Puppet

A big thank-you to my two favorite cities in the world, Toronto and Palm Beach, and to the wonderful people in each. To Owen Laster, Larry Mirkin, and Beverley Slopen, my very own Three Musketeers, who keep me on the straight and narrow—or circuitous and flighty, as the case may be. To Aurora, who has been with our family for more than thirteen years, and for Rosie, who is always willing to help out. To Owen’s former assistants Jonathan Peckarsky and Bill Kingsland, and to his current one, Susanna Schell, all unfailingly pleasant in the face of often peculiar and pesky requests. To Julia Noonan with the Metro West Detention Center and to Berthe Cano at the Toronto Reference Library, for generously sharing their time and answering my many questions. To lawyers David Bayliss and Larry Douglas, who taught me more than I really wanted to know about the Canadian justice system. To my sister Renee, and all my wonderfully supportive friends in both Canada and the U.S., for being, respectively, my sister and my wonderfully supportive friends. To my toy poodle, Casey, who never fails to make me smile. To Emily Bestler, Sarah Branham, Judith Curr, Louise Burke, Seale Ballenger, Thomas Semosh, and all the wonderful people at Atria and Pocket Books. To Maya Mavjee, John Neale, Brad Martin, Stephanie Gowan, Val Gow, and everyone at Doubleday Canada. To Corinne Assayag, who has done such a spectacular job designing and overseeing my website, and to my daughter, Shannon, for her advice, encouragement, and muchneeded assistance with my email. To Warren, for reading the manuscript in its final stages, and to Annie, for finally getting around to reading my last book. To the hardworking booksellers and author escorts I’ve met during my various book tours. And once again, to my readers everywhere. Thank you. You never cease to amaze me.

S
OME
of the things Amanda Travis likes: the color black; lunchtime spinning classes at the fitness center on Clematis Street in downtown Palm Beach; her all-white, one-bedroom, oceanfront condo in Jupiter; a compliant jury; men whose wives don’t understand them.

Some of the things she doesn’t: the color pink; when the temperature outside her condo’s floor-to-ceiling windows falls below sixty-five degrees; clients who don’t follow her advice; the color gray; being asked to show her ID when she goes to a bar; nicknames of any shape and size.

Something else she doesn’t like: bite marks.

Especially bite marks that are deep and clearly defined, even after the passing of several days; bite marks that lie like a bright purple tattoo amidst a puddle of mustard-color bruises; bite marks that are all but smiling at her from the photographs on the defense table in front of her.

Amanda shakes blond, shoulder-length hair away from her thin face and slips the offending photographs beneath a pad of lined, yellow legal paper, then picks up a
pencil and pretends to be jotting down something of importance, when what she actually writes is
Remember to buy toothpaste.
This gesture is for the jury’s benefit, in case any of them is watching. Which is doubtful. Already this morning, she’s caught one of the jurors, a middle-aged man with thinning Ronald Reagan–red hair, nodding off. She sighs, drops her pencil, sits back in her chair, and pushes her lips into a pout of disapproval. Not big. Just enough to let the jury know what she thinks of the testimony being given. Which she would like them to believe is not much.

“He was yelling about something,” the young woman on the witness stand is saying, one hand absently reaching up to tug at her hair. She glances toward the defense table, pulls the platinum curls away from their black roots, and twists them around square, fake fingernails. “He’s always yelling about something.”

Again Amanda lifts the pencil into her right hand, adds
Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese
to the impromptu list of groceries she is creating. And
orange juice
, she remembers, scribbling it across the page with exaggerated flourish, as if she has just remembered a key point of law. The action dislodges the pictures beneath the legal pad, so that once again the photographic impressions of her client’s teeth against the witness’s skin are winking up at her.

It’s the bite marks that will do her in.

She might be able to fudge the facts, obfuscate the evidence, overwhelm the jury with irrelevant details and not always reasonable doubt, but there is simply no getting around those awful pictures. They will seal her client’s fate and mar her perfect record, like a blemish on an otherwise flawless complexion, detracting from
almost a year of sterling performances on behalf of the poor, the unlucky, and the overwhelmingly guilty.

Damn Derek Clemens anyway. Did he have to be so damn obvious?

Amanda reaches over and pats the hand of the man sitting beside her. Another salvo for the jury, although she wonders if any of them is really fooled. Surely they watch enough television to know the various tricks of the trade: the mock outrage, the sympathetic glances, the disbelieving shakes of the head. She withdraws her hand, surreptitiously rubs the touch of her client’s skin onto her black linen skirt beneath the table.
Idiot
, she thinks behind her reassuring smile.
You couldn’t have exercised even a modicum of self-control. You had to bite her too.