James Patterson - 7th Heaven

Right about then, I stopped listening and just watched body language. Joe, directing everything to Conklin, coming on a little too strong. Conklin, deferring without being deferential. I was so attached to them both, I turned my head from one to another as if I were courtside at Wimbledon.

Blue eyes. Brown eyes. My lover. My partner.

I pushed my eggs to the side of my plate.

For probably the first time in my life, I had nothing to say.

YUKI SAT AT the prosecution table between Nicky Gaines and Len Parisi, waiting for court to convene. It was Friday. The jurors had deliberated for three days, and word had come down late last night that they’d arrived at their verdict. Yuki wondered if the jurors had rushed their decision so they could have a weekend free of responsibility and tension. And if so, would that be good or bad for the People?

She felt overcaffeinated because she was. She’d been swigging coffee since six this morning and hadn’t slept more than two hours the night before.

“You okay?” she asked her second chair. Nicky was breathing through his mouth, the odor of VapoRub coming off him in waves.

“I’m good,” he said. “You?”

“Peachy.”

To Yuki’s right, Red Dog was writing a memo on a legal pad. He appeared blasé, carefree, a mountain of calm. It was an act. In fact, Parisi was a volcano resting between explosions. Across the aisle, L. Diana Davis looked fresh, powdered, and coiffed. She put a mothering arm around her client’s frail shoulders.

And then, at nine on the dot, the bailiff, a sinewy man in a green uniform, called out, “All rise.” Yuki stood, then sat back down as the judge took the bench. Nicky coughed into his handkerchief. Parisi capped his pen and put it in his breast pocket. Yuki clasped her hands in front of her, swung her head to the right as the door to the jury room opened and the jurors entered the courtroom.

The twelve men and women were wearing church clothes today, hair combed and sprayed into place, men in jacket and tie, the women sparkling with jewelry.

The foreperson, a woman named Maria Martinez, was about thirty, Yuki’s age, a sociology teacher and mother of two. Yuki couldn’t see Martinez coming out in favor of a prostitute who would let a boy die, then cover up the fact with a body dump.

Martinez put her handbag on the floor next to her chair.

Yuki felt a prickling sensation on the back of her neck and her arms as Judge Bendinger opened his laptop, made a joke to the court reporter that Yuki couldn’t hear. Then he swiveled his chair face-forward and said, “Order, please.”

The room quieted, and Bendinger asked if the jury had a verdict.

Martinez said, “We do, Your Honor.”

The verdict form moved from Martinez to the judge and back again to Martinez. Nicky Gaines coughed again, and Parisi reached behind Yuki and flicked Gaines on the back of his head, frowned a rebuke.

“Will the foreman please read the verdict?” Bendinger asked. Martinez stood, looking small in her charcoal-gray suit. She cleared her throat.

“We, the jury, find the defendant, Junie Moon, not guilty in the charge of murder in the second degree.

“We find the defendant, Junie Moon, not guilty in the charge of tampering with evidence…”

The packed courtroom erupted in loud exclamations punctuated by the sharp slams of Bendinger’s gavel.

“What did she say? What did she say?” Gaines asked Yuki, even as the judge thanked the jury and dismissed them.

Yuki felt sick, physically ill. She’d lost . She’d lost, and she’d let everyone down – the police, the DA’s office, the Campions, and even Michael. Her job and her passion had been to get justice for the dead boy, and she’d failed.

“I shouldn’t be doing this kind of work,” Yuki said to herself. She stood abruptly.

Without speaking to Parisi or Gaines, she turned around and said to the Campions, “I’m very sorry.”

Lowering her eyes, Yuki pushed her way into the crowded aisle and left the courtroom.

YUKI SAW TWILLY RISE from his seat in the gallery and move to follow her out of the courtroom and into the hallway, that bastard . She worked her way through the knots of people in the corridor, shoved open the door to the ladies’ room, found an empty stall, and locked it. She sat with her head in her hands for long minutes, then went to a sink, washed her face, and slipped on her sunglasses.

Once back in the hallway, she headed for the fire exit, heart still knocking inside her chest as she walked quickly down the staircase, her mind circling the verdict, still shocked that the jury had found Junie Moon not guilty. The public would go berserk when they learned that Junie Moon was going to get out of jail free. They’d blame the verdict on her , and they’d be right to do it.

It was her case and she’d lost.

Yuki opened the door into the lobby and, with her head down, walked out of the gray cubical building into the equally gray morning. Len Parisi was on the top step of the courthouse, standing like a red-haired sequoia inside a clump of journalists who were reaching their mics and cameras forward, shouting questions.

She saw star TV reporters, Anderson Cooper and Rita Cosby, Diane Dimond and Beth Karas. Cameras rolled as Parisi told the press whatever politically correct blah-di-blah a public servant with a coronary in his history and probably another one in his future would say.

Fifty feet away from Parisi, three steps down, Maria Martinez and several of the jurors were also surrounded by reporters.

Yuki heard Martinez say, “We were overwhelmed with reasonable doubt.” And then the video cameras shifted as L. Diana Davis exited the big steel-and-glass double doors with her arm still sheltering Junie Moon.

Yuki ran down the remaining steps to the street. She saw Connor Campion and his wife at the curb, Campion’s driver holding open the door to a Lincoln sedan. Jason Twilly was standing beside Campion, the two men deep in conversation as Yuki passed.

Yuki crossed Bryant against the light, eyes focused on the All Day parking lot, glad to be invisible in the morning crush of pedestrians, especially relieved that Twilly was busy with a bigger fish than she. Keys in hand, she found her Acura toward the back of the lot.

She heard someone call her name. She turned with a scowl, saw that Jason Twilly was coming toward her, his dark jacket flying open like the wings of a vulture.

“Yuki! Hang on.”

Jason Twilly was following her again!

YUKI JAMMED THE CAR KEY into the key slot, heard the soft thwick as the locks opened.

“Yuki, wait.”

She turned again, one hand clutching the strap of her handbag, the other clenched around the handle of her briefcase.

“I’ve got nothing to say to you, Jason. Go away .”

Twilly scowled, his expression murderous, the look of a man who could go violently out of control.

“You listen to me , little girl,” Twilly said. “Be glad that you lost , because Junie Moon didn’t kill Michael Campion. But I know who did .”

What? What had he said?

“ Look at me, Yuki. Look at me . Maybe it was me .”

Yuki got behind the wheel and yanked the door shut in Twilly’s face. Twilly bent down, rapped on her window, bap-bap-bap , losing it, desperate, yelling through the glass, “ We’ve got unfinished business, Yuki. Don’t drive away !”

Yuki threw the car into gear, jammed down the accelerator, and with tires squealing, she left the lot. She called Lindsay from the car, her voice shrill over the sound of traffic.