For the Defense (3 page)

“Nice try,” Diana said. “But not even close to working. Now off with you.”

“What’s causing you pain?” Jack asked Mel, curious to know, despite Diana’s obvious desire to be on her way.

“We have to move out of my grandmother’s home,” Mel said. “She’s really sweet, and she understands me, and I’ve lived here for as long as I can remember.”

“Why do you have to leave?” Jack prodded.

“She’s getting married, and her husband’s moving in with her, so Mom and I have to rent a place. There are no
houses available, only yucky apartments. And Mom’s going to have to find someone to stay with me when she’s not there. Except I don’t want to be baby-sat because I’m no baby.”

“You’re certainly not,” Jack said. Although, as Mel’s far too unhappy tone had demonstrated, she was still very much a nine-year-old for all her intelligence.

When Diana had finally succeeded in shooing her daughter into the house, Jack turned to her. “You could have warned me about Mel.”

“Yeah, but this was more fun.”

For
her
maybe. But he didn’t mind. He’d had a chance to hear Diana laugh. That had been a nice surprise. He’d always thought that the deeper a woman’s laugh, the deeper her enjoyment of physical pleasure.

Diana’s laugh had been so deep he could still feel it vibrating along his nerve endings.

F
ORTY MINUTES LATER
, Diana and Jack stepped through the doorway into the Silver Valley County jail. As they walked through the metal detector, Diana exchanged waves with the security guard who had the latest John Grisham thriller in his hands.

Hustling once again to keep up with her fast pace, Jack followed her into the elevator and watched her punch the button for the next floor.

“Are you as upset about having to move out of your mother’s home as Mel is?”

“Just something that has to be done,” she answered without looking at him.

Jack couldn’t tell whether he’d hit on a touchy subject or if Diana’s reluctance to talk was due to preoccupation with their upcoming interview. When the elevator doors opened, she was out in a flash.

“Hi, Diana,” the prison guard called from behind the counter.

“Hi, Fran.”

Jack looked over Diana’s shoulder as she signed in, noticing that she entered both of their names. The prison guard buzzed the door to the hallway open and gestured for Diana to go through.

But before Jack could, the guard pointed to a room behind the counter. “Step in there and take off all your clothes.”

“I beg your pardon?” Jack said.

“Body search,” Fran explained curtly, hands on her sturdy hips, fingers twitching toward the gun in her holster. “Got to make sure you’re not taking anything prohibited to the prisoner.”

He stared at the serious look on the prison guard’s face in growing unease.

“Nice try, Fran,” Diana said, “but Mr. Knight’s part of the law firm’s defense team and not subject to search.”

The female guard looked Jack up and down and let out a disappointed sigh. “Rats.”

“Thanks,” he whispered on an exhale of relief as they walked down the hall.

A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth as she headed directly for a room at the end. She opened the door and gestured for him to step inside. She apparently wasn’t the type who waited for men to hold doors open for her.

Jack liked that. He stepped past her into a windowless, eight-by-ten foot room with a Formica table, four scratched metal chairs and an overhead fluorescent light that flickered.

“They’ll bring Connie in to meet with us soon,” Diana said as she closed the door then and took a seat at the table. “Before she gets here, I need to fill you in on a few things.”

He sat across from her and waited. She looped the strap of her shoulder bag over the back of her chair as she began.

“Connie is unnaturally shy. I want her to tell you her story because the emotional impact comes through so much clearer in her words. But she might not talk to you. She offered nothing but minimal information to me at first. It wasn’t until I learned she’d lost a daughter that I thought of approaching her another way.”

“When you say lost, do you mean the girl died?” Jack asked.

Diana nodded. “Had she lived, her daughter would have been around Mel’s age now. I got the idea that Connie might find talking to another mother easier than she would to an attorney. So, on my next visit I stopped asking questions and started telling her about the challenges facing me as a single mom. When she seemed interested, I knew I was making progress and showed her a picture of Mel.”

Pausing for a moment, Diana gave her shoulders a little roll as though trying to shake off a sudden tightness. “Connie took one look at Mel’s picture and cried. Then she told me about Amy.”

“Amy is the daughter she lost,” Jack guessed. “How long ago did—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. The door opened and a guard brought in Connie Pearce, murderess. She walked into the room slowly, as if she was unsure of each step. The instant she saw Jack, she flinched and took a step backward.

Connie not only didn’t look like she could run down a man with a car. She didn’t look like she could chase down a fly with a swatter.

This case got more baffling by the minute. Jack decided right then that he was not going to leave the room until he had heard this woman’s story.

W
HEN
D
IANA SAW
Connie’s reaction to Jack, she was certain her client was never going to talk to him. But before
she could ask Jack to wait outside, he stepped forward, took Connie’s hand and smiled into her startled face.

“I’m Jack Knight, Connie. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

His voice sounded very gentle and sincere. Connie’s retreat halted.

When Fran seemed ready to take exception to Jack’s physical contact with the prisoner, Diana shook her head. Diana and Fran had known each other a long time. The guard trusted her. Fran nodded and quietly left the room.

“You look…familiar,” Connie said as she stared up at Jack, a small frown forming.

“Do I?” he asked as he held her hand within his open palm. Smiling one of those devastating smiles of his, he said, “Maybe you recognize me from TV. The soap
Seattle
?”

Connie’s mouth opened in astonishment. “You’re Derek Dementer! But I don’t understand. What are you doing here?”

“Diana tells me you’re in trouble. I’ve come to help.”

Keeping her hand within his own, Jack led Connie to the table, held out a chair for her. His facial expression, physical attention and voice all radiated warmth.

He sat facing her, knee-to-knee. “Being an actor was fun for me. But I’d much rather rescue a lady in distress than be the villain causing her distress.”

Damn if he didn’t sound like he meant every word he was saying, too.

“You really think you can help
me?
” Connie asked, still obviously finding this too good to be true.

“I
know
I can help you,” he said with the kind of confidence that brooked no argument. “But first, I need to understand everything that happened. Will you help me?”

For the first time since she’d met Connie, Diana saw her client smile. Jack’s constant attention was telling Connie that she alone existed for him. A normal man showing a woman that kind of attention would be hard to refuse. When a charismatic man like Jack turned it on, what chance did a woman have?

“What do you want me to do?” Connie asked.

“Tell me about Amy,” he said.

Connie sigh was soft and sad. “Oh.”

“I know talking about her is very difficult,” Jack said, his voice tender. “But will you try for me?”

Connie nodded. “Okay.”

Diana let out a relieved breath. He had accomplished in a couple of minutes what had taken her two weeks. The lawyer in her was impressed, but the woman in her was more than a little annoyed.

Connie inhaled deeply before she began.

Diana knew the story. She focused her attention on Jack, trying to imagine what he would think and feel when he heard it. Was he merely a handsome actor with all the right words at his command? Or was there some substance behind that charm?

C
ONNIE STRUCK
Jack as so childlike and vulnerable that he had a hard time remembering that she was in her late twenties.

“I fell in love with Jimmy when we were seniors in high school,” Connie began. “He said he wanted us to get married. But when I told him I was pregnant a couple of months before graduation, he got upset. The day after graduation, he disappeared. I knew then that I’d have to raise my baby by myself.”

“Your parents couldn’t help?” he asked.

“My parents told me I was going to hell when I told
them. They turned me out of the house and warned me to never come back.”

Jack shook his head. Religion could so easily be perverted into hate when humans turned away from its message of love. He squeezed Connie’s hand, urging her to go on with her story.

“A woman who owned a small diner down the street from the high school gave me a job as a waitress and let me sleep in her storage room,” Connie said. “The next few months were very hard. But once my Amy was born, I knew nothing else mattered. She was my sweet baby, my total joy.”

He could hear that joy in Connie’s voice, see it flooding her face as the memories of her child filled her.

“Amy was the happiest, most loving child. She was the reason I got up every morning and said prayers of gratitude every night. I worked in a day-care center so I could keep her with me. When she got close to school age, I applied to be a teacher’s aide. Only then my baby…my baby…”

Connie’s head dropped as her voice faltered. She stared down at her lap as her hand clutched his.

Jack would have sworn he was immune to dramatic pauses, but he wasn’t immune to this one. Connie didn’t know how to simply relate facts. She emitted the complete range of her emotions in full and living color. He now understood why Diana had wanted him to hear the story from her client. No one else could tell it like this.

“What happened to her?” he asked quietly.

“It was Amy’s fourth birthday. I was in the kitchen baking her cake. She was playing on the screened-in front porch. I heard a car, and it seemed much too close. I looked up to see this old car jump the curb and smash through our fence. It plowed into the porch, then sped away. I ran outside to look for Amy and I found her under the wreckage. She was dead.”

Tears poured down Connie’s cheeks, large glistening drops of pure grief. Jack had no handkerchief or tissue to offer her. He leaned over and gently rubbed the tears away with his thumbs.

“Did they find the driver?” he asked after a moment.

She tried to speak, but her words were choked by sobs. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Diana answer him with a shake of her head.

Connie wept for several more minutes before resuming her story. Her voice was whispered pain. “I wanted to die. I tried to. But Amy kept coming to me in my dreams. She told me she’d be too sad if I died. I enrolled in night school and earned a teaching credential. They offered me a job teaching third grade. I told them I wanted to teach kindergarten instead.”

“So you could be around children Amy’s age,” he guessed.

She nodded. “Sometimes when they smiled, I saw Amy in their eyes.”

Jack let a moment pass before he asked, “When did you meet Bruce Weaton?”

“Over a year ago. Amy had been gone almost four years by then.”

“How did you meet him?”

“I worked late one day setting up a classroom exhibit. When I walked out to the parking lot, I saw that one of my tires had gone flat. Everyone else had gone home. I didn’t have a phone to call for assistance. I was trying to figure out how to put on the spare when Bruce came by in his car. He changed the flat for me. Afterward, he invited me out for coffee.”

“You had coffee with him?”

“Oh, no. He was very handsome and drove a Mercedes. I was certain he was only being kind.”

“But you did see him again?” Jack prompted.

“About a week later. I bumped into him while we were both standing in line for popcorn at the movie theater in the mall. He’d come to see some war movie. I was there to see a Disney adventure my class was talking about. I was so surprised when he asked if he could sit with me and watch the kids’ movie.”

“And after the show?”

“He bought me an ice-cream cone from a concession in the mall. We talked until closing. He kept asking me about myself and seemed really interested in what I told him. When he walked me to my car, he invited me to dinner the next evening.”

Jack listened to the amazement in Connie’s voice as she described her growing relationship with Bruce. Everywhere they went over the next few months, women gave the good-looking Bruce the eye. But he gave all his attention to her.

Bruce told Connie about his father, Philip, and his brother, Lyle, both of whom were partners with him in a very successful real estate firm. He explained that his mother, Barbara, was a prominent judge. Connie had a hard time believing that this perfect man from a perfect family was interested in her.

After they’d been dating for three months, she finally got up the courage to ask Bruce what he saw in her. To her total amazement, he asked her to marry him.

“What did you say, Connie?”

“I didn’t know what to say. He’d been pressing me for weeks for…a more intimate relationship. I’d told him that after Jimmy, I didn’t want to be physically intimate with a man again unless I was married. Now he was asking me to marry him. When I told him I wasn’t sure, he agreed to give me more time.”

At a barbecue the following Sunday, Bruce’s seven-year-old nephew had dragged Connie into Bruce’s garage
to show her the new bike his uncle had bought him for his birthday. As he swung his leg over the bike’s seat, the boy’s foot caught on the edge of a drop cloth. When Connie had pulled the drop cloth from the boy’s foot, she saw a tiny gold locket and chain in the corner. A distinctive blue rose was on the front of the locket.

“I picked up the locket, opened it,” Connie said, her voice suddenly nothing but a quivering breath. “I found Amy’s picture inside. She was wearing the locket the day the car hit the porch.”