“Abby”—her father lifts his coffee mug toward me—“this is Ms. Nickerson.”
She gives me a little wave from across the room.
“Call me Marty,” I say, hoping I don’t sound too much like Honey.
She nods, studying me as she takes another swallow. Her expression says she’s certain she knows me from somewhere but can’t quite put her finger on it.
I know how she recognizes me, of course, and I wonder if Abby needs her gorgeous gray-blues examined. Aside from our nine-inch height difference, Luke and I are dead ringers for each other. We share the same black hair, fair skin, and dark blue eyes. She realizes before I say anything, though. “You’re Luke Ellis’s mom, aren’t you?” she says. “God, you look just like him.”
I nod, swallowing the urge to point out that it’s actually the other way around.
“I had dinner with him last night,” she tells me.
“So I heard. He managed to squeeze me in for five minutes before he dashed out to pick you up.” I have no idea what Luke would’ve wanted me to say in response to Abby’s comment, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t it.
She raises one eyebrow. “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”
I nod again, amazed. My son must have mentioned his mother.
She sets her glass on the counter, looks from one parent to the other, then frowns. “Why are the two of you talking to a lawyer?”
Her mother walks toward her—and away from our discussion—before the question ends. “It doesn’t concern you, Abigail.”
Abby stares at her father, her eyes saying she fully expects an answer. He hesitates for a moment, watching his wife’s back, then meets his daughter’s gaze. “We’re discussing the Forrester matter,” he says.
“What about it?” This time the question is directed at me, but the Senator answers first. “We’re talking about the investigation,” he says. “That’s all.”
Abby folds her arms and smirks. “Investigation? Please. No need for an investigation. I know exactly what happened.” She stares angrily at her father. “And so do you.”
“Abigail,” her mother snaps, “this isn’t the time.”
“Too much nose candy.” Abby fires her words at me, ignoring her mother. “That’s what happened. Too much white stuff up the nose.”
Silence. For a moment, no one in the room seems to breathe. Even the perpetually mobile Honey is paralyzed.
Finally, the Senator takes a deep breath and turns to me. “Michelle had a problem,” he says, “a couple of years back. But she was past that. She’d put it behind her.”
“Oh, right.” Abby laughs, but it’s not a happy one. She takes her half-empty glass of juice from the counter and heads out of the kitchen. “Sure she did,” she calls over her shoulder, her ponytail bobbing. “And she gave up men too. The word on the street is she was headed straight for the convent.”
Honey scowls at her husband, slaps her twisted towel on the counter and follows her daughter toward the living room. She pauses, though, in the doorway, and turns back to me. “I’ll be happy to abide by your instructions,” she says. “As far as I’m concerned, the name Michelle Forrester need never be mentioned again.”
Senator Kendrick plants his elbows on the table and buries his face in his hands as his wife leaves the kitchen. I set down my coffee mug, check my watch, and wait. I had two appointments scheduled for this morning. This was supposed to be the easy one.
Chapter 6
Derrick Holliston has had a change of heart, it seems. I’m only about twenty minutes late for our jailhouse meeting, but apparently he and Harry have already covered a lot of ground. “Maybe I won’t, then,” he says as the young guard with the crew cut pulls the meeting room door shut behind me. “Maybe I won’t.”
“Won’t what?” I already know the answer, I think—his tone tells me more than his words—but I want to be sure.
“Testify,” Holliston says as I join him and Harry at the rickety table. “Maybe I’ll just keep my mouth shut.”
I’m a little concerned about what led to this switch. I’m no fan of Holliston’s—Harry’s instincts about him are dead-on, I’m certain—but like it or not, he is our client. If he wants to take the witness stand—and he sure as hell did yesterday—it’s not our job to talk him out of it. “Hold on,” I tell him as I turn toward Harry. “Fill me in.”
“We were just going over the police report,” Harry says, tossing his pen on top of a dog-eared copy of it. “It’s in there. The whole story.” His emphasis on the last word says it all. It’s a fairy tale, as far as he’s concerned. A grim one.
“So?” I ask. I’m pretty sure I know where this is going, though.
“So Tommy Fitzpatrick will say it for us,” Harry answers. “The Chief questioned Holliston personally, as soon as he was picked up, and recorded his version of events. My bet is Fitzpatrick will be the Commonwealth’s first witness. He prepared the primary report and he’ll testify to its content. All of it.”
Holliston not only waived his right to remain silent on the morning of his arrest, he spilled his guts to anyone—and everyone—who’d listen. While that’s generally not a good idea, it just might work to his advantage now. His story has been memorialized at least a half dozen times, once in painstaking detail by Tommy Fitzpatrick, Chatham’s Chief of Police.
“So the jurors will hear what happened,” Holliston explains, as though he’s my lawyer, “but they don’t hear nothin’ about my priors.”
His priors aren’t pretty. If the prosecutor were to line them up side by side, in chronological order, the jury would see the perfect evolution of a sociopath, each crime more violent than its predecessor. The jury won’t see anything of the sort, though, because the prosecutor can’t do that—Holliston committed all but one of his crimes when he was under eighteen.
“Most of your priors won’t come in anyhow,” I remind him. “Your juvenile record is sealed.”
“Yeah, but I got that assault.” He sighs. “That’ll come in. And it don’t make me look good.” He shakes his head slowly, his lips tight, his eyes saying it’s a damned shame the world dealt him that blow.
Holliston has only one conviction on his adult tab, an accomplishment made possible by the fact that he’s spent all but five weeks of his over-eighteen life in jail. If he takes the stand in this trial, that conviction will come in. It’s a given. And it’s a problem.
Four years ago, the manager of one of Chatham’s premier restaurants was assaulted and robbed. Bobby “the Butcher” Frazier, longtime caretaker of Kristen’s Pub, was closing the place that February night, the off-season regulars and a handful of employees out the door just minutes ahead of him. As he stood on the snowy brick walkway inserting his key to flip the back door’s deadlock, a young white male wearing a ski mask emerged from the darkness of the parking lot. He demanded the night deposit sack Bobby had stashed under one arm.
The Butcher isn’t a guy who takes kindly to bullies. He told the masked man to take a hike. A fistfight ensued and Bobby was stabbed during the course of it, the knife penetrating just below his right shoulder. Down but not out, he grabbed his attacker’s hand—along with the knife inside it—and continued to fight. Eventually, though, the masked man kicked Bobby to the ground and fled with the cash.