The Last Plea Bargain (2 page)

1

For the fourth straight day, I walked through the winding corridors of Piedmont Hospital, heels clicking on the tile floor. I had grown accustomed to the smell of antiseptics and the slow, lumbering elevators that carried me to the third floor. Outside my father's room, I squirted some disinfectant on my hands, just as I had done a few minutes earlier when I first entered the hospital. It had become something of a ritual.

There was no nurse in my father's room, no sign of anything that resembled life.

My name is Jamie Brock. Assistant DA for Milton County. Single and hardworking, with no time in my life for males other than my father, my black Lab, and the eighty-three defendants I am trying to put behind bars.

But at that moment, as I pulled a chair to the side of my father's bed and placed a hand on his forearm, I was also Jamie Brock, daddy's girl.

And at the age of twenty-eight, I would soon be an orphan.

My father had not spoken since his second stroke four days ago. The first stroke turned him into a man I did not recognize. The sharp mind and acid wit gave way to a tender and confused man who looked like my father but fumbled with complex ideas. Sometimes he didn't even recognize his family and friends. The second stroke left him comatose. He had been lying here in this same bed, hooked up to these same machines, attended by the same nurses and doctors, for the past four days. His primary physician, a competent Indian doctor named Kumar Guptara, told me that my dad would never recover. Never give me another reassuring hug. His eyes would never open and sparkle at the sight of his only daughter. He would never again tell me that he loved me.

Despite Guptara's pessimism, which was shared by every other doctor we consulted, I half expected my father to someday wake up, unhook the machines, change out of his hospital gown, and walk out of the room even as the nurses called after him to stop. My father was a fighter. It was a trait I had inherited.

My brother wanted to pull the plug. But my dad, like most lawyers, had taken care of his clients' affairs and not his own. Evan after his first stroke, he'd refused to consider his own mortality and sign a living will. Now the doctors were unwilling to cut the umbilical cord to the machines when there was a stalemate among the children. Especially when one of the children was a lawyer.

And so I rubbed his forearm and tried to ignore the fact that he was wasting away in front of me, losing weight even as nutrition was pumped into his body, the hairy arms becoming drier and more brittle every day.

“Hey, Dad, it's Jamie. They say you can't hear me, but who really knows—right?” The room was still, machines pulsating, my father's chest slowly rising and falling.

I lowered my voice. “Four more days, Dad. Can you hang in there for four more days?”

After eleven years of appeals, the experts said that this time the date would stick. Antoine Marshall, the man who broke into our home and killed my mother three months after my sixteenth birthday, was scheduled to get the needle. That same night, he'd shot my father and left him for dead. My dad had lost three pints of blood but lived to testify. How could I let him die now?

“We expect the lab results to be back on Rikki Tate tomorrow,” I told my dad. I had been delivering reports on the Tate case every day. Rikki's death had occurred before my father's second stroke, and we both knew there was foul play. “Caleb Tate is already making excuses. Says that he knew Rikki was addicted to narcotics, but he couldn't stop her.”

I leaned closer to my dad's ear. “You were right, Dad. He poisoned her. I can feel it in my bones.”

Caleb Tate had represented Antoine Marshall at his trial. I would never forget the day he cross-examined my father, the only eyewitness to the crime. Dad was a great lawyer, but it's true what they say about the best lawyers making the worst witnesses. It was painful to watch Tate dissect my father's testimony piece by piece. If it hadn't been for Judge Snowden, the jury might have set Marshall free.

I took one of my father's hands in both of mine. “I'm going to nail Caleb Tate,” I promised him. Antoine Marshall and Caleb Tate were responsible for putting my father in this bed. He had survived the shooting but never fully recovered emotionally. They were also the reason I had been working for three years in the district attorney's office and had never plea-bargained a case. Even now, as I looked at my father's pallid face and brushed his gray hair off his forehead, the bitterness ate at my soul like a cancer. My dream was to indict Caleb Tate within thirty days of his former client's execution.

My father would not be around to see his daughter avenge the memory of a woman we both loved. But I would do it to honor my father's memory. And I would swear to it on my mother's grave.

At home that night, I waited for the latest news report about Antoine Marshall's appeal with a mixture of apprehension and disgust. A friend from the DA's office had alerted me to the story on WDKX. “Shows how desperate he is,” my friend had said.

The story had run at six and was scheduled to air again at eleven. An anchor teased the report just before a commercial break, and my palms began to sweat. I braced myself, knowing that Marshall's defense team would stop at nothing.

After the break, the station cut to an interview with Professor Mason James from Southeastern Law School, Antoine Marshall's lead appellate lawyer.

The interview took place in James's cramped law school office. The man looked more like a UFC fighter than a professor. He wore a tight black T-shirt that showed off a bodybuilder's physique—thick neck, trapezius muscles that stood out like cables, huge biceps, and tattoo sleeves covering both arms. He was completely bald with a dark complexion, square chin, and broad nose that had been on the wrong end of too many fists.

He was, I knew, Southeastern's poster-boy faculty member—loved by most students but detested by law-and-order alumni like me. A convicted felon who saved a guard's life during a prison riot and was then granted a pardon by Georgia's Pardons and Paroles Board. One of only three former felons licensed to practice law in Georgia, he now headed Southeastern's Innocence Project, a clinic that filed truckloads of appellate motions for convicted felons.

The camera zoomed to a head-and-shoulders shot of James with a dry-erase board visible in the background.
4 more days
was written on it.

“Give me a break,” I mumbled.

“You can't be serious,” the reporter said. She was referencing James's latest appellate filing.

“Dead serious,” James said. “No pun intended. There's a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental right now—part of the three-drug cocktail used to kill prisoners in Georgia. My sources tell me that the state is getting the drug from some fly-by-night supplier operating out of the back of a driving school in England.”

James gave the camera a hard look. “You wouldn't put your dog down with drugs like that,” he said. “We're just asking for thirty days to investigate.”

I scoffed at the TV. It would be funny if it weren't so heartbreakingly sad. Antoine Marshall had shot my mother in the head without thinking twice, desperate for money to buy meth. And now, twelve years after the shooting, eleven years after his conviction, he was complaining about the pedigree of the drugs they would use to gently end his life.

I couldn't wait for Friday to be over.

2

The debate took place in the Milton High School auditorium. It was less than half-full, and I sat next to my friend and mentor, Regina Granger, the senior assistant district attorney for Milton County. Regina, a large and loud woman, had a boisterous belly laugh that made you think she was warm and cuddly. She was not. Regina was one of the toughest people I knew, an African American woman who earned her stripes thirty years ago in Milton County's good-ole-boy system.

If you were accused of a crime in our county, the worst news you could get was that Regina Granger was handling your case. In my three years at the prosecutor's office, I had never seen her lose.

We were watching the Republican candidates for attorney general of Georgia debate. I would rather have been getting a root canal or watching an opera. Regina and I were both there for the same reason—our boss was one of the candidates.

District Attorney William Masterson filled every inch of his chair in the middle seat at the table of candidates and a little more. He was the John Madden of the Milton County Courthouse—demonstrative, gruff, and down to earth. Everyone in the DA's office loved him or at least respected him. But he was also mired in third place in a five-candidate race with four months left before the primary.

The leader was the current chief assistant AG, a man named Andrew Thornton. In contrast to Masterson, Thornton was thin, bookish, and deadly serious. I had watched him argue twice before the Georgia Supreme Court, opposing Antoine Marshall's appeals, though he never returned my phone calls. Instead, he had junior members of the AG's office deal with bothersome victims like me.

Toward the end of the debate, the moderator asked a question about the death penalty, and Masterson pounced on it. “I will never apologize for seeking the death penalty for those members of our society who show such callous disregard for the lives of others. We hear a lot about the rights of defendants, but I can tell you this. . . .” Masterson paused and made sure he had everyone's full attention. “In every case where I've sought the death penalty, the victim suffered far more than any defendant executed by the state. I could tell you some gruesome stories about how these victims were tortured, raped, and killed. And unlike the defendants, the victims had no choice in the matter.”

There was a smattering of applause from the archconservatives who had shown up for the debate. I found the whole thing a little unseemly.

“My biggest problem with the death penalty is that we allow these cases to drag on for years, costing the taxpayers millions,” Masterson continued. “In the audience tonight is one of my assistant district attorneys, Jamie Brock.”

I felt my face redden, and I knew what was coming next. I hated playing the victim card, and I hated having others play it for me.

“As many of you know, her mother was killed by a three-time felon named Antoine Marshall more than ten years ago. He's still sitting on death row, attacking everyone and everything involved in the process, even though Jamie's father, whom this man also shot, survived that night and ID'd him at trial. That's why Jamie is a prosecutor today.”

Masterson motioned toward me in the audience. “Jamie, would you stand for a moment?”

I shot him a quick look to let him know that I wasn't happy, then stood and forced a smile. The crowd applauded politely.

“For me, being a prosecutor is not just a career,” Masterson said. “I feel the same way Jamie does—what we do is a calling. Victims have rights, and they're entitled to justice.”

When the debate was over and Masterson had finished glad-handing every person who'd stuck around, he gave me a hug. “Hope I didn't embarrass you,” he said.

“You did,” I said. “But you can make it up to me. We need to talk.”

Masterson raised an eyebrow. “This can't wait till tomorrow?”

“I only need five minutes.”

He grunted his approval and then decided that if the conversation couldn't wait, we might as well get coffee and ice cream. Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting in an Applebee's, and Masterson was replaying the debate, asking for my perspective. When his ice cream finally came, he had two questions. “You sure you don't want some?”

“No thanks.” I was sticking with just coffee.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Rikki Tate.”

“So talk.” He took a bite of ice cream.

I had already formulated my negotiating strategy. I wanted to work on the Tate case. I knew it was the kind of high-profile case where Masterson would want someone from the DA's office working with the major felony squad detectives right from the start. I also knew Masterson would say I was too busy. I would tell him that I would work overtime and still handle my normal caseload. He would then say that I didn't have enough experience to handle the case, and I would offer to ride second chair. He would claim that I was too emotionally involved, and I would quote one of his answers from earlier that night when he said that, as prosecutors, we ought to be personally involved in every case. Like I did with every cross-examination, I had scripted the conversation in my head a hundred times and had a response for every objection, a counterpoint for every argument.

“I'd like to work on the Tate case,” I said.

“I'm handling that one myself,” Masterson responded, going for another bite. “But I could use a good second chair.”

It took me a second to shift gears—I was expecting an argument, not capitulation. “Seriously?”

“On one condition.”

“Anything,” I said quickly. Maybe too quickly.

Masterson leaned forward, creating that hulking presence that intimidated defense attorneys. The look didn't bother me; I knew he was just a big teddy bear.

“I'm calling the shots,” he said. “I'll ask for your input, but at the end of the day, I'm making all the strategic decisions. If we go to trial, you'll get to take a few witnesses and maybe even do the opening. Heck, I might have you try the whole case. But when it comes to whether we charge him and if so, what we charge him with—that's all up to me.”

Masterson studied me for a moment and I knew I had no room to negotiate.

“Understood?”

“Anything you say, boss.”