Suspicion (2 page)

  He didn’t answer. And he didn’t relax his hold. Instead, he turned to the officer closest to him. "What the hell is this?" He had to shout to be heard. "What are those people doing here?"

  "They have a permit, Detective. It’s in order. I checked it myself."

  "A permit for what?"

  "Peaceful demonstration."

  "Peaceful, my ass. I want them out of here." He motioned to another policeman. "Now."

  The officers responded immediately, drawing their batons and gesturing for the crowd to step back. At first, the demonstrators resisted, but after a few minutes, the placards and the fists came down and they walked away.

  "May I have my arm back now, please?"

  As if he hadn’t realized he was still holding her, the

  detective glanced at Kate, then at her arm. "Sorry," he said, releasing her. The dark blue eyes moved quickly over her face, lingering longer than necessary on her mouth. "Are you all right?"

  "Of course I’m all right." She’d be damned if she was going to admit to him that, for a brief moment, she had been afraid. "They weren’t going to lynch me if that’s what you thought."

  "Maybe not, but I’ve seen too many such demonstrations turn sour to take a chance." He glanced at the dissipating crowd. "Where is your car?"

  "Across the street, and I can get there by myself," she said, anticipating his offer to walk with her. Not wanting to sound ungrateful-he had, after all, helped her through a potentially dangerous situation-she gave him a brief nod of her head. "Thanks for your help, Detective Calhoon. I suppose you’re right about crowds. One never knows which way they’ll turn."

  Then, signaling to Maria, who had been standing discreetly aside, she waited until her housekeeper had joined her before taking her arm and heading toward the parking lot.

  We, the jury, find the defendant, Antonio Fuente, guilty."

  Sitting at her desk in the plush office she had occupied since joining the law firm of Fairchild, Baxter and Rendell three years ago, Kate closed her eyes as the words she had hoped would never be spoken echoed in her head.

  The case had been doomed from the start. Everyone had told her so. Even Douglas Fairchild, who had known Tony even longer than she had, had warned her it would be a tough fight, perhaps a hopeless one.

  Her eyes, red from lack of sleep, focused on the open folder in front of her. It contained the closing arguments she had presented to the jury only yesterday. Believing in her client’s innocence, she had delivered her speech with all the passion and conviction she could muster. The jury, eight women and four men, had listened to every word, and for a while, Kate had dared to hope that the case wasn’t so hopeless after all.

  She couldn’t have been more wrong. After deliberating for less than twenty-four hours, the twelve jurors had returned a guilty verdict.

  Who could blame them? As Ted Rencheck had been only too glad to point out, the case was a slam dunk. Tony’s girlfriend, a law clerk at Fairchild Baxter, had been found smothered to death in her apartment. The only

  fingerprints the police had found there, besides Lilly’s, were those of her boyfriend, Tony Fuente.

  But it was the testimony of Lilly’s upstairs neighbor that had been the most damaging.

  Chuck Winslow was sixty-three years old and a retired school janitor. He and his wife of forty-one years lived one floor above the apartment Lilly Moore had occupied.

  On the night of the murder, Winslow had been on his way to the basement to empty his trash. As he’d reached the second floor, he’d heard shouts coming from Lilly’s apartment. One of the voices had belonged to Lilly, the other to a man. They were arguing, Winslow had claimed, and the man sounded very angry. Winslow had also heard Lilly call her visitor by name-Tony.

  By the time the ex-janitor had returned from the basement, all was quiet in apartment 2A and he hadn’t given the incident a second thought. It wasn’t until the following morning, when the police had come knocking at his door, that he learned of the tragedy that had occurred on the floor below.

  Although Tony had admitted to being in Lilly’s apartment that night, he had emphatically denied having quarreled with her. In fact, he said they had been talking about taking a vacation together after Lilly graduated from law school later on that month. When he left Lilly’s apartment-fifteen minutes before Chuck Winslow claimed to have heard him and Lilly argue-Tony was the happiest man on earth.

  At the time he was arrested, and through the entire trial, Tony had also maintained having seen a station wagon parked across the street. He wouldn’t have paid much attention to the car if it hadn’t been for the man behind the wheel-an unusually large man wearing a dark knit cap. who seemed to be dozing.

  Hoping to identify the mystery person, Kate had distributed a rough sketch throughout the neighborhood, but no one fitting that description, or that of the car, had been seen in the vicinity.

  In the end, the jury hadn’t believed Tony. It didn’t matter to them that he adored Lilly, that he had turned his life around and was putting himself through college by working long hours as a bartender. Only two things had mattered: Antonio Fuente had once belonged to a gang and he had a hot Latin temper-a point the prosecution had reiterated continually.

  Feeling restless, Kate stood up. As she did, she caught her reflection in the small antique mirror directly across from her desk. God, she looked awful, she thought, running her fingers through her shaggy red hair and wishing she had never cut it. After she’d left her husband, Eric Logan, a year ago, she had felt an overwhelming need for change, for self-renewal. At the time, chopping off the rich, fiery mane Eric had loved so much had seemed like an important step toward that goal. Thank God it was beginning to grow back, but until it was restored to its original shape and length, she would have to make the best of what was there.

  Peering into the mirror, she studied her features a little more closely. She looked tired. Tears shed in the car as she had driven Maria home had washed away most of her makeup, and her green eyes, usually so bright, now looked dull and weary. Even her mouth had a sad, downward slant to it. Tony’s trial had taken its toll on her. Just as it had on Maria.

  With a sigh, she moved to the window overlooking the Capitol. Just beyond it was the Mall, the vast, grassy, gravel-pathed pedestrian strip that stretched for several blocks, all the way to the Washington Monument.

  Kate never tired of the view, of the huge crowds that mobbed the area every day, of the grandeur of the monuments. Even now, with the trees barren and the skies a pewter shade of gray, there was a symbolic beauty to this city that was breathtaking.

  She had fallen in love with the nation’s capital the moment she had set foot in it eighteen years ago. She had been a freshman at Georgetown University then, a wide eyed country girl full of dreams and ideals.

  The daughter of two Iowa schoolteachers, she had never wanted to be anything but a lawyer. But rather than seek employment in one of the capital’s many law firms after her graduation from law school, she had accepted a position with the U.S. attorney’s office.

  "I want to make a difference," she had told her father, by then a widower. "I want to truly serve the people. And to do that, I need to prosecute criminals, not defend them."

  Her father had understood. But not Eric Logan, whom she had married during her first year of law school. A marketing assistant at Hollbrook Industries, Eric couldn’t understand why, after all the time and money she had invested in her education, she had settled for such a menial job.

  After a while, Kate gave up trying to explain it to him. Too late she realized that he had married her not because he loved her, but because he thought that as an attorney, she would be able to provide him with the kind of luxuries he regarded as essential.

  "Living in style," as Eric called it, was the reason he had insisted they live in his stepfather’s luxurious home in Potomac, Maryland, where he had spent the past several years, rather than in Kate’s modest Bethesda apartment.

  At first, Kate didn’t see any harm in it. Rose and Douglas Fairchild had welcomed her with open arms, and the house was certainly big enough to give the newlyweds all the privacy they needed. But when Alison was born a year later, Kate began to wonder if being raised in such luxury would give the child a false sense of values.

  When Kate suggested to Eric that they start looking for a place of their own, he was so adamantly opposed to the idea that she quickly dropped it-for the sake of family harmony-and never brought up the subject again.

  Three years ago, following a complex murder case Kate had brilliantly prosecuted, Douglas, who had tried to lure her to his firm before, made her another offer-a six figure salary and a junior partnership in Fairchild Baxter.

  Her initial reaction was to say no, as she had previously. She still felt the justice system was unfair, that it leaned too heavily in favor of the defendant, especially if the latter happened to be wealthy.

  Knowing that, and knowing that an office with a view and a handsome salary wasn’t enough to sway her, Douglas had laid his trump card on the table. Along with the high-profile clients Kate would be expected to represent, she would also be able to take on cases that were important to her, cases the firm might otherwise reject.

  After a great deal of consideration, she agreed to give Douglas’s offer a try, partly because she was fond of him and hated to disappoint him again and partly because she hoped, foolishly, that the huge increase in salary would save her marriage.

  But while her decision to leave the U.S. attorney’s office proved highly successful career wise, it did little to improve the situation between her and Eric. Disillusioned with his lack of advancement at Hollbrook Industries, Eric had begun to go out at night, sometimes until late. Although he emphatically denied it, Kate was certain he was seeing other women.

  It wasn’t until last December, when she caught him having lunch in an out-of-the-way restaurant with a stunning nineteen-year-old, that she decided she’d had enough. Indifferent to Eric’s claim that the girl meant nothing to him, that he loved Kate and didn’t want to lose her, she packed her and Alison’s belongings, moved out of the Fairchilds’ house and filed for divorce.

  Life as a single mom hadn’t been easy, especially with a daughter who held her solely responsible for the breakup of their family. But somehow they had survived the first year. And at times, that’s exactly what it felt like-survival.

  "How did it go, Kate?"

  At the sound of her ex-father-in-law’s voice, Kate turned around and met Douglas Fairchild’s concerned gaze. In his early sixties, he was a short, round man with thinning gray hair and pale blue eyes that seldom showed any kind of emotion-a characteristic that had served him well in the courtroom. He came from a long, illustrious line of Washington attorneys and had inherited the sixty-year-old firm from his father, a former Supreme Court judge.

  Kate sighed, walked back to her desk and sat down. "They found him guilty."

  "I see." Unbuttoning his impeccably tailored brown jacket, Douglas lowered his chubby frame into a chair facing Kate’s desk. Although his face was grim, she knew he wasn’t surprised at the verdict. "How did Maria take it?"

  "Badly. One of the jurors was close to tears and couldn’t bear to look at her."

  "Did you poll them?"

  Kate nodded. "They all stuck to their verdict."

  Douglas gave a troubled shake of his head. "I feel terrible about this. Maria and Tony are like family to me."

  It was true. Prior to working for Kate, Maria had been in the Fairchilds’ employ for nineteen years. When Kate had divorced Eric and moved out of the Fairchilds’ mansion, it was Douglas who had suggested that Maria go with Kate so Alison, then twelve years old, would have someone she knew and loved to look after her when Kate was at work.

  "He didn’t do it, Douglas," Kate said with the same earnestness she had demonstrated in the courtroom. "I’ve never been so sure of a man’s innocence as I am of Tony’s. They convicted the wrong man."

  Douglas’s eyes locked with hers. "Are you absolutely sure of that?"

  Kate stiffened. "Are you saying you aren’t? That you think Tony lied to us?"

  Douglas sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Frankly, Kate, I don’t know what to think anymore. Since hearing Chuck Winslow’s testimony last week-"

  "The man lied! Someone got to him and offered him a lot of money in exchange for that phony testimony. I’d stake my life on it."

  "If that was the case, we would have already seen signs of his windfall-an occasional dinner out perhaps, or some new clothes for his wife. But you told me yourself that his lifestyle hasn’t changed one bit since the murder. He and his wife never go out, they don’t entertain and they still ride around in that battered old pickup truck."

  "He’s being cautious, that’s all," Kate said stubbornly. "I’m sure whoever bought his testimony warned him about not flaunting the money."

  Douglas looked skeptical. "I don’t know, Kate. I was there the day Winslow testified, remember? He didn’t sound like a man who was lying. In fact, I thought he made a very credible witness. Even under your cross examination-and you were tough on him, Kate-he never faltered."

  Kate leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers. She had always had a great deal of respect for Douglas, but there were times when she couldn’t quite figure him out. Maybe he had been defending the rich and mighty too long. He had become jaded, almost cynical.

  Well, no matter what he or anyone else said, she would never believe Tony killed Lilly-not even in a moment of passion. Right now, however, she was too damned tired to argue about it.