He stares at me for a long time before a smile appears. “Wow, you are a piece of work.” He laughs. “I know I’m not the big fancy lawyer you are,” he says with a wave of jazz hands, “but I’m not an idiot, either. I show the jury that video of you planting the drugs. I show the jury the DNA and fingerprint results. And we’re done. That’s it. No jury convicts me.”
“But what about your version of the events?” I ask.
“My version?” He cups a hand over his mouth, like he’s about to whisper a secret. “I’m not going totellmy story,” he says. “I’ll let that video and the test results do the talking. It’s called exercising the right to remain silent. Ever heard of that?”
“Yup.” I smile. “Too bad you didn’t exercise it the other day when we talked.”
From my purse I remove a small, clear plastic case holding a disc. “I had it burned onto a CD,” I say. “I know you still have one of those disc drives on your home computer.”
His eyes go cold, his body still as a statue. “What…the fuck…is that?”
“It’s your copy,” I say. “I made several. Wanna listen?” I pull out the digital recorder I had in my pocket when Luke and I had our fight. I hit play:
“This was Trinity’s idea, wasn’t it? Yeah. It was her idea to steal one of my shopping bags and toss the Oxy pills inside it. Her idea to steal a tube of my lipstick. This was all Trinity. You don’t have it in you—”
“I don’t owe you an explanation. I don’t owe you shit!”
“Well, that answers my question right—”
“No, it doesn’t—”
“Yes, it does. Once again, she talks you into—”
“What’s with this Trinity-manipulating-me bullshit, like I can’t think for myself? It was my idea! I did it. I took your shopping bag and lipstick. I put the pills inside. I drove the car. Trinity didn’t even want me to do it.”
I shut off the recorder. “That’s gonna be tough to explain,” I say. “You’re admitting you put the drugs in the car yourself. The good news for you is, nobody ever has to hear that recording of you. As long as nobody sees that video ofme.”
The look on Luke’s face reads pure hatred. But he’s really just mad at himself.
“I never went after you, Luke. I went after Trinity. But you went after me. So I’m protecting myself. You’ll still win your case, I think, because you still have my DNA and fingerprints on the contraband and a plausible story. That should be enough for reasonable doubt. But show that video to the prosecutors, and I play them this audio. You’ll go to prison.”
“Then so will you,” he says.
“I will? For what? For the crime of putting a bag in a car?”
“A bag with drugs,” he says, but the conviction in his voice is slipping.
“Says who? Where’s the proof there were drugs in the bag I put in there? Your word? Luke, that’s not how the law on possession works. To be convicted of possession, you have to be caught in the act with the drugs. You were. You have to have custody and control over the drugs. You did. And on that recording, you admitted you put the drugs there. So you’re guilty. Me? Even if you could prove that the bag I put in the trunk had drugs in it—and you can’t—so what? I wasn’t caught in the act. At the time they found the drugs, I didn’t have custody of them. I didn’t have control over them. I was thirty miles away. Possession isn’t like murder. You can’t be prosecuted just because at some point in the past, you possessed drugs. You have to be caught in the act. It’s called thecorpus delicti, if you want to research it.”
Now he’s just getting flustered. I don’t blame him. He’s in over his head. He’s playing on my turf.
“Bottom line,” I say, “bury that video, and I’ll bury this audio. Or it’s bad for you.”
He backs away, red in the face. “I…I trusted you…You were my attorney—”
“No, no,” I say. “We terminated our attorney-client relationship the night before. In writing. Signed and dated by you. Our conversation was not privileged. It is admissible in a court of law.”
“You…” He shakes his head. A bitter smile crosses his face.
I slap the plastic case with the disc against his chest. “Don’t play your card, Luke, and I won’t play mine. And we’ll get past this, you’ll see.”
44
Allison
I’m awake before my alarm at 5:30 a.m. Sleep has been a problem for me. For one, being alone in a bed for the first time in nearly twenty years, which I’ve done for the last week since giving Finley the boot. And Marlow Luckett paid me a visit two days later; no matter how often I tell myself that he won’t return, it hasn’t been easy dozing off at night.
Oh, let’s see, then there’s theChildresstrial getting closer every day with so much to do, dealing with Finley’s craziness, and of course Luke’s betrayal. I can feel it all wearing me down, knotting my neck and shoulders, pressing behind my eyes.
