Law of Attraction (33 page)

“I owe it to Laprea’s family.”

“You owe it to yourself, Annie.”

Anna took a deep breath as Jody hugged her. Jody’s forgiveness felt
like a blood transfusion, making Anna suddenly stronger and more alive than she’d been just a few moments before. She felt the return of the sense of purpose that had been missing since she’d been kicked off Laprea’s case. Anna smiled through her tears.

“I feel like Maria, back at the abbey after Captain von Trapp got engaged, and you’re the Reverend Mother singing ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain.’”

“That’s right, baby. Ford every stream.”

“Okay.” Anna laughed, and pulled back to look at her sister. “But, Jo, what can I do about Jack? I hurt him, and he’s such a good person. You should see him with his daughter. He’s warm and patient—everything our dad wasn’t. And he’s an amazing lawyer. Sharp, great in court, and he really cares about the people he’s fighting for. He trusted me. I think he was falling for me. And, God, did I ruin it.”

“It’ll be okay, Annie,” Jody began. “There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

“No,” Anna protested. “I know all about the D.C. dating scene—and my own warped radar. The guys I pick, like Nick, they’re hot, they’ve got an edge—and they always turn out bad. You know what I mean. I never would’ve been attracted to Jack if I met him at some party or a bar. But working with him, I really got to know him. And he’s wonderful. I should have cut Nick out of my life completely, just focused on Jack. But I didn’t.”

“Well,” Jody asked, “is that what you want? Are you sure you’re through with Nick?”

Anna paused before answering. Her connection to Nick had been immediate and intense. He was rich, clever, and gorgeous. But that connection had stretched thinner and thinner with the pull and tug of Laprea’s case. And Anna was beginning to realize that it was the damaged part of herself that was attracted to the bad-boy side of Nick.

“I think I’ll always have a soft spot for Nick,” Anna admitted, “but I know he’s not the right guy for me.”

Then Anna thought about Jack, sitting across the war room table with her, discussing some legal issue in his low, quiet voice. She remembered him bursting through her front door when D’marco was in her apartment. She pictured Jack in the foyer of his house, swinging Olivia in the air. Anna admired him. She trusted him. He made her laugh. It had been such a healthy feeling to actually want to be with a
good guy for once. And, Anna realized now, her days felt empty without him.

“Every day I don’t see Jack feels like a day I’ve wasted.”

“Then you don’t have a choice,” Jody said. “You have to go win him back.”

“Do you think I can?”

“It may take years and cost thousands of lives,” Jody joked, “but you have to try, don’t you?”

Anna took a deep breath as she and Jody hugged tightly. Jody was right, and Anna knew what she had to do now. She might not be able to get back her old job or convince Jack to trust her again. But she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life wondering what would have happened if she’d only done something. If she failed this time, at least she was going down fighting.

32

A
nna crouched before the old Xerox machine and stared at its tangled guts. Way back there, hidden behind a dozen black plastic knobs and tubes, she could see a suspicious white spot that might be the paper jam. She squeezed her fist through the plastic innards, groped blindly toward the spot, and sent up a quick prayer to the copier gods. She needed to get this done soon, or else she would miss the opening statements. She felt a promising, papery texture and grasped blindly at it, pulling out a handful of crumpled papers. Bingo. Her arm was covered in black toner powder, but she might have fixed it. She pushed the plastic door shut and the copier roared to life, sending papers flying through the machine.

Dan, the paralegal assigned permanently to the Papering Room, looked up in surprise and applauded. He’d given up on the copier. Anna clasped her hands above her head like a prizefighter who’d just won a big fight.

She felt like anything but a winner these days, though. Since returning to the U.S. Attorney’s Office after visiting Jody in November, she’d spent almost four months here in the windowless Papering Room in the courthouse basement. No more hearings, trials, briefs, or arguments. It was all papering, all the time. She’d been at this job for so long, she was the fastest lawyer on the two-hole puncher, a genius at data entry, the only person the fussy Xerox machine seemed to respond to. These were not accomplishments she had ever hoped to achieve.

EPO had conducted their ethics investigation. Although their report contained several sharp words about her conduct, they had cleared her of any ethics violation. Technically, she could go back to being a real lawyer. In reality, she was still an outcast. The office wasn’t letting her out of Papering anytime soon.

She’d had even less success with Jack. He didn’t pick up her phone calls anymore. She’d tried going to his office a few times, but his door was always shut these days, and his secretary always told her—kindly,
pityingly, unconvincingly—that he was in a meeting. They worked in different buildings now—Anna was in the satellite office in the courthouse basement while Jack was based in the U.S. Attorney’s Office—so they rarely ran into each other. On the few occasions when Anna did pass Jack in the halls, he would nod politely, but he wouldn’t slow down. Anna had been unable to prompt any type of connection with him; in fact, she hardly saw him anymore. But she would see him today.

She hurried the copies back to her desk. The officer whose case she was papering had fallen asleep in the chair. His head lolled back against the mint green cinder block wall and a thin line of spittle dangled from his slack mouth. Poor guy was working midnights. Anna two-hole-punched the papers, impaled them on the metal prongs, snapped the file shut, and tapped the policeman with it.

“You’re all set,” she said, trying to keep her voice as cheerful as Dan’s. If he could keep it up, she could, too.

The cop blinked awake, murmured his thanks, and shuffled off with the file.

Anna turned to her computer and noticed an envelope sitting on her keyboard. It wasn’t unusual to have a piece of mail delivered to her workstation here in Papering, since she didn’t have her own office anymore. She was about to toss it aside when she saw the return address. That was odd, she thought. She wasn’t expecting anything from the FBI.

She ripped open the envelope and scanned the paper inside. Her eyebrows dipped in confusion. The letter was full of scientific jargon, peppered with charts listing a series of apparently random numbers. She had never seen anything like it before. After the third read, Anna finally understood its meaning. She sucked in her breath.

Holy shit, she thought.

Why was she getting this? Hadn’t Jack canceled the test? And why was she getting this
now
of all days?

A moment’s thought explained the timing. The FBI’s DNA testing was driven by the date of the trial in the case they were doing the testing for. They were constantly backlogged—doing the DNA testing for everything from neighborhood robberies to war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan—and local cases often got pushed to the last minute. The lab promised to get the report done by the first date of trial, which was usually plenty of time. The initial trial date almost never turned out to
be the date that the trial actually started. Someone—usually the defense attorney—asked for a continuance for one reason or another, and the trial was postponed. In D’marco’s case, though, no one had moved to continue it, and the trial was actually starting on the first scheduled trial date. If a prosecutor had been following up on this paternity test, she probably could have asked the DNA lab to send the results a few weeks before the trial. But there had been no one attending to it here, and the lab had gotten it done just under the wire.

Anna stood up. D’marco Davis’s trial was starting any minute. She had to find Jack before he gave his opening statement.

“Dan, can you cover for me for a while?” She inclined her head toward the line of officers. “I need to go to court.”

“Sure.”

“Thanks. I owe you both.” There was one other lawyer in Papering today, a new woman who’d just started last week. She looked panic-stricken that Anna would be gone. “Don’t worry. Dan knows everything.”

Anna strode out of the Papering Room and ran up three flights of escalators, squeezing her way around the people standing on them. She’d hardly spoken to Jack in the four months since the debacle at her house—but she needed to talk to him right now. And he wasn’t going to be happy to hear what she had to tell him.

She jogged to Judge Spiegel’s courtroom and paused for a moment to catch her breath in front of the thick double doors. Then she yanked one open.

Almost every seat in the spectator section of the courtroom was filled. There were friends and relatives of the Davis and Johnson families, journalists covering the now notorious murder case, interns and other lawyers simply there to see Jack Bailey and Nick Wagner go head-to-head. Several extra marshals stood lining the walls to make sure the escape-prone prisoner wouldn’t try to run again. The courtroom was remarkably quiet for a room so packed with people. This is not good, Anna thought. Proceedings had already started.

A few people turned to look at her as she walked in, but most of the audience was focused on what was going on in the well of the court. Judge Spiegel was sitting in her high seat at the helm of the crowded, silent courtroom. She was wearing lipstick, Anna noticed, and her curly brown hair was blown out straight. Anna smiled at the realization that the stern judge suffered from the usual female vanities, and was not
immune to the presence of the sketch artists sitting in the front row.

Nick sat at the defense table, his head cocked toward a clean-cut young man who was whispering in his ear. With his tailored suit, strong profile, and thatch of dark hair, Nick looked not so much like a lawyer as a Brooks Brothers model of what a lawyer should look like.

Anna wondered fleetingly if the other man at the table was Nick’s paralegal—until she realized that it was D’marco Davis. He was nearly unrecognizable. D’marco had had a good shave and a haircut, and his cornrows were replaced with a neat, conservative fade. He wore a light blue sweater over a blue button-down shirt and tie, and a pair of trendy plastic-rimmed eyeglasses.

She should have known it was D’marco from the glasses. OPD attorneys always had their clients wear glasses for jury trials; Anna suspected they kept a bin of nonprescription frames just for that purpose. Somehow, glasses made even the toughest thug appear harmless and intellectual, as if the trial were keeping him from reading the biography of Winston Churchill he was in the middle of. Dressed up like this, D’marco looked like a large but mild-mannered orthodontist who just happened to have stopped by the courtroom on his way to a church supper.

Anna looked for Rose, but didn’t see her. She was probably in the witnesses’ waiting room. Anna hadn’t spoken to Rose in months. She’d been forbidden to contact witnesses after she was kicked off the case. She wondered what Jack had told Rose about her absence. Anna couldn’t believe that her first contact with Rose after all this time would be this.

Across the courtroom, fourteen men and women of varying sizes, ages, and colors sat in the jury box. They were the twelve jurors and two alternates. They couldn’t be too far into the trial, because they all looked so fresh and attentive. Juror number six was giving D’marco a motherly smile. The orthodontist getup was working.

Jack appeared from behind the witness stand, carrying a large piece of posterboard. He looked completely at home in the well of the courtroom, relaxed, confident, and ready for the fight ahead of him. He set the posterboard on an easel. It was a blown-up photo of Laprea Johnson, smiling radiantly.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Laprea Johnson,” Jack said.

With a sinking heart, Anna understood what was happening. She was too late. The trial had started and Jack was in the middle of his
opening statement, introducing the jury to the person they would spend the next several days hearing about. The prosecution always used a photo of the victim, looking as sweet as possible, as Exhibit A.

Anna sank down in one of the few empty seats. There was nothing she could do except sit and watch what Jack said, and fervently hope it wasn’t anything too damaging in light of the report she was holding.

“In August of last year,” Jack was saying, “Laprea Johnson was a hardworking, twenty-one-year-old mother of four-year-old twins. She got up every morning at four thirty a.m. to go to work at the Labor Department’s cafeteria, where she was a cashier. Outside of work, she enjoyed going to church and spending time with friends. She had a good life, a quiet, simple life that she had carefully built for herself and her family. On August sixteenth, D’marco Davis cut that life short, when he killed her in a fit of jealous rage.”

Jack’s words were surprisingly soft. His height and broad chest suggested a booming oratory, which made his gentle words seem all the more powerful. The jurors were paying attention, Anna saw. They liked him already.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself,” Jack said apologetically, as if he hadn’t planned exactly what he was going to say. “Let’s back up. Because this story really started five years ago, when Laprea first met the defendant.”

Anna nodded in appreciation of Jack’s skill. He had gotten them to care about the victim, given them enough information to get them hooked. Now they listened attentively as he went through the details of Laprea and D’marco’s long, violent relationship. Jack wove the details expertly, stitching the fabric of Laprea’s life thread by thread. He described how Laprea and D’marco had met, the puppy love that turned bittersweet, the escalating cycle of violence.

He didn’t mention every time that D’marco had beaten Laprea—many of the prior assaults were not admissible—but even the small pieces that did come in sounded pretty damning. Anna thought the opening was going perfectly—until Jack mentioned how Officer Bradley Green would tell them about an incident that took place the day after Valentine’s Day. Oh no, she thought, as he named Green as a witness. I’m sorry, Jack.