time seemed to slow to an impossible crawl. Her stomach churned sickeningly. Her heart pounded in hard, fast strokes. Icy with horror now, she knew there was nothing she could do to save herself or anyone else as the nightmare unfolded around her.
"Where are they?" the guy in the orange jumpsuit screamed, sharply enough to pierce the explosion of noise, which was so loud she felt her brain might self-destruct from the sheer, unbelievable volume of it.
"The fuck should I know?" Soto screamed back.
"They oughta be here!"
"Get out, get out, get out!"
This, from the gallery, was some other, innocent, man's yell, rising over the tumult, urging others to flee.
"Mama, where are you?" It was a child's frantic screech, also from the gallery.
"God help me, Jesus help me ..." a nearby woman wailed.
These and other disembodied voices reached her ears through the hair-raising sounds of dozens of people screaming and fighting to escape what in just a matter of seconds had turned into an abattoir. If she'd been able to move, she would have clapped her hands over her ears, but her muscles, seemingly heavy as lead, obstinately refused to respond to her brain's signals. Her breathing came fast and shallow. Her pulse raced. Cold sweat poured over her in waves. She knew she should move, run, hide, right now on pain of death, but she didn't. She couldn't. For the second time in her life, she was frozen to the spot with fear. Only her eyes moved, glancing desperately around.
Oh, God, how many dead?
Some people in the galleries were hunkered down, she saw as her terrified gaze darted toward them, doing their best to hide from the flying bullets as the remaining deputies and prisoners exchanged fire. Others jumped screaming over the backs of the benches or charged down the center aisle, bent double, pushing and slamming into one another as they tried to escape by way of the double doors she and Bryan had hurried through just moments before. A fleeing man was shot in the back and flung forward out of sight, knocking down two people in front of him as he fell. Those rushing up the aisle behind him leaped over the fallen bodies. In the jury box, some were on their feet, stampeding like crazed cattle toward the door to the jury room. Others dived out of sight behind the box's low wall, impeding their fellows.
Bullets flew everywhere.
Another deputy, retreating along the courtroom's left wall, shot steadily at the murderous trio now sheltering behind the bench before being hit by a barrage of return fire that cut him down. The jackhammerlike
crack
of the shots blasted Kate's eardrums. She screamed along with the rest—but once again, the sound was only inside her head.
"Kate, for God's sake, get under here!"