M.J. Rodgers - For The Defense

“A woman who owned a small diner down the street from the high school gave me a job as a waitress and let me sleep in her storage room,” Connie said. “The next few months were very hard. But once my Amy was born, I knew nothing else mattered. She was my sweet baby, my total joy.”

He could hear that joy in Connie’s voice, see it flooding her face as the memories of her child filled her.

“Amy was the happiest, most loving child. She was the reason I got up every morning and said prayers of gratitude every night. I worked in a day-care center so I could keep her with me. When she got close to school age, I applied to be a teacher’s aide. Only then my baby…my baby…”

Connie’s head dropped as her voice faltered. She stared down at her lap as her hand clutched his.

Jack would have sworn he was immune to dramatic pauses, but he wasn’t immune to this one. Connie didn’t know how to simply relate facts. She emitted the complete range of her emotions in full and living color. He now understood why Diana had wanted him to hear the story from her client. No one else could tell it like this.

“What happened to her?” he asked quietly.

“It was Amy’s fourth birthday. I was in the kitchen baking her cake. She was playing on the screened-in front porch. I heard a car, and it seemed much too close. I looked up to see this old car jump the curb and smash through our fence. It plowed into the porch, then sped away. I ran outside to look for Amy and I found her under the wreckage. She was dead.”

Tears poured down Connie’s cheeks, large glistening drops of pure grief. Jack had no handkerchief or tissue to offer her. He leaned over and gently rubbed the tears away with his thumbs.

“Did they find the driver?” he asked after a moment.

She tried to speak, but her words were choked by sobs. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Diana answer him with a shake of her head.

Connie wept for several more minutes before resuming her story. Her voice was whispered pain. “I wanted to die. I tried to. But Amy kept coming to me in my dreams. She told me she’d be too sad if I died. I enrolled in night school and earned a teaching credential. They offered me a job teaching third grade. I told them I wanted to teach kindergarten instead.”

“So you could be around children Amy’s age,” he guessed.

She nodded. “Sometimes when they smiled, I saw Amy in their eyes.”

Jack let a moment pass before he asked, “When did you meet Bruce Weaton?”

“Over a year ago. Amy had been gone almost four years by then.”

“How did you meet him?”

“I worked late one day setting up a classroom exhibit. When I walked out to the parking lot, I saw that one of my tires had gone flat. Everyone else had gone home. I didn’t have a phone to call for assistance. I was trying to figure out how to put on the spare when Bruce came by in his car. He changed the flat for me. Afterward, he invited me out for coffee.”

“You had coffee with him?”

“Oh, no. He was very handsome and drove a Mercedes. I was certain he was only being kind.”

“But you did see him again?” Jack prompted.

“About a week later. I bumped into him while we were both standing in line for popcorn at the movie theater in the mall. He’d come to see some war movie. I was there to see a Disney adventure my class was talking about. I was so surprised when he asked if he could sit with me and watch the kids’ movie.”

“And after the show?”

“He bought me an ice-cream cone from a concession in the mall. We talked until closing. He kept asking me about myself and seemed really interested in what I told him. When he walked me to my car, he invited me to dinner the next evening.”

Jack listened to the amazement in Connie’s voice as she described her growing relationship with Bruce. Everywhere they went over the next few months, women gave the good-looking Bruce the eye. But he gave all his attention to her.

Bruce told Connie about his father, Philip, and his brother, Lyle, both of whom were partners with him in a very successful real estate firm. He explained that his mother, Barbara, was a prominent judge. Connie had a hard time believing that this perfect man from a perfect family was interested in her.

After they’d been dating for three months, she finally got up the courage to ask Bruce what he saw in her. To her total amazement, he asked her to marry him.

“What did you say, Connie?”

“I didn’t know what to say. He’d been pressing me for weeks for…a more intimate relationship. I’d told him that after Jimmy, I didn’t want to be physically intimate with a man again unless I was married. Now he was asking me to marry him. When I told him I wasn’t sure, he agreed to give me more time.”

At a barbecue the following Sunday, Bruce’s seven-year-old nephew had dragged Connie into Bruce’s garage to show her the new bike his uncle had bought him for his birthday. As he swung his leg over the bike’s seat, the boy’s foot caught on the edge of a drop cloth. When Connie had pulled the drop cloth from the boy’s foot, she saw a tiny gold locket and chain in the corner. A distinctive blue rose was on the front of the locket.

“I picked up the locket, opened it,” Connie said, her voice suddenly nothing but a quivering breath. “I found Amy’s picture inside. She was wearing the locket the day the car hit the porch.”

Connie lifted her eyes to Jack’s. “Bruce had been so sweet to me. He’d asked me to marry him. I couldn’t believe he was the man who’d driven the car that had killed my baby.”

Jack held firmly onto her hand. “What did you do?”

“All I could think about was getting away. I ran from the garage and got into my car. I started the engine and backed into the street.”

“Did you see Bruce?”

Connie nodded. “When I put the car in drive and stepped on the gas, Bruce ran into the street and waved his arms, trying to get me to stop.”

“Did you try to stop?”

Connie’s chin dropped to her chest. “I tried to steer around him, but I was crying, and I couldn’t see him anymore. All I could see was Amy.”

“Connie, did you want to kill Bruce?” Jack asked.

“No. I only wanted to get away from him.”

Jack gently lifted Connie’s chin with his fingertips. The pain on her face bore witness to the truth of her words.

DIANA ACCEPTED Jack’s suggestion to talk about the case over lunch. Normally, she ate at her desk, unwilling to accept the long lines that were inevitable at good restaurants. But talking with him while grabbing a bite would actually be a more efficient use of their time.

Still, she felt uneasy.

She’d worked closely with both Richard and David Knight on cases, even shared an occasional meal with Richard without a moment’s unease. Jack’s brothers were also very good-looking, but she felt different around Jack, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on why.

It probably had something to do with watching him work his magic on Connie. That had been damn scary. Jack knew how to get a woman to talk to him and to trust him with effortless charm. She had no doubt that he could probably make a woman believe anything he said.

How could a woman ever know when he was being sincere?

Diana led the way to a favorite restaurant not far from her office. They got a great table on the second-story terrace that overlooked the street below. The day was dull, as most days in Western Washington were. In the distance the snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains wore dark lumpy hats of cumulus clouds.

But the early summer temperature was mild and the air tasted sweet, reminding Diana that people whose jobs chained them to desks all day needed to get out for a little natural light and fresh air once in a while.