Lisa Scottoline - Moment Of Truth

Paige laughed. 'No way. You have to stand for hours and they don't treat you that well.'

'How so? I would think models get the star treatment, especially if they have a manager there.' Mary was choosing her words with care, and Judy shot her a warning glance.

'No way.' Paige nodded, not completely happily. 'Sometimes my mother would see things I should have done better, like if my hands looked stupid. I don't always know what to do with my hands.' She fell suddenly quiet and just as Mary was about to follow up, Judy interrupted.

'But Paige, I always thought the photographer could make you look better,' she said, and Mary knew it wasn't coincidental. Judy was the only person less interested in the modeling profession than Mary.

'No. They tell you how to stand, and that's it,' Paige answered, unaware of the tug-of-war over her. 'The girl has to do it.'

Mary yanked back. 'Who are some of the photographers you use, like for the Bonner shoot? I'm thinking about getting my photo taken for work. You know, tough woman lawyer in front of a row of law books.'

Judy snorted, and Paige set down her juice. 'Caleb Scott shot Bonner, but I wouldn't use him. He's a jerk. Most of the time, like for all the catalog work, we use Vivi Price. She has her own studio in New York. Ever hear of her? She used to be an assistant for Demarchelier.'

Mary made a mental note. Trevor must like having a girlfriend who's a professional model,' she said, pushing it.

'Trevor? Yeah. He's cool with it.' Paige checked her watch, a silver Rolex that hung loose as a bracelet on her knobby wrist. 'Well, I gotta go. I'm gonna meet him for a late lunch. He doesn't have any classes until three, and they have open campus.'

'Where does he go to school?'

'Downtown, at Philadelphia Select. He's going to Princeton next year. He's really smart.' Paige's smile turned professional. 'I should get ready or I'm gonna be late. It takes me forever to get ready.'

'Where are you meeting him? Maybe we can drop you off.'

'No. I can get a cab. It's just at the Four Seasons. Thanks, anyway.'

'Okay.' Mary touched Judy's arm. 'We'd better get moving then, lady,' she said, and tried not to sound too eager. She'd have to hurry to do what she needed.

Mary powered down the sidewalk, hailing cabs as she walked, with no luck. It was so cold that spittle froze on the concrete sidewalk. The trees were dark hands reaching to a stark blue sky. Still she loved Philly in winter. 'Don't you wonder about what Paige just said?'

'You're outta your mind.' Judy hurried along to keep pace, hauling a heavy brown briefcase, the accordion type that law professors carried. 'What is it with you and Paige? Why don't you like her?'

'I think she's selfish. Did you see, she didn't offer us any orange juice, and she barely said thanks. These things matter.'

'No, they don't.' Judy's mouth flattened to a hyphen, giving a sharp edge to her voice. 'Bad manners aren't against the law.'

They're telling details.'

Telling what? We're supposed to be preparing a defense, and this case isn't about her. It's about her father.'

'Well, I think he's innocent, so I have to investigate other possibilities.' Mary shivered in her cloth trench coat as she tried to hail a cab. She and Judy never argued. It suddenly felt very cold. 'Right?'

'Wrong. She's off the point.' Judy's eyes became skeptical slits of blue and she stopped in mid-sidewalk, against a backdrop of colonial town houses. The soft melon color of their brick and the bubbles in their mullioned windows testified to their authenticity. 'We still have no reason to think Newlin is innocent, or that she did it.'

'I told you about the fight Paige had with her mother, in the dressing room.' Mary faced her best friend on the street. 'I bet it wasn't the first time they fought that way.'

'That's not enough. Everybody fights with their mother sometimes, probably more often in dressing rooms than anyplace else. They don't just up and kill them.'

'Paige just said she wished her father could come to the funeral. If you thought your dad had stabbed your mom to death, would you want him at her funeral?'

Judy sniffed. Her upturned nose was red at the tip, from the chill. 'No.'

'And aren't you hearing Paige has a lot more sympathy for dad, who tells us he's the bad guy, than for mom, who got killed? I mean, if Paige had killed her mother and was letting her father take the rap, she'd feel guilty, wouldn't she? I can't be the only guilty person in the world.'

Judy blinked. 'Okay, I admit it, it does seem odd.'

'So, to support my theory about Jack covering for Paige, we have to understand a lot about this family in a very short time, and we need to know how they related. We need to reconstruct the events leading up to the murder, to put it in context. Make sense?'

'I guess.'

Mary suppressed her surprise. Had she won? Was it that easy? 'So you agree with me? You think I'm right?'

'I think you could be.'

'Are you sure? I mean, I'm usually not.'

Judy laughed. 'This time you are. You're growing up, right before my eyes. What do you want to do next, boss? It's your case.'

Mary thought a minute, suddenly giddy. 'Okay, you go back to the office and find precedent for the preliminary hearing. I was going to follow my lead.'

'Your "lead"?' Judy smiled. 'You're a lawyer, not a cop.'

'Don't question me, I'm the boss!' An empty Yellow cab whizzed by and Mary waved frantically. 'Yo, wait!

Stop!'

'Mare!' Judy called after her. 'Where are you going?' 'Catch me if you can!' she shouted, running after the

cab, and Judy shot off after her, laughing.

Brinkley stood beside the stainless steel table with Kovich and Dwight Davis as the autopsy began. Brinkley kept a lid on his testiness at Davis and his distaste at the procedure by listening to the piano music coming from the CD player on the shelf. Hamburg always played Chopin's Nocturnes, and though Brinkley didn't listen to classical music, he appreciated it. The sweet notes of the piano made incongruous background music for the coroner's dictation, into a black orb of a microphone that hung from a wire like a spider on a web.

This is the case of Honor Buxton Newlin, a forty-five-year-old female,' Hamburg began. He was wearing blue pressed scrubs under an immaculate white jacket.

The body of Honor Newlin lay naked on the steel table, her eyes closed and her chest sliced cruelly with the wounds that had killed her. Brinkley tried not to look, in some sense protecting her modesty, and Hamburg evinced a similar respect for the body. His tone was almost rabbinical as he recited her height, weight, sex, age, and eye and hair color into the microphone.

'On January twelfth, the subject was brought to the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's office…'

They were only at the beginning of the autopsy; Hamburg had just cut away the woman's clothes, the first step of the external examination. The inspection of her blouse had taken a while, since Hamburg had been so systematic, matching each stab wound to each tear in the white silk and squaring up the bloodstains. The D.A., the detectives, and the medical examiner had pored over the clothes and pink shoe with the torn strap, but Brinkley could draw no

new conclusions about the shoe and Davis thought it didn't mean anything.

'Head: The head is normal. There is no evidence of trauma to the head. The scalp hair is…'

Brinkley was bumped slightly by Davis, edging him into the green steel cabinets lining the morgue. The area reserved for autopsies was cramped, dominated by a lineup of steel tables with drains in the middle and a deep sink under the head. No other autopsies were being performed, which Brinkley counted as a godsend. He found himself looking away while Hamburg swabbed the dried blood from Honor Newlin's wounds, to the achingly beautiful strains of the solitary piano.