She sat with her wrists shackled, the chain threaded through a metal loop in the center of the table. She wore an orange jumpsuit two sizes too big on her. I couldn’t see her face through the stringy blonde hair that hung in front of it. She was crying. And she was just a tiny little thing.
Her skin was pale so I could see tiny blue veins running up her arm. No track marks. Though puffy, her eyes looked clear, focusing with laser-like precision straight on me. It didn’t mean she wasn’t on something, but it was at least a positive sign.
The murder victim, Larry Drazdowski was huge. A basketball coach. Fit. Well muscled. Close to six foot five. They were charging this skinny nineteen-year-old girl in front of me with first-degree murder.
“You’re the lawyer?” she asked.
“I am,” I said. “My name is Cass. Cass Leary.”
It registered on her face with the flicker of her eyelids. Her mouth turned down. This girl was chained to a table facing life imprisonment. But I was the one with the lousy family name. Welcome home.
“Wow,” she whispered. “I heard about you. You went to law school and everything?”
“I did,” I said, hoisting my messenger bag to the table. I slid Aubrey’s case file out.
“Why did you come back here?” Aubrey asked.
“I’m your court-appointed lawyer,” I said. “If I agree to take this case, that is. I haven’t decided that yet.”
What little color she had drained even more. “You have to!”
“Listen,” I said. “Do you understand what they’ve charged you with?”
A single tear fell down Aubrey’s face. I knew the Ameses too. On the status ladder of Delphi, Michigan, the Ames family was maybe only half a rung above the Learys. It’s the second reason I took this file.
“They want to fry me for what happened to Coach D,” she said.
“Let’s just take this one step at a time. Now, I’m going to ask some questions. What you do tell me needs to be the truth, okay?”
“You’ll help me though? This isn’t what anyone thinks!” she shouted.
“Great,” I said. “That’s the last time I want you to answer a question you haven’t been asked. You are not to discuss this case with anyone but me. Ever. Not your parents, your friends, your priest, no one. Do you understand?”
Aubrey nodded. “You want me to keep my mouth shut.”
The case against her so far was sparse. Her cell phone was found at the scene near the victim’s body. I didn’t yet know what was on it, but it was enough to give them probable cause to arrest her. That was ominous.
“He was alive when I saw him last,” she offered, reading my mind.
“When was that?” I asked.
Aubrey sniffled. “A little after ten o’clock at the park.”
“You were there alone with him?”
She nodded, her expression growing more dour. Things looked bad enough already.
She wiped a tear from her eye. I reached for a tissue from the cardboard box at the end of the table. Aubrey blew her nose into it, looking every inch the little girl she was so close to being.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” she said, crushing the tissue into her fist. “Miss Leary. You have to be thinking all sorts of awful things about me.”
It hit me then. I did know this girl. She was an Ames, of course, not a Leary. Her grandfather worked with my dad a million years ago on the line at the spark plug plant on the west side of town that wasn’t there anymore. She reminded me of me in a way. And I knew it was dangerous for me to think that. She was vulnerable, but tough in the way she kept her back straight even as she fell apart right in front of me.
She met my eyes. “They’re going to want me dead. Aren’t you going to ask me?”
The weight of her question hung between us. It was one I never asked of criminal clients. In a legal sense, the answer didn’t matter. In the space of those few seconds, my world seemed to shift on its axis. The haunted, hopeless look in Aubrey Ames’s eyes cut straight through me.
“Aubrey ... it’s better if …”
“No,” she said. “It’s not better. Not for me. It matters. I did not kill that man.”
The thing was ... at that moment, I believed her. And she was right. It did matter.
“Okay,” I said. “So let me get to work.”
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