Nothing But the Truth (9 page)

She almost laughed at the unexpected surprise. A house party down the street from the largest Baptist church in Dallas. What would the parishioners say if they knew? Would they proselytize to the partygoers or would they merely lament their quick descent to hell, while enjoying a burger at the food court under the church’s spacious dome? Ryan didn’t know the answer, but she did know discovery tonight would keep her from winning an election for anything.

When Ryan arrived at her destination, she pulled in behind the other cars waiting at the valet stand. Ryan wondered if the neighbors wondered why they weren’t invited to the party. Were they jealous not to be included in the assemblage of expensive cars and well dressed visitors? She shrugged away the question. These gatherings were carefully crafted to deflect attention from their real purpose. Ryan knew nothing about the elaborate details contrived to disguise each event. She didn’t want to know. Her ignorance kept her safe.

Once inside, she struggled to maintain her usual self-control. She would adhere to the rules, but she had dressed to attract. Tonight, she was determined to draw attention quickly. Tight designer jeans hugged her thighs before fanning out slightly over spike-heeled red leather lace up boots. Her snug black silk sweater accentuated her breasts. She moved through the partygoers. She was keyed up, and she attributed it to the caffeine from earlier. Flashes of Brett kept invading her thoughts. She pushed away the obvious conclusion that the edge she felt had anything to do with the conflicting emotions she experienced in Brett’s presence.

The solution to take the edge off approached her from behind.

“You have a delicious ass.”

The voice was honey smooth and the hands grazing her jeans teased her arousal. Ryan relished the attention for a moment before turning toward her admirer. The woman facing her was riveting. For the second time that day, Ryan was face-to-face with a beauty whose height allowed her to look her in the eye without having to tilt her head. Visions of the lengths of their naked bodies fully aligned, lying side by side, made Ryan wet.

The woman was dressed in white leather. A tight bodice, laced in front, pushed her breasts to full attention. Snug pants hugged slender hips and encased the woman’s very long legs. Ryan’s mind wandered to another tall drink of water, and she imagined Brett Logan standing before her, masterful in leather. She resisted the urge to smile at the image in her mind considering she had last seen Brett dressed in faded jeans, well-worn Nikes, and a University of Texas sweatshirt. She pushed away the tickling notion that Brett in her jeans was considerably sexier than the luscious leather clad brunette standing before her. She found her voice.

“I do? How can you tell?”

“My hands tell me everything I need to know. They are always right.”

“Your hands can taste?”

“All my senses rely on whatever my hands tell them. They’re always right.”

“They are, are they?” Her fantasies fought to come to life. She couldn’t have the woman she was thinking about, but she could have the one who was here for no other purpose than to please the guests of the house. Ryan may not break the rules of the house, but she was already breaking her personal code. Don’t flirt. No unnecessary conversation. Don’t beg. If she didn’t get to a room with this woman soon, that last tenet was in serious danger.

“Follow me?”

Ryan took the woman’s hand and followed.

Brett studied the woman in her office doorway. Her clothes hugged her body like a sausage. Her tight red curls were at odds with her olive skin. Her coral colored lipstick ran outside the lines and her blue eye shadow was a throwback to the eighties. She talked like a person hopped up on caffeine, and although she was petite, she managed to maneuver her body so that she blocked the person Brett really wanted to see.

Brett asked Mrs. Phillips to take a seat on the couch to the side of her desk, and she focused her attention on Kenneth. She placed his age at around twenty. He was rail thin. His clothes hung on his body like those of a hastily dressed scarecrow.

“Kenneth, before we get into the facts of why you are here, I need to let you know some ground rules.” He nodded. “I need you to be able to tell me everything about this case and I need to be able to ask you questions. Frank and personal questions about what you tell me.” Brett shot a look at Mrs. Phillips. She was perched on the edge of the sofa, barely sitting. Brett wanted her out of the room. “I am bound by law and the rules of my profession to keep everything you tell me confidential. However, in order for attorney-client privilege to apply, the information you share with me has to be shared in private.”

Kenneth nodded. His mother didn’t move. Brett wondered if she was talking into the wind. Time to be perfectly clear. “Mrs. Phillips, I’m happy to talk to the two of you together about the procedural aspects of this case, but I need to talk to Kenneth privately about the facts of the case itself.”

Clients liked the comfort of family and friends. Their presence fortified them for the things they planned to say and the admonitions they expected to hear. But Brett preferred these sessions be one-on-one. She would spend ample time explaining the nuts and bolts of the criminal justice system to both mother and son once she had the facts she needed to evaluate how much trouble her client faced. The presence of friends and family at this stage threw a wrench in the works. People didn’t like to confess, even to minor indiscretions, in front of their parents, spouses, or best friends. Their physical presence often equated to minimizing.

Mrs. Phillips didn’t budge, so Brett tried a more direct approach. She stood and walked toward her office door, motioning for Mrs. Phillips to follow her.

“I want to be here when you talk to my son.” Her tone was firm and resolute. Brett paused, searching for soft words in which to couch her dismissal of the woman.

“And I want you to be. When we start to talk about the many things you need to know in order to help your son through this process, but right now I need to talk to him alone.”

Kenneth pointed to his mother. “She knows everything.” He delivered the simple sentence with what seemed maximum effort. Since he had entered her office, Brett suspected the young man was hopped up on something. He was too skinny, for one thing. For another, his arms and legs jittered with the intensity of craving most junkies couldn’t keep hidden. His eyes darted all over the room, rarely settling on a single object for more than a few brief seconds.

“Everything?” Brett asked. Kenneth nodded. “Let me make sure I understand. Your mother told me you want to confess to a murder that you were directly involved in. Is there anything about the facts of that crime that you haven’t already shared with her?”

Kenneth shook his head from side to side. Brett held up her hand. “I need to you answer out loud.”

“She knows everything.”

Brett doubted Mrs. Phillips knew everything. She doubted any of them, Kenneth included, ever would. Motivation and remorse were components of criminal activity often discovered after exhaustive soul-searching. Her concern today though was the details of the murder itself, and her concern for confidentiality was moot if Kenneth had already spilled his guts to his mom. If that was the case and Kenneth consented to having her present, then Brett wasn’t going to put up a fuss. Especially since it didn’t seem like young Kenneth planned to do any talking without his mommy in the room. Brett made a mental note to explore the dynamic between the two when she could get Kenneth alone. In the meantime, she offered one last caveat to her potential client.

“If, during our discussion today, you think of anything you haven’t already told your mom, we’ll need to ask her to leave the room while you tell me. She can be compelled to testify about anything you tell her whether I’m present when you tell her or not. You only get to stand behind attorney-client confidentiality when the communication you have with me is made in private. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Your mom tells me this has something to do with the Ross Edwards case. Do you know Ross Edwards?”

“No.”

Brett quickly realized getting information out of Kenneth was going to be a slow and arduous process, which was no different than most clients. “Okay, why don’t you start talking? I’ll save my questions until you’re done.” Brett sat back in her chair and watched as Kenneth shifted in his seat. At first, she thought he was trying to gear up for the telling, but she was confused when he pulled a wadded up piece of paper from his back pocket and began smoothing it out on his lap.

“What’s that?” So much for saving my questions, she thought.

“He wrote down what he wants to tell you,” Mrs. Phillips answered.

Brett tried not to show her annoyance. She turned so she was facing Kenneth and directed her next question to him. “Have you shown what’s on that paper to anyone else?”

“Just me.”

Time to nip this in the bud. “Mrs. Phillips, I appreciate you being here with your son.” Brett paused to let her kind words sink in before she became forceful. “This process requires that Kenneth and I communicate directly. I have to be able to rely on whatever Kenneth tells me as being the truth according to him. The best way for that to happen is for me to hear whatever he has to say, spoken by him. Does that make sense?” Though the last question was clearly rhetorical, Mrs. Phillips nodded.

“I wrote it.” The sound of Kenneth’s voice was a welcome relief. He held up the paper. “Do you want me to read it to you?” Brett wanted no such thing. She wanted Kenneth to tell her about the murder. Something was off, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“Is that how you would like to tell me what you have to tell me?” In response to his nod, she said, “Why don’t we start that way?”

Brett watched Kenneth carefully as he read. His mother watched closely as well, hovering on the edge of the sofa as if hanging on his every word. His method of telling his story would work for now, but Brett planned to make it perfectly clear he had to be prepared to answer her questions if they were going to have any kind of long-term working relationship.

I was hanging out with my homeboy, John. We wanted to get some T-bars, but we didn’t have any money. John said he knew where we could do a lick. I thought we were going to a DART station, but he took us to a house over in Richardson. We climbed the fence and he jimmied the sliding glass door. When we got inside, John and I grabbed a laptop in the living room and John went to another part of the house. I heard a woman cry out and went to see what happened. John was standing over this lady. He said she came up on him, so he hit her in the head. She was just lying there, but she looked like she was breathing. I said we need to get out of here. We grabbed what we already had and ran. We took the stuff to John’s place.

The next day, John said he had gone back over there and the lady was still in the floor where we left her. I went back over there with him and we took some more stuff. She was dead. John had the idea to bury her. We didn’t want to get caught digging in the yard, so we pried up some floorboards and dug a grave under the house. We couldn’t get the floor to look right again, so John said we should set fire to the house. He said if we did, they would think she died in the fire and it would cover up any evidence that we’d been there. He found some lighter fluid in the garage and poured it around the house, lit it, and we took off. We pawned the stuff we took and bought some T-bars and weed.

When he finally lowered the papers, he looked shyly at Brett as if seeking approval. She struggled for an expression that would achieve balance between praise for the telling without endorsing the actions he had detailed. She had no idea if she pulled it off. She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake the stupid out of him. Instead, she launched into interrogation mode.

“I’m going to ask you a few details to fill in my notes.” She waited for his nod. “Did you have any idea anyone was in the house when you got there?”

He shook his head, but Brett wasn’t satisfied. He’d never make it through a police interview if he couldn’t even get the words out with her. “Out loud.”

“No.”

“Did either you or John have a weapon when you entered the house?”

“I didn’t. I don’t know about John. I don’t think so.”

“What did John use to hit the woman?”

“Some metal thing. Like a tool by the fireplace.”

“A poker?”

“I guess, yeah. He used it to pry up the floor too.”

Brilliant plan.
Brett didn’t speak the sarcastic comment, but she wanted to. Burglary of a home was bad enough, but to compound the offense by not only killing the homeowner, but burying her body and setting her house on fire was classic idiocy.

Kenneth’s mother interrupted her thoughts. “What happens next?”

“Well, we need to talk about that.” Brett took a breath and while she did, Mrs. Phillips jumped into the gap in discussion.

“When you take him in, will he go to jail right away? Will you get some kind of agreement with the prosecutor first?”

Brett formed a T with her hands. “Time out. You’re getting ahead of the game. I don’t take on capital murder cases.”

“Sure you do. You have a very good reputation for success.”

Brett wondered if Mrs. Phillips realized how relative success was in the arena of capital murder cases. “I used to. I don’t do that work anymore.”