John Lescroart - The 13th Juror

She nodded. "But if I admitted that, especially with what happened with Ned, no jury would believe I didn't kill Larry, too."

This was the issue. Jennifer had killed Ned because he beat her. Larry, too, had beaten her, and she was contending, insisting, that she had not killed him.

"I had to lie," she said. "Once it came out that they both hit me…"

"What's to make me think you're not lying now?"

"I'm not lying now. I'm telling you."

"All you're doing is telling me another version. Whatever flies this week."

"Diz." Freeman put a hand on his sleeve. "Please. Look at it strategically. She's free on Ned. We're halfway there. She certainly didn't kill her own boy. Accident or not. She wasn't any part of that. I think you and I both believe that."

"I don't know what I believe anymore, David."

Jennifer put her hand on his other arm. "I did what I did with Ned almost ten years ago." She was talking quietly, almost whispering, not trying to look at him to persuade with her eyes, which he took as a good sign. "If I had a choice, as you say I did, well then at least you should believe that I didn't think I had a choice. I was scared for my own life and I didn't know what to do – I thought there was no other way out."

"With Larry, it hadn't gotten to that yet. Maybe it would have, I don't know. I wanted to think not. It's why I started seeing Ken Lightner, trying to make the family work. I'm screwed up, I admit, I bring things on myself. Even Ken tells me I'm too much a victim. I was trying to change… And then somebody… somebody kills Larry, and my son, and out of the blue I'm arrested for it. And suddenly I'm supposed to trust my whole life to two men who I didn't even know six months ago? No way. Men haven't been so good to me, you might have noticed, so I made my own plan and stuck with it."

Hardy crossed his arms. "I did notice one other thing, though. You managed to tell David here the truth."

Freeman cut in. "I sandbagged her, Diz. That's how I work. It came out."

"And you didn't tell me."

"That was my decision, not hers. Okay, it was a mistake on my part, bad judgment. I should have included you, but I didn't think you'd need to know until the penalty phase, if then."

"Need to know, huh?" It had become dark outside through the guardroom window. Friday night. The weekend lay ahead, with time to decide what he was going to do. Hardy let out a long breath. He turned to Jennifer. "If you have any other secrets, Jennifer, now would be a good time to talk about them."

But the veil had come down again, her passion spent. "Just find out who killed my baby, would you? Can you do that?"

He didn't know what he was doing, driving in the morning rain out California to Miz Carter's, then changing his mind, turning down through Golden Gate Park, avoiding the tree limbs that littered Kennedy Drive, knocked down by the force of the storm. He didn't really know where he was going. Maybe his brain had shut down from lack of sleep.

It all had come down to whether he believed her. This time. Even though he knew she had lied to him – about damn near everything – from the beginning. Could he still believe her?

He thought he did. That was what had kept him awake, tossing next to Frannie until the cloud's gray became visible out their bedroom window.

He had told Frannie that Jennifer's story was flawed, but the truth was that he found it credible. He'd been around and around on it, and every time it came up more logically sound.

Jennifer had to kill Ned. From her perspective, it was pure self-defense. She truly believed he was going to kill her, and why wouldn't she?

She'd tried to run away and he'd tracked her down. Then she'd told him she was going to leave and he'd beaten her almost to death, violated her with the blunt end of a kitchen knife, killed her cat as an obvious, classic threat, and threatened her with her own death if she did anything to stop the rampage.

He had read everything Lightner had given him, plus twenty or thirty other articles and briefs on the subject. Battered women did not feel like they could get away. They were forever trapped in a situation from which they could literally neither run nor hide, and which would someday, in all probability, kill them.

Hardy believed Freeman could prove that Jennifer taking Ned's life had been justifiable, a sometimes valid form of self-defense that the courts had begun to recognize. Even with Judge Villars, even with the legislature failing to pass a law codifying BWS as a defense. Hardy was fairly confident they could get Jennifer off. Certainly, as he had pointed out, no jury in the State of California would call for the death penalty.

Jennifer was not stupid. She knew that if she agreed to assert the battered-woman syndrome, then her life, at least, would be removed from the equation – it would no longer be a capital case.

So the recurring question was: Why wouldn't she plead to it? Her reason was that it implied a defense against guilt, and she said she had no reason for a defense against something she hadn't done.

And she could not very well plead to one murder and not the other. No one would believe her. Powell would laugh at it. A jury would be insulted. No judge would be sympathetic. Yet Hardy found himself believing it. Jennifer Witt did not kill her son, she had not been there when he had been killed, she had known nothing about it. Matt rang true, and if he bought that – which was not at all the same as believing a jury would buy it – then working backward, all the other apparent duplicity made a perverse kind of sense.

She could not admit to any similarities, especially in so far as battery, between her lives with Ned and with Larry, especially once they'd gotten as far as trial.

There was no evidence that she had been beaten, and if they admitted at trial that she had been, in the jury's mind that would only make it more likely that she had killed both of her husbands. So her position had to be that no one had ever abused her. It was the only story that worked… And of course, truthful or not, David Freeman the lawyer gobbled it up and made it his own.

There was a pause in the downpour. Hardy was wearing tennis shoes, jeans and a green waterproof jacket. He got out of the car, and from where he stood, near the top of Olympia up the block from Jennifer's house, he could see a band of blue widening at the horizon. Even this early in the morning, and it was before seven, the air was strangely humid and heavy, laden with the smell of eucalyptus.

He didn't know why he had driven out here, or what, if anything, he expected to find or accomplish. Light-headed, he walked from his car up past the Witt house to the edge of the grove surrounding Twin Peaks, leading up to Sutro Tower, the source of the eucalyptus scent. A mother deer and her two fawns were rooting through the foliage there, fifty or sixty feet back into the trees.

The deer bolted, startled, disappearing into the woods. In the deep shade, Hardy blinked his stinging eyes, trying to clear his vision, stunned to see Jennifer Witt in a bright blue jogging outfit break from the cover of the trees and run toward him on the trail, then past him – no, close up it wasn't, of course, her – out to the street, where whoever it was turned down Olympia.

As he stood there, drizzle began to fall again and he ran, following her footsteps, around the corner and down the long block to his car. The woman, jogging faster than Hardy could sprint, had turned downhill on Clarendon.

The car spun on the wet pavement, then straightened. Hardy took the corner at Olympia and hydroplaned again, his wheels this time bouncing off the concrete corner-divider before he got the car under control again.