The phone rang before I sat down on the sofa. "I was about to give up on you," Jake said. "Thought you'd be home early. I've already left three messages."
"I haven't even been in the bedroom to pick them up. I'm just sitting down to dinner," I said, describing my meal to him.
"Doesn't sound like enough to keep body and soul together. I'll have to make up for that tomorrow night."
"What's all the noise in the background?" I asked.
"It's the party at the British embassy I told you about. They've got all the Washington correspondents here, sort of an annual meet-the-press deal. Dinner and dancing, but it's about to break up."
Who's your date?is what I really wanted to ask Jake, but under our new arrangement, we were both free to spend time with other people if we were not available, since our jobs interfered with our personal lives so frequently. Instead, I told him I couldn't wait to see him and tried to believe it when he whispered that he loved me into the telephone.
I dialed my best friend and former college roommate, Nina Baum, who lived in California. "Great timing. You just got me coming in the door."
I could hear her four-year-old son screeching in delight at her arrival. "I'll let you go. Call me over the weekend."
"You sound flat, Alex. What's going on?"
No one on earth knew me better than Nina. We had leaned on each other through every good time and bad in each other's lives. I told her what had happened to my case, how depressing it was to see the photos of Queenie at the morgue, and how jealous I was to think of Jake at a party with someone else.
"You've heard me on this subject, Alex." Nina was not keen on Jake Tyler. She had adored Adam Nyman, the medical student I'd met during my law school days at Virginia. She had mourned with me when he had been killed in a car wreck on his way to our wedding on Martha's Vineyard, and she had helped me throughout my slow emergence from the black hole into which I sunk after absorbing the news of Adam's death.
In the years since that tragedy, I had never let myself get as close to anyone as I had to Jake, only to find that my dearest friend, whom I trusted implicitly, thought he was too superficial and self-involved for me.
"Try your damn case, will you?" Nina said. "You want to know what time Jake gets home tonight? Forget it. You want to know what whoever she is he settled for in your absence was wearing to the party? Trust me, you would never have bought the rag in the first place. You want to know how much she knows about you? If she isn't sticking pins in a tall, blonde, mud-wrestling voodoo doll who thrives on competition by this time, she ought to go out and buy one immediately. Speak to you on Saturday. I've got to go feed Little Precious."
I laughed at Nina's nickname for her son and put down the phone.
When I finished my snack, I spread all the case papers out on my desk. I had outlined an opening statement, and now took half an hour to reduce it to an abbreviated list of bullet points. I smiled as I thought back to my first felony trial, when I'd stood before the jurors with a painstakingly detailed speech, written in essay form, of which I'd read every word. Midway through, the judge interrupted and wiggled his finger at me, asking me to approach. "Miss Cooper, this isn't a book report. Put down those pages and talk to the people before you lose them."
I had learned to abandon the crutch of too many notes and simply sketch out the main points I needed to make. The advantage of vertical prosecution-of working a case from the moment of the first police report up to the verdict-was that we knew the facts cold and could proceed without any notes or outlines.
In the morning I would spend one last hour with Paige Vallis, steadying her before her difficult day on the witness stand. I arranged all the questions I would ask her and made a list of the items I would ask the court to premark for identification, to avoid delay in the presence of the jury.
By midnight I had undressed and turned out the light, but the adrenaline that fueled my courtroom rhythm made a good night's sleep impossible. At six o'clock I got up and showered. Blow-drying my hair, I looked at my reflection in the mirror and wondered how long it would be before the dark circles that frequently took up residence beneath my eyes during a trial would reappear.
I finished dressing and dabbed some perfume on my wrists and behind my ears. I called a car service and went down to the lobby to wait for the sedan to take me to the office, and I was at the coffee cart at the building entrance before seven-thirty.
My car was still there, so the first call was to AAA, to tow it to my repair shop and replace the two tires. Then I settled down to the business on my desk until Mercer arrived with Paige Vallis almost an hour later.
I closed my door to give us more privacy. She didn't need to go over the facts again. The events of March 6 were indelibly etched in her mind's eye. I knew that if I questioned her about them now, it would heighten her state of nervousness, as well as take the emotional edge off the presentation she would make to the jury. Instead, we talked about what I thought the pace of the trial would be and when we might expect to go to verdict.
"Andrew's lawyer?" Paige asked.
"Robelon. Peter Robelon. What about him?"
"Do you have any better sense of what he's going to do to me?"
We had been over this countless times, and Paige didn't like it better than any other witness. When the assailant in a sexual assault case was a stranger, the defense did not have to attack the victim. They could acknowledge that a vicious crime had occurred, and suggest that the woman was tragically mistaken in her identification of the defendant. Poor lighting, little opportunity to see his face clearly, and general hysteria were the traditional arguments against a reliable identification by a rape victim. All of that changed when DNA technology replaced the survivor's visual memory as the means of confirming who her attacker had been.
But it was terribly different when a woman was assaulted by someone known to her-a friend, a coworker, a lover, or an ex-boyfriend. More than 80 percent of sexual assaults occurred between people who knew each other, so identification was not the issue at trial. Yet these victims were far more likely to have their credibility attacked in the courtroom.
Mercer was standing beside his witness, removing the lids on the cardboard coffee containers he had brought for each of us. "It's like Alex has been telling you all along, Paige. Robelon can only go one way in this case. He can't say it never happened and that you're making this whole thing up. The presence of Tripping's DNA makes that impossible."
"So it's that I consented? That I'm lying about this, right?"
I nodded my head.
"Will the jury already know that when I walk into the room and take the stand? I mean, does he just say that when he addresses them the first time?"
"I'm sure he'll plant that seed in their minds," I said. Robelon was a good lawyer and likely to be more subtle than most. I didn't think he would outright accuse Paige Vallis of being a liar. Rather, he would paint the jury a picture in very broad strokes, setting them up to believe that she had been hungry for this relationship, pursuing Andrew Tripping and unhappy when something went wrong during the night in question.
I hated this moment in the process. I hated being the person who had to deliver the victim into the hands of my adversary, in public view, to tell this story of trust and betrayal to a courtroom full of strangers. In the months since Paige reported the crime, I had struggled with Mercer to gain her confidence, to ask about intimacies that most people never discuss outside of their bedrooms. Now that I had gained that acceptance, I could not give her a victory without first exposing her to public humiliation and dissection.
"Will there be newspaper reporters at the trial?" she asked.
"I don't expect any. So far they haven't expressed interest in the case, and I can't imagine why that would change. Did you end up asking a friend to come with you? Anyone to sit in the courtroom for moral support?"