I resisted the urge to tell her this whole thing was about as far from perfect as a case could get. But she was right. I didn’t want Katy thrown to the wolves without helping her put up a good fight.
Now I just had to hope she hadn’t actually killed her husband.
Chapter 6
They broughtKaty into the lawyer’s room at the jail thirty minutes before her scheduled arraignment. A different person than the one I knew walked in. Katy had been just twenty-two years old when she married my brother twenty years ago. For the likes of Joe Leary, she’d been a catch. At least that’s what the people of Delphi thought.
Katy came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father worked as an account executive for one of the Big Five auto makers earning well into the six figures. She’d grown up in a big house with seven acres and a private pond. She’d gone to Clarington, a prestigious private school twenty minutes from town.
She’d been engaged to a med student who later went on to become a highly regarded neurosurgeon at U of M Hospital. But one day, Katy’s father wanted to renovate the basement of his three-thousand-square-foot home and Joe had been part of the construction crew. Theirs had been a meet-cute that sounded like a grumpy-sunshine romance book plot. She broke things off with her fiancé and she and Joe were married withina year. She’d been by his side during his ugly custody battle with Emma’s biological mother, Josie.
Today, Katy shuffled in wearing leg irons and an orange jumpsuit. Her hair was matted on one side and she stared at me with eyes gone hollow.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” she said in a small voice. “I would have understood if you hadn’t.”
“I need a minute with my client, please,” I said to the deputy at the door. It was almost a throwaway line. Something I’d said hundreds of times while conducting jailhouse interviews like this.
Katy collapsed into the chair in front of me. “Oh, Cass. Do you mean it?”
I waited until the deputy left us alone. There were no recording devices in here or one-way glass. Katy and I could speak freely for the first time since I’d learned of her arrest.
“That depends,” I said. “I’m in an ethical quagmire if I walk into that courtroom with you.”
“I’ll sign whatever you need,” she said. “A waiver or something?”
“That’ll be the least of it,” I said. “You understand that my loyalty runs to Joe. If I find even a whiff of his involvement in this …”
“Did he ask you to help me?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer that. I didn’t want to be a liaison between the two of them. I didn’t want Joe talking to her at all. If I found out he had, this would become a very short conversation. I told her that.
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t Joe who talked me into coming. It was Emma.”
Katy burst into tears. “Oh God. That poor kid. I know she hates me now. But she wanted you here anyway?”
“She doesn’t hate you,” I said. “And I’d rather stick to the facts of your situation. When I saw you Friday, I told you it was too dangerous for you to tell me anything about your case. If I’m going to act as your lawyer, I need to know everything. Every detail, no matter how small. Just representing you at today’s hearing will be more than enough to invoke privilege over what you tell me. Representing you at trial if this gets that far is another decision we’ll have to make. I haven’t even seen the full police report.”
“I didn’t do this,” she said. “I didn’t kill Tom.”
“Do you understand the evidence they have against you so far?”
She shook her head. “Jenna thinks I killed him. She’s mistaken. She didn’t see what she thought she saw.”
“Jenna is your housekeeper?”
She nodded. “Jenna Rodney. She’s worked for Tom for a few years. Since before we got married. She’s a sweet kid. She’s not much older than Emma. And I understand why she’s confused. Why she might think the worst of me.”
“She told the police she walked in on you standing over Tom’s dead body holding the murder weapon and covered in his blood.”
“That’s true,” she said. “She absolutely did. But she didn’t see me kill him, because I didn’t.”
“Step by step,” I said. “Take me through it.”
Her eyelids fluttered. She looked like she was going to pass out on me. I took a small water bottle out of my bag and handed it to her. She gulped it down.
“I went to bed,” she said. “That’s the gist of it. I hadn’t been sleeping very well over the last few nights. Over the last couple of months, really. I was going on the third night of no more than two hours of sleep total. I had a couple of glasses of wine around eight, I think. A little later, I still felt keyed up. Tom had some sleeping pills left over from an old prescription. He suggested that I try them. He gave me the bottle before he left. I took two and was in bed by around ten. They hit me hard. I remember taking them, brushing my teeth, and climbing into bed. Then that was it until the next morning when I rolled over and …”
“Hang on,” I said. “Back up. Where was Tom?”
