1
THERE IT WAS: THE RUSH, the thrill, the exhilaration coursing through her veins like molten gold. It hit her the moment she swept through the courthouse doors. Other lawyers felt that rush when they rose to open, or to close, or at the moment the jury returned its verdict. But for Kelly McCann, it was this moment, the victory lap, her triumphal chariot ride around the coliseum while the crowd roared in the stands. It was better than drugs. Better than sex—at least what she remembered of sex. After all, an orgasm was only the payoff of maybe twenty minutes of effort. Whereas this—this!—was the reward for weeks of trial, months of prep, years of sacrifice.
The crowd thronged the pavement in front of the courthouse and spilled out into the street. The reporters had pushed their way to the front; at the back were the TV news vans with their rooftop dishes pitched to the sky like SETI satellites searching for intelligent life. A burst of camera flashes met Kelly as she stopped at the edge of the stairs. Before her was a sea of upturned faces and microphones on poles that stretched like cranes’ necks over their heads. The media was there—her team saw to that—and the protesters were there, too—the media saw to that—with their hand-scrawled placards raised as high as the cameras and microphones. #METOO and JUSTICE FOR REEZA and TAKE RAPE SERIOUSLY and BELIEVE REEZA. Some of them had been there from the first day of jury selection, and their signs were now tattered and rain-streaked, a proud emblem of their endurance.
On the other side were the counterprotesters, in equal numbers. They held up their own placards: JUSTICE FOR GEORGE, DON’T CANCEL DR. B, and, most prominently, SAVE OUR SAVIOR—hyperbolic perhaps, but not the first time he’d been so dubbed. After all, he was the man who may have cured Alzheimer’s.
Kelly paused to allow the photographers their shots. She was dressed severely, in a black suit and white blouse, tortoiseshell glasses, her blond hair sleeked back in a tight French twist, her only jewelry a wedding band. On her feet she wore not the expected sensible flats but black pumps with four-inch heels. At only five foot two, she needed that extra height.
This had been her signature look ever since her early days in the DA’s office when she learned her colleagues were calling her the Cheerleader. The nickname was probably unavoidable, even if they’d never unearthed her high school history. She was, after all, a petite blonde with a southern accent, a penchant for bright colors, and a tad too much enthusiasm about her work. She couldn’t do anything about her height, and not much about her accent, but she ditched the bright colors immediately. As for her enthusiasm—that died a natural death even before she went over to the defense bar.
Her courtroom team fanned out in a V-formation behind her, like geese flying south. First was her associate, Patti Han, a brilliant young lawyer whose talents were wasted riding second chair beside Kelly. Striding up next was Kelly’s assistant, Cazzadee Johnson, a long-legged beauty whose competence and composure were likewise indispensable to Kelly’s success. Two men brought up the rear: the Philadelphia lawyer serving as her local counsel and the suburban lawyer serving as her hyper-local counsel—both men, both white, and both so nondescript that Kelly routinely confused one with the other. They were indispensable, too, but only because the local court rules required them—a way of protecting the hometown bar from marauding out-of-state lawyers like Kelly. The final member of her team was Javier Torres, her investigator. He was there, too, but not on the courthouse steps. He was on patrol, moving through the crowd like a panther, silky smooth and stealthy.
“For ten long months,” Kelly began, her voice ringing out down the steps and over the street, “Dr. Benedict has borne the awful weight of a false accusation. His reputation has been sullied. His family traumatized. He’s received hate mail and even death threats. And his work—his vital, critical work—has been horribly hampered. That’s the awful power of a false accusation. And perhaps worst of all is that he had to bear all this in silence. The reality of our legal system meant that he couldn’t say a word in his own defense.”
Of course, it was Kelly herself who forbade him to speak, but the crowd didn’t need to know that.
“Today, at last, twelve good men and women spoke up for him. They put the lie to that awful false accusation.” She allowed a smile then, a big beaming smile that broke out like a sunrise over the crowd. “The jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty on all counts!”
Her declaration was greeted with boos and hisses from the protesters, but she heard only the applause and whistles from the counterprotesters. Like any good cheerleader, she knew how to whip up her own side to drown out the other side. The technique still worked today. She raised both arms in triumph, and Team Benedict roared its approval and sent the blood singing through her veins.
This moment was her compensation for all she’d sacrificed and all she still endured. For ten years she’d done nothing but defend men accused of sex crimes. Athletes and musicians were her bread and butter, along with the occasional CEO. It was sordid work. The accusations themselves, of course, but also all the borderline-dirty tactics it took to defeat them. All the unreasonable ways of creating reasonable doubt. It left her feeling soiled sometimes, as if her hands were stained with the damned spots of complicity. But this moment scrubbed those spots away. It was like tossing a match on tinder and watching the flames erupt. She was purified by fire, silver in the refiner’s crucible.
She liked to win. She lived to win. It was the entire secret of her success. Her courtroom victories weren’t due to any great brilliance on her part. She had no more talent than the average lawyer. What she did have was this abiding lust for victory.
Early in life she realized that she was never going to be more than a runner-up in either athletic or academic competitions, so she found other ways to use her competitive drive: cheerleading squad, drama club, debate team. Law school was a natural progression, and criminal trial work the natural culmination. Most of her cases she settled swiftly and quietly, but two or three times a year she took them all the way to trial. Always in the best interests of her clients, she maintained, but admittedly it was also to preserve her reputation and keep her profile high. And high was how she felt right now.
“I want to thank the jurors for their service,” she shouted. “They sacrificed more than three weeks of their lives; they had to endure endless hours of testimony and several more hours of thoughtful deliberation. But in the end, they delivered justice for Dr. Benedict. And with it they restored hope for all those people around the world who depend upon Dr. Benedict and his lifesaving work!”
The cheers came even louder then, loud enough to drown out the groans that came from the protestors.
“And now, thanks to those jurors and their outstanding service, Dr. Benedict no longer has to remain silent. Doctor?”
George Carlson Benedict, MD, PhD, shuffled forward to take Kelly’s place at the edge of the stairs. He was fifty, a gray-haired, bespectacled man in a slightly rumpled gray suit. His shoulders were stooped, no doubt from years of hunching over a microscope. He didn’t look like a multimillionaire, but as controlling shareholder of UniViro Pharmaceuticals, he surely was. He didn’t look like an international celebrity either, but he was that, too. It was rare for any scientist to achieve such status, but Dr. Benedict had done it. He was the man who maybe, hopefully, had cured the most-feared disease in the world. He’d already been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Nobel Prize in Medicine was surely on the horizon.
Kelly stepped aside as her client cleared his throat and droned out his thanks to the jury in his usual low-pitched monotone. The cameras flashed again, and Kelly smiled blindly into the starbursts of light.
When her vision cleared, a face in the crowd leapt into view as suddenly as if she’d zoomed in on it. A glamorous brunette of fifty, tall and handsome, even with her striking eyes narrowed and her mouth twisted with disgust. Kelly froze on that unexpected face for a moment before her vision panned camera-like to the right and zoomed in on another face twenty feet away. It was a young woman this time, quietly pretty with short brown hair and, behind her glasses, deep-set eyes that still looked as haunted as the day Kelly met her. Then her vision-camera panned left, pulled back, and a third face came into focus at the rear of the crowd. Another woman, this one very young, a skinny blonde with timid, bashful eyes. Three different faces, three different women, three different cases with only one common thread.
Dimly, Kelly heard her name spoken. It was Dr. Benedict, thanking her in his robotic voice for all her hard work.
She hadn’t expected to see these women, here or anywhere, ever again. Their cases were done and dusted, checks delivered and cashed, papers signed and sealed. She searched for Javi Torres in the crowd, found him, and raised an eyebrow. He nodded to acknowledge that he’d clocked them, too. As of course he would. He would know their names, too, while all Kelly could remember were their jobs and the dollar amounts: chief information officer, $2.5 million; research scientist, $500,000; office cleaner, $20,000. Money paid to them in exchange for their nondisclosure agreements. The NDA women, she called them.
Her heart started to hammer with a second spike of adrenaline. They shouldn’t be here. They mustn’t be here. This could only mean trouble. She forced herself to take a breath and study each of them in turn. They weren’t holding placards, she noted. They didn’t seem to be part of any group. They weren’t looking at one another. They didn’t even know one another. They couldn’t. So they mustn’t be here to make a scene. They wouldn’t dare.
She searched out Javi again, and he met her eyes and gave a shrug. This was nothing, his shrug said, and her pulse slowed.
Now Dr. Benedict was thanking his wife, Jane, who stood the requisite three steps behind him. She was a plump, rosy-cheeked woman with a mobcap of gray curls, and she gazed on him with eyes aglow behind her glasses.
A disturbance sounded from around the corner as he was thanking the board of UniViro for standing with him throughout this ordeal. A shout rang out, then a chorus of shouts, and part of the crowd broke away and scrambled for the rear of the courthouse. Most of the cameras and microphones followed. Kelly knew what that meant: Dr. Reeza Patel, the alleged victim, was trying to sneak out the back door. But no such luck. The crowd and the media would be there to catch her in the agony of her defeat, this sad perversion of the walk of shame.
A man stepped forward to escort the Benedicts to their waiting car. He was Anton, Benedict’s ever-present shadow. Whether that was his first name or last was never clear to Kelly, nor was his exact job description. He was a towering hulk of a man, bald, with deep forehead wrinkles, like a Shar-Pei.
Kelly signaled her own team to huddle at the far side of the courthouse plaza. She demurred at the fawning congratulations from her local counsel and got down to business. There were housekeeping matters to attend to. Reminders to submit their final statements as soon as possible. The logistics of packing up her files and shipping them back to Boston. There was transportation to arrange, and her assistant, Cazzadee, was already on the phone booking their flights. The Philadelphia lawyer offered to drive them back to their hotel in the city. Kelly declined—she needed an hour to herself—but she pointed Patti and Cazz to the man’s car and promised to meet them at the airport for their flight home.
Patti hesitated and threw an anxious look around the courthouse plaza.
“Don’t worry,” Kelly said. “He’ll make his own way home.”
Patti blushed and ducked into the car. She was in love with Javier and thought no one knew it, while the sad truth was that everyone knew it but Javier.
IT WAS TWENTY minutes before Kelly’s Uber arrived, and she sank into the back seat with a long shuddering sigh. “Tough day?” the driver asked.
Tough day, month, decade, she thought, but she didn’t answer. For three weeks she’d been onstage, her manner and dress and expressions scrutinized by dozens of people. Every word she spoke was consequential. Any slip of the tongue could have been fatal. Any unguarded reaction a signal to the jury that she didn’t want to send. After all that, she was determined for at least the next hour not to perform, and certainly not for the benefit of an Uber driver. He took the hint of her silence and didn’t speak again as he drove away from the courthouse.
In minutes the brick storefronts of the county seat gave way to the gentle hills of open country. It was late September, the last gasp of summer, and the scrolling landscape looked dry and brittle in the late-afternoon sun.
She closed her eyes and leaned back against the upholstery but soon got a crick in her neck. She shifted left then right in search of a more forgiving position, but it was no use. Here was the trouble with the purifying fire of acclamation. It burned out when the acclamation ended, leaving her with cinders in her hair and soot on her hands and the taste of ashes on her tongue.
This case had been particularly sordid. Reeza Patel was a PhD virologist who’d worked on Benedict’s research team. One day last year she’d dared to correct one of his comments, and worse, she’d done it in front of other people. If she were to be believed, he raped her in retaliation. A violent, sickening rape that she described in lurid detail.
But she wasn’t to be believed. The quicksand in the evidence was the fact that Benedict fired her only days before the alleged attack. That could have been the sum and substance of his so-called retaliation, while her cry of rape could have been her own retaliation for having been fired. These circumstances gave Kelly a lot of material to work with. Under cross-examination, Patel dug herself in deeper and deeper until she finally sank. The jury didn’t believe her story, and they acquitted Benedict.
Kelly’s phone was singing in three-part disharmony as alerts for calls, texts, and emails streamed in. She couldn’t turn the phone off—it might be Todd or the children—and she couldn’t ignore it either. Like Pavlov’s dogs, she was conditioned to respond to every ping and chirp. She opened her eyes and opened the phone. Already there was a deluge of emails from reporters, and she deleted all of them without reading.
There was a voicemail from Harry Leahy, her all-but-retired senior partner. Plenty of other septuagenarians had embraced texting over voicemail, but Harry seemed to delight in being a dinosaur, and, sadly, one to whom her fortunes remained tied. “Call me,” his voicemail message said, as if that conveyed anything more than a missed call alert would have.
She didn’t call him. There was time enough for that tomorrow. Instead, she sent messages to Todd and the kids letting them know she’d be home that evening. Todd replied instantly with a thumbs-up emoji, followed by a party-hat emoji, followed by a “whew!” emoji. She couldn’t blame him for that last one. They’d worked out a good division of labor over the years, but when she was out of town, he had to shoulder all the care responsibilities on his own. He deserved a break.
She looked up from her phone and out at the roadside as it blurred past the car windows. The open country had funneled them onto an eight-lane superhighway, flanked by office parks on one side and housing developments on the other. The UniViro campus was somewhere to the left, along with the headquarters of a dozen more pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies. This stretch of suburban Philadelphia was the headquarters of Big Pharma. An employment magnet for bioscientists, it was responsible for much of the brain drain from South Asia, including, Kelly recalled, the parents of Dr. Reeza Patel. The industry had long been tarnished by price-gouging scandals and the opioid epidemic, but thanks to George Benedict, it was suddenly basking in the heavenly glow of public esteem. Science was good again. Drugs were great, and vaccines were miraculous.
She shifted position again. Her right leg had fallen asleep, and she had to shake it out to restore feeling. This had been a recurring problem during the trial. Too much time sitting motionless in courtroom and conference room. She needed to find time for a long run tomorrow.
Her phone buzzed. This was the call she’d been waiting for. “Javi,” she answered. “Anything?”
“Nothing,” her investigator said. He was a former cop, but there was never any bully or bluster in his manner. He reported to her in an even-tempered tone. “They peeled off in three different directions. No phone calls. No signals to each other I could see. They didn’t even glance at each other.”
“Okay. Good.”
“I followed one of them, LaSorta . . .”
“Remind me—?”
“The tech lady. Hey, guess what she’s driving. A brand-new Porsche.”
Kelly remembered her now: $2.5 million.
“I followed her to see if she was gonna meet up with anybody after, but she headed straight for New Jersey. That’s where she’s living now. I left her at the bridge.”
“Good. Thanks, Javi.”
“I’m gonna hit the road now. I’ll swing by the hotel and pick you up if you’d rather drive than fly.”
She laughed. “Six hours in a car with you? Pretty irresistible.” But even as she said it, she knew there were countless women who would find him irresistible in any setting.
Her phone buzzed in her hand. Another call was coming in, and at the sight of the name, she let out a startled “What?”
“I said, unless you need anything?”
“No, no. Safe trip.” She connected the incoming call. “George?”
Dr. Benedict’s dry voice sounded in her ear. “You didn’t think you’d escape me that easily, did you?”
In fact she did. Their business was over. It was like she always instructed her team: Move on. Don’t look back. No regrets. No recriminations.
“Come to dinner tonight,” Benedict said. “We’re having a few people over to celebrate.”
“Thanks, but my flight leaves at eight.”
“Reschedule for tomorrow.”
“Sorry, no. I need to get back tonight.” She’d been away for three weeks without even a quick trip home on the intervening Saturdays. Lawyers didn’t get weekends off during trial. That time was for witness prep.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll have the chopper fly you home.”
“Oh, thanks, George, but I really—”
“I must insist. For Jane’s sake. She wants to thank you in person.”
She hesitated at the mention of his wife. His bride, he called her—an affectation perhaps, but in this case it was literally true: they’d been married only a short time. And she was such an unexpected choice for a powerful man to make in a second wife. Wife Number 1 had been a brittle blonde who favored short skirts and tall heels, while Jane could have played the sweet-natured grandmother in an old black-and-white movie. She was an RN who’d cared for George’s mother in her final illness.
Kelly considered her their best witness at trial, even though she did nothing but sit silently behind her husband throughout. Her appearance did all her talking for her. She looked like a woman for whom sex was only a slightly embarrassing memory, which had to mean that her husband was the kind of man who didn’t really care about sex very much either. No, he must value companionship, friendship, good character, or why else would he choose a woman like this?
Kelly always wondered what their deal really was. “Well—”
“You’ll be home before midnight, I promise.”
She laughed, a feeble sound of defeat, and accepted his dinner invitation, along with his offers of a car to pick her up and a helicopter to take her home.
Her next call was to Cazz. “Change of plans,” she sighed.
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