James Patterson: The 8th Confession

With the precisely inconvenient timing waiters around the world have perfected, a trio of young men grouped around our table, a small cake in hand, candles burning, and began singing “Happy Birthday” to Joe. Just as I had planned.

The song was picked up by other diners, and a lot of eyes turned on us. Joe smiled, blew out the candles.

Then he looked at me, love written all over his face. He said, “Don’t beg, Blondie. I’m not going to say what I wished for.”

Did I feel the fool for blighting our evening?

I did.

Did I know what to do about Joe’s wish and that diamond ring in its black velvet box?

I did not.

But I was pretty sure my indecision had nothing to do with Joe.

WE WOKE UP before dawn and made urgent love without speaking. Hair was pulled, lips were bitten, pillows were thrown on the floor.

The fierce lovemaking was true, heartfelt acknowledgment that we were stuck. That there was nothing either one of us could say that the other didn’t already know.

Our skin glistening in the afterglow, we lay together side by side, our hands gripped tightly together. The high-tech clock on the nightstand projected the time and outside temperature on the ceiling in large red digits.

Five fifteen a.m.

Fifty-two degrees.

Joe said, “I had a good dream. Everything is going to be okay.”

Was he assuring me? Or reassuring himself?

“What was the dream?”

“We were swimming together, naked, under a waterfall. Water. That’s sex, right?”

He released my hand. The mattress shifted. He shook out the blanket and covered my body.

I heard the shower running as I lay in the dark, feeling pent-up and tearful and unresolved. I dozed, waking to Joe’s hand touching my hair.

“I’m going now, Lindsay.”

I reached up and put my arms around his neck, and we kissed in the dark.

I said, “Have a good trip. Don’t forget to write.”

“I’ll call .”

It was all the wrong tone to let Joe leave on this cool note. The front door closed. The locks clicked into place.

I bolted out of bed.

I dressed in jeans and one of Joe’s sweaters, ran barefoot out into the hallway. I pressed the down button at the elevator station, one long push until the car made the climb back up to the eleventh floor and jumped open.

I despaired as the elevator dropped me slowly down. In my mind’s eye, Joe’s bags were in the trunk, the car moving now along Lake Street, picking up speed as it headed toward the airport.

But when the elevator finally released me into the lobby, I saw Joe through the glass front doors, standing beside a Lincoln sedan. I blew past the doorman and ran out into the street, calling Joe’s name.

He looked up and opened his arms, and I fell against him, pressed my face to his jacket, felt the tears slip out of my eyes.

“I love you so much, Joe.”

“I love you, too, Blondie.”

“Joe, when we were in that waterfall, was I wearing my ring?”

“Yeah. Big old sparkler. Could see it from the Moon.”

I laughed into his shoulder. We kissed and hugged, did it again, until the driver joked, “Save a little for later, okay?”

“I’d better go,” Joe said.

I stepped back reluctantly, and Joe got into the car.

I waved and Joe waved back as the black Lincoln took my lover away.

YUKI WAS IN HER OFFICE, one of the dozens of windowless, grubby warrens for assistant district attorneys in the Hall of Justice. She was prepped, primed, and in full court dress: a gray Anne Klein suit, ice-pink silk shirt, three-hundred-dollar shoes she’d gotten half off at Neiman.

It was half past six in the morning.

In about three hours she would be making her closing argument in the bloody awful and complex murder trial of Stacey Glenn, a twenty-five-year-old former pageant queen who’d managed to be both a beauty and a beast.

What Stacey Glenn had done to her parents was revolting, unprovoked, and unforgivable, and Yuki was determined to nail that psycho-bitch and send her away for good. But for all of Yuki’s determination and gifts for bringing the strongest argument to life, she was becoming famous around the DA’s office – famous for losing. And that was killing her.

So this was it.

If Stacey Glenn got off, as much as she’d hate to do it, Yuki would go back to civil law, handle rich people’s divorces and contract negotiations. That’s if she wasn’t fired before she could quit.

Yuki hunched forward in her creaky chair and shuffled a packet of index cards, each one highlighting a point she would make in summing up the People’s case.

Item: Stacey Glenn had left her apartment in Potrero Hill at two in the morning and driven her distinctive candy-apple-red Subaru Forester to her parents’ house forty miles away in Marin, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.

Item: Stacey Glenn entered her parents’ house between three and three fifteen a.m., using a key that was kept hidden under a particular heart-shaped stone by the front door. She went through the kitchen to the garage, brought a crowbar upstairs to the master bedroom, and bludgeoned her parents, beating both their heads in.

Item: A neighbor testified that around three that morning she saw a red Subaru Forester with off-road tires in the Glenns’ driveway and recognized it as belonging to Stacey.

Item: Leaving her parents for dead, Stacey Glenn drove toward her home, going through a tollbooth on her return trip at approximately four thirty-five.

This timeline was crucial to Yuki’s case because it established Stacey Glenn’s movements on the night in question and decimated her alibi that she was home alone and asleep when her parents were attacked.

Item: Stacey Glenn was a degenerate shopper, heavily in debt. Her parents were worth nothing to her alive. They were worth a million dollars to her dead.

Item: Stacey Glenn had the means, the motive, and the opportunity – and there was also a witness to the crime itself.

And that witness was 90 percent of Yuki’s case.

Yuki wrapped her cards with a rubber band, dropped the pack into her purse. Then she folded her hands under her chin and beamed her thoughts to her own mother, Keiko Castellano, who had died before her time and who was highly ticked off about it. Keiko had loved her only daughter fiercely, and Yuki felt her mom’s comforting presence around her now.

“Mommy, stay with me in court today and help me win, okay?” Yuki said out loud. “Sending kisses.”

With hours to kill, Yuki cleaned out her pencil drawer, emptied her trash can, deleted old files from her address book, and changed her too-sweet pink blouse to the stronger, more confident teal man-tailored shirt that was in dry cleaner’s plastic behind her door.

At eight fifteen, Yuki’s second chair, Nicky Gaines, ambled down the corridor calling her name. Yuki stuck her head out of her doorway, said, “Nicky, just make sure the PowerPoint works. That’s all you have to do.”

“I’m your man,” said Nicky.

“Good. Zip up your fly. Let’s go.”

YUKI STOOD UP from her seat at the prosecutors’ table as the Honorable Brendan Joseph Duffy entered the courtroom through a paneled door behind the bench and took his seat between the flags and in front of the great seal of the State of California.

Duffy had a runner’s build, graying hair, windowpane glasses worn low on the slope of his nose. He yanked out his iPod earbuds, popped the top on a can of Sprite, then, as those in attendance sat down, asked the bailiff to bring in the jury.

Across the aisle, Yuki’s opponent, the well-regarded criminal defense attorney Philip R. Hoffman, exchanged whispers with his client, Stacey Glenn.