Don't Call Me Hero (31 page)

The Assistant D.A. worked the knot on his necktie. “The prosecution rests, your Honor.”

The courtroom seemed to hold its collective breath as we waited for Julia’s response. She had done virtually
nothing
all day in court. I half expected her to ask for a motion to dismiss the charges, arguing that we had failed to prove our case, but that request never came.

The judge swung his gavel. “Court is in recess. We’ll reconvene at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow morning.” He trained his gaze on Julia. “Ms. Desjardin, I expect you’ll have a defense ready by then?”

“Of course, your Honor.”

As the courtroom emptied, the former city attorney gathered her yellow legal pad and other loose notes and carefully filed them away in her black leather briefcase. Her father said something to her too quiet for me to overhear. Her red lipsticked mouth thinned, and she shook her head hard.

He leaned forward as if to say more, but she snapped her bag shut. “I said
no
,” she growled out.

Mr. Desjardin shoved his wooden chair back into place. “Fine. I’ll see you in the morning,” he grumbled before stalking out of the courtroom.

I walked up to the defense table on shaky legs. “What was that about?” I shoved my hands into the back pockets of my jeans.

Julia scowled. “Not that it’s any of your business, but he invited me out to dinner.”

“I hope it wasn’t to celebrate.”

“Of course not. That would be premature.”

“Especially since you did nothing at all today to win your case.”

She jerked her head up and leveled me with a steely gaze. “That’s your opinion.”

“What game are you playing at, Julia? Are you even
trying
to defend your father?”

“I wouldn’t have resigned from my job if I was going to let him go to jail.”

“Why not? It seems like the perfect scenario to get you out of this town. No more job. Your dad in some white-collar prison.”

Julia’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want from me, Cassidy? Because it sounds like you actually want me to win this case and beat you.”

“I don’t,” I denied. “Your father embezzled a shitload of money from the city, and he has to face the consequences.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow in court, Detective.”

I didn’t want to be dismissed so easily, but David snagged my arm before I could go after her. “Come on, Miller,” he said. “No fraternizing with the enemy.”

I tried to form a protest as he dragged me away. “But I—”

“I need lunch and you’re buying.”

We stopped off at Stan’s after court had adjourned for the day. The diner was filled with others who had also attended the unusual court proceedings. David dug into his cheeseburger and fries while I picked at mine.

“What do you think she’s up to?”

David jammed a few fries into his mouth. “Julia?”

I nodded.

“Discredit the witnesses, introduce a new suspect, and create doubt,” he listed off around a mouthful of greasy starch. “At least that’s what they do on all of those lawyer-crime TV dramas.”

“I’ve never heard of a defense attorney not doing anything with the prosecution’s witnesses though,” I thought out loud. “It makes me nervous—like this is the calm before the storm.”

“Uh huh.” I didn’t think David was actually listening to me. He at least didn’t share my concerns. “You gonna eat that?”

I pushed my plate in his direction. “Go ahead. It’s all yours.” I couldn’t eat. My stomach was too knotted with dread.

That unsettled feeling still hadn’t left when I showed up at the courtroom the next morning. I hadn’t been able to sleep before my shift when I’d returned from lunch with David; my brain refused to shut down. I kept thinking about Julia’s strategy. There had to have been a reason why she’d refused to cross-examine any of the prosecution’s witnesses. I was thankful to have work that night to keep me busy, because for once, my war demons weren’t bothering me. Instead, it was the not knowing when it came to this case and Julia that assured I wouldn’t sleep well.

“You look spooked,” David remarked out of the side of his mouth. The courtroom seemed even more populated on day two of Mayor Desjardin’s trial.

“Because I am,” I admitted. “I still think Julia’s up to something.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You were here yesterday. It was like she was purposely trying to lose.”

“Maybe she realizes what a strong case we’ve built against her dad,” David suggested. “Maybe he refused to plead guilty, so she’s helping move along the inevitable.”

My eyes followed the shapely figure of Julia Desjardin as she entered the courtroom with her father. She ignored me, chin held high, just as she’d done the day before as she reached the front of the room. “That would be the best case scenario.”

“And the worst case?” David asked.

“We’re fucked.”

The judge entered the courtroom, and all conversations came to an end. Everyone rose from their seats and waited for him to sit down in his chair before returning to theirs.

He adjusted his reading glasses at the end of his nose. “Court is now in session. We will return to the case of the City of Embarrass versus William Desjardin. Ms. Desjardin, you may call your first witness.”

Julia rose gracefully from her chair. I turned in mine to watch her in profile. Her face was stony and emotionless. “Your Honor, the Defense calls Detective Cassidy Miller of the Embarrass City Police Department to the witness stand.”

David elbowed me in the ribs. “What the fuck?” he quietly hissed.

“I don’t fucking know!” I scrambled to my feet, unprepared. David had been called to testify the previous day on behalf of the prosecution and police department. Julia had refused the opportunity to cross-examine him. I had no idea what she hoped to accomplish by dragging me to testify.

I stumbled up to the witness stand and nervously raked my fingers through my hair. The bailiff swore me in, and I took my seat beside the judge.

Standing behind the defense table, Julia looked poised. She took a moment to review her notes before her caramel-colored eyes looked in my direction. When our eyes finally locked, I saw only determination reflected in hers.

We were fucked.

“Your Honor,” her voice rang out, clear and assured, “I’d like to identify Detective Miller as a hostile witness.”

A collective murmur buzzed in the courtroom. I didn’t know how savvy the gallery was on criminal law or trial lingo, but they at least gathered that something was happening. By identifying me as a hostile witness, Julia was acknowledging that my testimony would not be favorable to her father’s defense. But more importantly, it gave her the power to ask me leading questions that normally would not be allowed.

The judge struck his gavel to call for quiet. “Please proceed, Counselor.”

“Detective Miller,” Julia began, “how long have you been a police officer?”

I squirmed in my chair. The first question was a softball, but it still made me anxious. “A little over a year.”

“And of that year, how long have you been employed by the city of Embarrass?”

I glanced in the direction of the Assistant D.A., but he wasn’t even looking at me. His head was buried in his briefcase. “About two months.”

David’s words from lunch the day before flashed in my head:
Discredit the Witness.

Julia pressed her palms flat against the wooden table. “Can you walk us through how you and Sergeant Addams came to connect the Defendant to these alleged crimes?”

There was that damn word again. Alleged. I kept my inner monologue to myself, mindful of my environment, and took to the task of talking about the case. It was largely the same response that David had given the day before, but slightly different from my point of view.

“Sergeant Addams approached me with a concern about a purchase order for forty police radios. We both found it to be suspicious because our police department is only three people.”

“But you discovered later that those forty radios were for police departments in other towns, is that correct?”

I frowned. Julia was intimately familiar with this case because of me. She was asking leading questions, which normally wasn’t allowed, but I’d been named a hostile witness which gave her the power to lead me in whatever direction she wanted to. I proceeded to answer her question, careful with my words as though treading through a mine field.

“Correct. As part of the investigation I visited the chief of police in Babbitt. He told me he’d received notice from Chief Hart about a collaborative grant opportunity for communication equipment available through the Department of Homeland Security.”

“So it was Lawrence Hart who approached the neighboring agencies about this opportunity.”

“Yes. At the time.” I frowned. Julia was making it sound like Chief Hart had done something wrong when he’d only been following the Mayor’s directive.
Introduce a New Suspect.

“But upon questioning Chief Hart, we were informed that Mayor Desjardin had directed him to reach out to neighboring police and fire departments about the radios, and that he’d been told by Mayor Desjardin that the grant was a match program instead of it being entirely free.” I wasn’t going to let her throw shade on the Chief. He hadn’t done anything wrong; he’d been manipulated just as much as the other cities’ emergency responders had.

“Miss Miller,” Julia coolly stated, “I’ll ask you to only answer the questions I’ve asked and to stay on topic.”

I flicked my gaze over to the judge who only nodded his head in agreement.

Yup. Fucked.

Julia cleared her throat. “So your investigation hit a dead end. The group grant accounted for the unusually large purchase order.”

“Yes.” She knew the story better than I did.

“Tell me, Detective Miller, when did the case resume?”

“I, uh, when the paperwork on the radios went missing.”

“Went missing?” Julia echoed. Her voice lilted up almost comically, but she knew all of this.

“Yeah. I was keeping it in my apartment, and when we went to look for it, it was gone.”

“Is it standard procedure to keep paperwork for an on-going investigation in one’s home?”

“Well, no.” I cringed. She didn’t have to try very hard to discredit me. I was doing a bang-up job on my own. “But the investigation had come to a dead end.”

“So you lost the files.”

I couldn’t very well say that I thought someone had stolen them. It sounded too much like a conspiracy theory. “I don’t know what happened to the paperwork,” I settled for. “We called the Office of Emergency Communications directly, and they were able to confirm that the grant for the radios had been entirely funded. Not long after that, Sergeant Addams and I petitioned the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the original grant application. Mayor Desjardin was named as the issuing agent.”

“But surely you had more than just a name on a piece of paper, Detective. As Mayor, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for William Desjardin to be listed on the application,” Julia pointed out. “Isn’t it possible that the Defendant filled out the grant application for the fully-funded police radios, but then Chief Hart told other police agencies it was a collaborative match program?”

“It’s possible, but not likely,” I noted. “We later discovered that the bank account that other cities had been provided wasn’t the city’s general fund. In fact, it didn’t belong to the city at all. It was a private bank account that further investigation revealed belonged to Mayor Desjardin. If Chief Hart was the person responsible, why would Mayor Desjardin have fiscally benefitted?”

Julia smiled prettily, and I hated her a little for it. “I’m not the one on the witness stand, Detective. It’s not my job to answer your questions.”

I looked again in the direction of the judge to get some backup, but his stoical face indicated I was still on my own.

“Can you walk us through how you discovered the personal bank account that allegedly belongs to the Defendant?” Julia continued.

Alleged.
I bit my tongue and kept my comments to myself. I was an officer of the court, and I would respond appropriate to my position.

“The OEC grant indicated that no money should have been exchanged for the forty police radios. We had the word of several police chiefs, but we needed tangible proof. While looking through the city’s general fund to confirm that each neighboring agency had paid for their share of the police radios, we came up empty. The money wasn’t there. Rather than look through every bank account associated with the city, the former city attorney suggested we ask the other agencies directly for the specific account number where they’d deposited the radio money to.”

Julia visibly stiffened at the reference to herself, but I kept going. “It turned out to be a private bank account—one belonging to Mayor Desjardin. The Mayor misled Chief Hart and the police chiefs of surrounding towns into thinking it was a collaborative match program and he pocketed their money.”

“Detective Miller,” Julia snapped. “I’ll warn you only one more time to stick to the questions I’ve asked. I don’t need you to ad lib.”