Page 5 of Hard Heart

She brightened. “Oh, that’s great! So you have experience on the other side? The hiring process was slightly rushed, and I haven’t seen your résumé.”

“I qualified as a solicitor in the UK, then moved to New York, spent two years getting my JD, and passed the bar exam.”

“In New York?”

“Yes.”

“And then you…moved here to Virginia?” She raised an eyebrow because that really didn’t make much sense, career-wise.

“The move was for personal reasons. I’m hoping to take the Virginia bar exam in February.”

Now the other eyebrow winged up. “Boy, you’re going to be busy.”

“I’m not expecting to have much of a social life.”

Instead of laughing the way my supervisor at Bester & Block would have done, Raelene gave me a look of sympathy.

“Well, we’ll surely do our best to support you. If you need to take a few extra hours for study nearer the time, that should be okay.”

“Really?”

“Most folks who work here aren’t in it for the money.” No kidding. “So we try to provide a nice environment because we don’t want anyone burning out and leaving unnecessarily. We’re real glad to have you here, Serafina. Did I pronounce that right?”

“Sair-uh-fee-nuh, yes. But Sera is fine.”

“Sera,” she repeated. “You have a list of the types of cases we do take, but there are several we don’t touch—racketeering, drug possession or sales, fraud, DUI, long-term abuse. There isn’t any straightforward way to overturn those, and frankly, we don’t want to try.”

I scribbled frantically. “I understand.”

“Once you’ve triaged the cases, we’ll be able to move on to the research phase—submitting freedom of information requests, obtaining police files, reviewing the evidence, laying out the facts, and speaking with those who’ve been convicted.”

“You want me to…speak with the prisoners?”

“Some of them. We tend to split the workload here, and by then, you’ll know their cases better than anyone. But without being admitted to the Virginia Bar, you won’t be able to offer any legal advice. It’ll purely be a fact-finding exercise.”

I was about to ask whether that was even safe, but I bit my tongue. If I’d done my job and reviewed the applications properly, I should only be visiting innocent men. No point in calling my abilities into question right at the beginning.

“I’m looking forward to it.”

Now she laughed. “Don’t worry, we’ll prepare you for what to expect before we throw you to the wolves. Take my advice and wear pants. Walking around a prison looking the way you do is asking for trouble.”

“Is my skirt too short?”

It was practically knee-length, and nobody at Bester & Block had voiced a problem with it.

“I’m talking about the whole package. You don’t need to wear a suit here—it isn’t as if we get many clients visiting the office.” She grinned at me. “Good luck, Sera. You know where the coffee machine is? We all chip in to buy the pods, and there are usually cookies in the jar.”

I had a feeling I’d need my caffeine via IV by the time February rolled around, but I nodded.

“I’m ready.”

By Friday, the stack was two inches shorter, and I’d reviewed eighty-three forms, starting from the bottom of the pile. Some of these folks had been in prison for years. Decades, even. More than half didn’t fit the criteria—an appeal hadn’t been completed, or it was the wrong type of crime—and I drafted a letter explaining our position. Of the remainder, few had an obvious thread to start pulling on. I was left with four possibles. Well, three possibles and one “this guy’s either a wacko conspiracy theorist or the world’s biggest scapegoat.”

Probably, I should have put his application in the “nope” pile, but I’d started reading it just before my lunch break, and I didn’t want to look like a slacker in my first week on the job, so I googled “Levi Sykes trial” while I ate my meatball marinara sub from Joey’s Deli, a choice which came highly recommended by Raelene. The sub was fourteen inches long—I measured it—and if I ate one of those every day, wearing my pinstriped skirt suit wouldn’t be an issue anymore. I’d be in elasticated trousers.

“Ready to go through the list?” Raelene asked, the sticky wheel on her chair squeaking as she wheeled it over threadbare industrial carpet.

The Justice Project was about as different to Bester & Block as a firm could get, but I didn’t hate it. And the work was eye-opening—while I was at the CPS, I’d been totally focused on putting people behind bars, but now I was beginning to realise how many convictions might be unsafe. Great trial lawyers were supremely confident, maybe even arrogant, but that win-at-all-costs mentality meant innocent people paid the price.