JULIA GEARY CAME across all kinds of stupid in the course of her job as a Peak County public defender, but Ray Belmar pushed fuckup into a whole new dimension.
The justice of the peace looked down her long nose and read the charges facing Ray—public disturbance, lewdness, indecent exposure—then turned to him and put them into appalled plain English.
“You ran into the middle of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade stark naked?”
On the Monday after the parade, the courtroom reeked of stale alcohol sweating its way through overworked pores. It was packed with still-hungover miscreants awaiting initial court appearances on all manner of misbehavior that had crossed a legal line. The snoozers among them—there were many—snapped to wakefulness.
Julia spoke up. “With respect, Your Honor, my client wasn’t naked. He wore a sock. The charge of indecent exposure doesn’t apply.”
The judge turned her glare upon Julia.
“A single clad foot doesn’t negate the charge, Ms. Geary. As you well know.”
Julia cleared her throat.
“Your Honor.” She waited a beat. “It wasn’t on his foot.”
The courtroom erupted.
Ray turned to face the gallery and took a bow. “A sock,” he mouthed, spreading his hands apart to indicate extra-long.
“Mr. Belmar!” The judge slammed her gavel.
Julia cast an ostentatious glance at the courtroom clock and, behind her back, rubbed her fingers together, knowing that Claudette Greene—Peak County’s lead prosecutor—would see the gesture from her table on the other side of the well.
As they’d walked together into the courtroom, Julia had bet Claudette ten dollars she’d have the courtroom in stitches three minutes into Ray’s case.
“You’re on,” Claudette said. “They’re all still too wasted to hear anything other than it’s their turn to say, ‘Not guilty.’”
“What are you doing here today, anyway? Isn’t this a few steps below your fancy new pay grade?”
Julia knew the answer, even as she asked. Claudette, her former partner in the Public Defender’s Division, had moved to the dark side—into a job as acting prosecutor—when the former chief prosecutor resigned. But now Claudette faced an election and needed all the press she could get. The charges against Ray, all misdemeanors, normally wouldn’t have rated Claudette’s attention, but videos of Ray’s antics at the parade had predictably gone viral and Claudette was in court to throw the book at him and squeeze one more story out of the whole escapade.
Chance Larsen, the crime reporter for The Bulletin, sat in the back of the room, dutifully scribbling as Claudette outlined all the reasons Ray should spend some time behind bars to contemplate the error of his ways. “He jumped onto the Rotary float! Flaunting his … sock … in front of a child!” Chief among Ray’s misfortunes was the fact that one of the Rotarians had invited his sixteen-year-old granddaughter to accompany him on the float.
Julia appreciated Claudette’s motivation, but it pissed her off anyway. Jail time would be bad enough, but the indecent exposure charge, if it stuck, could see Ray labeled a sex offender because of the granddaughter’s age. She had an inches-thick file containing the paperwork on Ray’s various brushes with the law, but even during the worst of his alcohol-fueled misbehavior, he’d never crossed that particular line.
She gazed out the tall courthouse window during Claudette’s wearying recital. Red and blue lights still flashed from the cop cars lining the creek bank two blocks away. where an early-morning jogger had a found a “popsicle,” the derisive term some cops applied to transients who succumbed to Duck Creek’s frigid winters.
Claudette thundered her windup.
“Your Honor, I’d ask that you deny bail to Mr. Belmar, or impose one in a high enough amount that guarantees he’ll remain incarcerated until his trial. He’s clearly a threat to the community.”
Julia rose in defense of her hapless frequent flier. “Your Honor, if this indecent exposure charge is to remain against my client, half this room must face similar charges, given the amount of public urination on the streets that day. My own little boy commented on it.”
The judge didn’t need to know of Calvin’s utter delight at the sight. Julia had to grab his hand to stop the five-year-old from pulling down his pants and attempting to imitate the mighty arcing streams splashing against Duck Creek’s storefronts as the high school band marched past, merrily tootling “The Rakes of Mallow.”
“Additionally, if I count correctly, some thirty people were arrested on charges of public drunkenness, a dozen for simple assault, and five for felony assault, including a couple of sexual assaults.” Julia heaved a mournful sigh. She’d learned a little something about theatrics in the brief time she’d shared an office with Claudette. “St. Patrick’s Day in Duck Creek continues its ignoble tradition.”
Duck Creek owed its existence to silver mines, which before they were dug dry had attracted scores of Irish immigrants, whose descendants—helped by a yearly infusion of students from the university in the next county—celebrated in notoriously uninhibited fashion. In addition to being obviously hungover, several in the room wore visible signs of their weekend revelry in the forms of black eyes, cuts and scrapes, and more than one arm in a sling.
Ray himself sported a purple goose egg on his forehead, a swollen jaw, and a bandaged hand. More worrisome, given a recent commitment to sobriety after his brash demonstration of impressive sock length, he’d slumped in his chair seemingly even more hungover than the others, his skin gray and papery, eyes scary-monster red, with an occasional whole-body tremor.
“Those Rotary folks kicked the shit out of me before they threw me off their float,” he’d said in response to Julia’s startled look—a detail intentionally omitted as she pleaded Ray’s cause.
“My client recently completed a three-month sobriety program,” she said, hoping the judge focused on the papers in front of her and not Ray’s appearance, which made her fear for the sobriety she was so vigorously touting. “For the first time in years he has a job, washing dishes in one of our local establishments. By all accounts, he’s an excellent employee.” By which Julia meant she hadn’t heard otherwise. She took a breath and finished her spiel.
“Until Saturday, a day on which—I repeat—far worse behavior abounded, he’s had no recent encounters with the law. To impose such an outsize and unfair bail, and to hold him in jail until this case is resolved, would interrupt the tremendous progress he’s made. He attends Alcoholic Anonymous meetings three times a week and counseling sessions twice a month, and hasn’t missed a single one, nor has he failed any of his regular alcohol and drug tests. I’d ask that he be released on his own recognizance so that he can continue his hard work toward becoming a productive member of society.”
She sat as Claudette argued a final time for a high bail.
“Hey.” Ray tugged at her arm. “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
Julia didn’t dare look at the bench but sensed the judge’s attention.
“Okay,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth. “As soon as we’re done.”
“No. Not here. Someplace where—” He looked around the room. “Not here.”
She understood. Since his transformation into an approximation of a solid citizen, Ray had styled himself as something of an informant, tipping Julia off to extenuating circumstances that could benefit her clients, many of them his former compatriots in petty crime, although in some cases she’d get a text with a name and a simple warning: Let his ass rot in jail. But the courthouse was populated by attorneys, clerks, cops, sheriff’s deputies, wrongdoers, and those who’d been done wrong, any of whom might be interested in Ray’s tidbits, or so he believed.
Julia wasn’t so sure. His number had lighted up her phone a half dozen times in the days before the parade, but a little bit of Ray went a long way and she was especially disinclined to talk with him after seeing various videos of his parade high jinks. Now, though, he had her cornered.
The court reporter asked Claudette to repeat something she’d just said. Julia took advantage of the general distraction to stall.
“How’d you get out, anyway?” Normally, people who couldn’t afford to post bail were held in jail until their initial court appearances, but Ray had dragged himself into court a free man.
“Jail was too full. They kicked a bunch of us low-level cases out Sunday morning. How about coffee later?”
“Colombia?” It was just a couple of blocks from the courthouse. “Around four?”
He shook his head. “Tomorrow. Say, noon. Starbucks.”
She blinked. Duck Creek’s lone Starbucks was on the edge of town and, unlike Colombia, presented little risk that anyone from the courthouse would see them. Whatever Ray wanted to tell her might actually be important.
“Okay, but I’ll have to keep it quick. The funeral’s at two. I can’t miss it.”
Leslie Harper, a state legislator from Duck Creek, had been found dead in her home a few days earlier. The first police reports had hinted at suicide or maybe an unfortunate combination of booze and sleeping pills. Over her years in the legislature, Harper had sponsored—sometimes even successfully—bills to ease penalties and fees for nonviolent offenders, and members of the Public Defender’s Division would be at her funeral in force.
To see Ray, Julia would have to give up her lunch hour, a laughable concept anyway among the perennially overburdened public defenders.
“Quick is all I need. I’ll be at the funeral too. Harper was good people.”
Julia turned to him in surprise. “You knew her?”
“There’s a lot about me you don’t know.” He gave a wan grin and she kicked him under the table, reminding him of the seriousness of the occasion.
Ray pasted on a somber expression just in time to hear the judge acquiesce to Julia’s request to release him on his own recognizance, with the condition that he be tested daily, rather than weekly, for alcohol and drug use at his own expense.
He gathered enough strength for a jaunty wave and sauntered from the courtroom.
Julia smiled and settled back to wait for her next case. She’d just bested Claudette, who had years of experience on her, in a courtroom skirmish—a minor one, to be sure, but satisfying nonetheless.
She was still riding high from her success the previous year in proving the innocence of a teenager charged with sexually assaulting a classmate. And she was looking forward to her dinner this evening with Dom Parrish, the principal of Duck Creek High, with whom a shy flirtation during that case had turned into an unexpectedly satisfying relationship.
She’d finally emerged from the despairing years of mourning after an IED in Iraq killed her husband, a loss that still had the power to blindside her with occasional gasping, stop-in-her-tracks agony, albeit losing a shade of strength with each blow. These days she looked forward, not back, and sunshine suffused the view.
She put Ray’s file aside, picked up another, and turned her attention to her next client.
“Sonofabitch!” An outcry in the hallway outside interrupted the proceedings. A few people rose and peered through the door’s glass window.
The judge rapped her gavel. “Be seated.”
A crash sounded outside, followed by a torrent of strangled profanity.
“Order!”
But everyone in the gallery was on their feet now, jostling toward the door.
The judge let her gavel fall a final time. “Ten-minute recess.”
Julia joined the pack fleeing the room.
“What’s going on?”
“Damned if I know,” said Claudette. “You okay with taking that ten dollars in the form of a couple of lattes from Colombia? Tomorrow after the funeral? Wish I could get the barista to add a shot of whiskey. I’ll need it.” She and Leslie Harper had been close, a friendship they’d maintained even after Claudette moved into the chief prosecutor’s job, whose previous occupants had not looked kindly upon the criminal justice reforms that Claudette had continued—with Leslie’s help—to champion.
Two women elbowed past them to join the fast-growing crowd in the rotunda. Julia stood on tiptoe, but even raising herself up to five feet two was useless given the jostling mass before her.
“More than okay. Ray’s dragging me to Starbucks tomorrow. It’ll take more than two lattes to get that taste out of my mouth. I’m going to have to give up my lunch hour to listen to his latest conspiracy theory.”
Claudette, whose height gave her the vantage point Julia lacked, looked to the far side of the rotunda. “No, you won’t.” She raised her voice. “Prosecutor coming through!”
Julia scuttled behind her in the space that magically appeared, stopping cold at the sight of two sheriff’s deputies wrestling a screaming Ray Belmar to the marble floor.
“I didn’t do it! Whatever it is, I didn’t fucking do it!”
Julia shouldered past Claudette. “Hey! Don’t hurt him. He’s my client. Ray, what’s going on?”
The deputies knelt over Ray, one with his knee against the side of Ray’s head, mashing his face against a floor filthy from the traces of melting snow and mud. The other dug a knee into Ray’s back as he forced handcuffs around his wrists.
Ray bucked beneath them, then fell still. His eyes rolled wildly toward Julia.
“I don’t know,” he gasped.
“Get off him. I’m his lawyer, dammit. Get off him.” Julia pulled her phone from her blazer pocket and aimed it toward the scene. The deputies grunted to their feet, roughly pulling Ray up with them.
Julia recognized one. Unlike some cops and deputies, he’d never seemed to view public defenders’ efforts as an insult to his own work.
“Wayne, what the hell?”
He jerked his head toward the window. “That guy they found down by the river this morning?”
She followed his gaze. The cop cars were still there, along with the coroner’s van, but they’d finally turned the lights off. “What about him?”
“He didn’t freeze. Well, maybe he did, but only because somebody beat him to a bloody pulp first.”
“Who?”
A harder man might have laughed. Wayne’s glance was all pity.
From the corner of her eye, Julia saw Chance Larsen beside her, his phone held toward Wayne, the record light blinking.
“Come on, Julia. Now is not the time to start being stupid.”
The other deputy started to drag Ray away.
“That’s not possible. Ray wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
Wayne’s face hardened.
“He didn’t hurt anyone. He killed him.”
LIGHT SHONE THROUGH the frosted glass of Julia’s office door, laying a bright path down the dark hallway that led to the warren of offices housing the public defenders.
“Damn.” She was sure she’d turned it off before she went to court. She’d hear about it from Deb, the meddlesome office manager who made it her business to ensure the office was pinching every possible penny.
Julia counted herself fortunate to finally have an office to herself after Claudette’s departure to the far-better-paying position of county attorney. She didn’t want to risk her newfound luxury by running afoul of Deb—a futile effort, she realized seconds later when she opened the door.
A young woman stood inside, a tape dispenser in one hand, a stapler in the other. Two open file boxes sat atop Claudette’s desk, and Julia’s own desk contained a stack of files that hadn’t been there before. A long wool herringbone coat hung beside Julia’s puffy parka on the coatrack.
“Who the hell are you?”
Julia knew she should apologize for her rudeness. But it didn’t appear to have rattled the interloper.
“Marie St. Clair. I’m your new intern.”
She was taller than Julia—but then, everyone was—with a broad, pale face, wispy pale hair, and pale eyes that bulged froglike, all of it giving her the appearance of someone who existed below ground, in a place devoid of sunlight. Her expression suggested she rarely smiled.
Julia had planned to transfer her own things into Claudette’s desk, slightly larger than hers and in marginally better condition, and then move her old desk out entirely, making the space appear less like a repurposed closet and more like an actual office. She’d never gotten around to it and apparently had missed her chance.
“I didn’t ask for an intern. And what are you doing here now, anyway? Aren’t internships a summertime thing?”
“I asked if I could start early. I’m doing well enough in my classes that they said I could work a few hours a week during the semester.”
Marie placed the stapler and tape dispenser on the desk, aligning them precisely with a stack of Post-it notes and an in/out box. “Sounds like we—”
We?
“—are going to have a homicide trial on our hands.”
“Not likely.” Julia sat at her desk and logged on to her computer in an attempt to look purposeful. The office windows, grimy from years of inattention, let in precious little light, and even that was fast fading. She’d come back to the office planning only to grab her coat and go home, eager to close the door on this day, but didn’t want to cede the office, her office, to Marie, who was hovering beside her with an expectant expression on her face and a question on her lips.
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t do it.”
“They all say that.”
Ah, the arrogance and certainty of law school. Lawyers got a bad rap on both counts, but nothing beat baby lawyers for being the smartest people in the room.
Julia nudged the files littering her desk. They were her own, both old and pending cases. “What are these doing here?”
Marie looked toward the file cabinet. “Deb told me to clear out a couple of drawers for myself, so I did.”
Julia had always thought the references to blood boiling mere colorful hyperbole. Now hers surged hot through her veins. She wondered whom she hated more at the moment, Marie or Deb.
Marie lingered oblivious, rearranging the already perfectly aligned items on her desk. “Have you ever tried a homicide before?”
“No.”
A mix of disappointment and irritation chased the eagerness from Marie’s face. “They’ll probably assign someone with more experience, then.”
Julia logged off with a loud clack of keys and grabbed her coat from the rack. Marie could spend all damn night lining up her office supplies for all she cared.
“They’re not going to need to assign anyone. Ray Belmar didn’t kill that man.”
She closed the door behind her, then opened it again.
“Get your shit out of my file cabinet. Leave the stuff on my desk where it is. And if you ever touch my files again, I’ll ship you back to law school before you can say habeas corpus.”
A blast of warm air, redolent of tomato and garlic and simmering meats, greeted Julia when she pushed open the door of Dom Parrish’s house.
Her spirits soared. “Sunday gravy? But it’s Monday.”
Parrish appeared in the kitchen doorway, a wooden spoon in one hand, his other cupped beneath it to catch drips. He held the spoon to her lips. “Taste.”
“Mmm. Perfect. I’d rather have this than a glass of wine—and I really need a glass of wine.”
“In there.” He pointed to the living room, where two chairs had been pulled close to the fireplace, two glasses of wine on a table between them. “Dinner can wait.”
She unwound her scarf, kicked off her shoes, draped her coat over the back of one of the chairs, and stood before the fire, hands outstretched.
“What’s the occasion?”
“For starters, Calvin and Elena demanded tacos yesterday. Remember? And today’s a teacher in-service day. No school for the kids and early out for us. I knew you had Ray today—hence, Sunday gravy. Cures all ills, even better than chicken soup.”
Dom was the first and only man Julia had dated since Michael’s death. Their relationship had proceeded slowly, cautiously, its tentative pace imposed in part by the combined realities of Dom’s teenage daughter, Julia’s young son, and the fact that Julia still lived with her mother-in-law. Sex involved the sort of scheduling maneuvers worthy of air traffic controllers. They’d fallen into a pattern of two weeknight dinners at his house, timed to his daughter’s evening volunteer shifts at a local refugee center, and weekend outings of varying success with one or both kids.
She’d persuaded him to try cross-country skiing, the low-rent alternative to the glitzy ski resort on the outskirts of town, and Dom—whose last name, Parrish, was the anglicized version of Parisi, the name bestowed on him by an indifferent clerk at Ellis Island—in turn had introduced her to the Italian tradition of Sunday gravy: the meaty, long-simmered sauce that warmed them through upon their return from their excursions.
They lifted glasses, clinked, and sank into the chairs.
“How’d it go with Ray today? Was he up to his usual shenanigans?” In the months they’d been together, Dom had heard more about Ray than any of Julia’s other clients.
Julia’s sip turned into a gulp. She rolled the stem of the glass between her fingers.
“Pretty much.” She set her wine aside and recounted the story of the sock, spreading her hands far apart in imitation of Ray’s theatrics, eliciting a spit take from Dom.
“Even the judge laughed. It was all fun and games until they arrested him for homicide.”
She was thankful Dom hadn’t taken another sip of wine.
“What? Did somebody at the parade have a heart attack at the sight of that sock flopping around? You’re kidding, right?”
“Afraid not.”
A log collapsed into the fire, sending up a starburst of sparks. A few bounced through the screen and landed on the rug. Julia ground her toe against them, heedless of the damage to her striped wool sock.
“I’d no sooner finished getting Ray out from under the insane bail Claudette wanted than they arrested him. They say he killed that guy they found down by the river. I just can’t believe it.”
“From everything you’ve told me about him, that doesn’t sound like Ray.”
“It’s not. And then they stuck me with this obnoxious intern …”
Julia was off and running, indulging in one of the forgotten pleasures of being in a relationship—namely, shoveling the day’s unpleasantness onto someone else’s shoulders.
Dom, as usual, did the right thing, making sympathetic noises and refilling her glass, until he finally took it from her and wrapped her hands in his.
“You know what? You’re far too tense to give that gravy the attention it rightly deserves. Dinner can wait.”
He didn’t need to say more. Julia practically ran ahead of him to the bedroom, where everything that came next banished all thoughts of Ray Belmar from her head.
Maybe it was the wine. Or maybe it was her need to block out the shock and frustration of Ray’s arrest, followed by the insult of the unwanted intern.
Julia took the lead, pushing Dom onto his back, her movements fast, almost rough, her moans drowning out the sounds of the key in the front door, the footsteps down the hall.
“Yes!” she yelled, just as the bedroom door flew open and a shocked voice intruded upon her consciousness.
“Dad?”
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