Ransom River (23 page)

Petra looked embarrassed to be there. She said, “Friday after school I’m going to hit the road. Rory, please. Get out of this house at least.”

“It just makes me crazy,” Rory said. “Petra, this is your home. The whole thing is infuriating.”

Before she could throw something breakable, Petra picked up a bowl of fruit from the coffee table. It was filled with oranges. She offered them to Rory.

Rory grabbed the whole thing and pitched it at the wall.

The bowl clanged and clattered to the floor. Oranges rolled in all directions.

“Not quite what I had in mind,” Petra said. “But that’s okay.”

Rory turned to Seth. “What am I going to do? Knowing the names of the gunmen isn’t enough. What can we do with this information? Where do we go from here?”

“I’m working on it,” he said.

Petra rubbed her forehead. “Mirkovic’s men said something else to me.” She looked distraught. “They said you seemed to take your oath as a juror kind of twisted. That you were willing to pervert the course of justice and wouldn’t come clean with them, but you sure liked to get homey with your fellow jurors.”

“What did they mean?” Rory said. But she was afraid she knew.

“That they’d seen you in court, being friendly with the others in the jury box. Especially the people who sat on either side of you. They said they were going to find out what was going on one way or the other. Somebody could talk, they said.” She was fraught. “It could be you. Or not.”

Rory stood for a long moment, feeling ensnared. She thought about Frankie Ortega and Helen Ellis.

One of the oranges rolled slowly across the floor. Chiba trotted over, picked it up with his teeth, and dropped it at Rory’s feet. He joined the others in staring at her.

The lawyer’s office was on the sixteenth floor of a black glass skyscraper at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard in Century City. Outside the floor-to-ceiling window were the Los Angeles Country Club and the Santa Monica Mountains, a vista of emerald fairways and hillsides jeweled with million-dollar homes. Sitting across from the lawyer’s desk, Rory’s stomach churned. The view alone told her that this visit was going to be costly. A secretary in patent stilettos brought coffee on a silver tray, and the coins rang louder in her head.

A second later Jerry Nussbaum came in. “Ms. Mackenzie.”

He stood as tall as a point guard, with the wingspan of a vulture. Rory stood and shook his hand.

“David Goldstein tells me you need my help.” He sat down behind his desk. “That means I listen.”

At three hundred fifty bucks an hour, Rory figured, he’d better. And she’d better talk fast.

“I’m a juror on the Elmendorf murder trial. And the Ransom River police apparently suspect that I have some link with the gunmen who attacked the court yesterday. They’re threatening to prosecute me. They haven’t been specific, but they’re tossing around terms like conspiracy and felony murder.”

“David sketched the basic scenario for me.” Nussbaum took out a legal pad and a fountain pen. “On what evidence are they basing these suspicions?”

“CCTV video recorded during the siege. The gunmen seemed to choose me deliberately. And later I talked to one of them. One on one.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s apparently enough.”

He wrote with quick, sharp strokes. “We’ll want to see the video.”

“I’ve seen it. If you want to play conspiracist, you could make anybody in that courtroom look like an accomplice. But the cops homed in on me telling the gunmen, ‘We have to help him,’ after Judge Wieland was shot. They assert it’s evidence I was working with the gunmen.”

“‘We.’”

“Right.”

Nussbaum looked thoughtful. “Take me through it.”

It took her twenty minutes, and by the end, again, her heart was thudding, her hands knotted in her lap. Her coffee sat untouched on the table beside her.

When she described the tactical assault on the courtroom, Nussbaum shook his head. “Since 9/11, Homeland Security has had buckets of cash to dole out to local law enforcement—grants to first responders who want to go paramilitary. Every truck stop in America now has a fully armed SWAT team.”

He wrote more notes. “Is there anything else? Anything you want to tell me that could influence the situation?”

The defense attorney’s gambit. He would provide her with a zealous defense, and, if it came to it, force the prosecutor to prove her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. He would not ask a client if she was guilty. He just wondered, hypothetically, if she had anything else she might like to divulge.

“Three things,” she said.

Nussbaum’s face was alert and open. He looked ready to hear.

“I didn’t do it,” she said. “I did nothing except get called for jury duty. I never saw the gunmen before yesterday.”

He nodded. He didn’t indicate whether he believed her or not. He may or may not have considered her truthfulness relevant at the moment.

“Two, I think they were paid to attack the courtroom.”

That caused surprise. “How’s that?”

She laid it out. He took more notes and began to frown. He didn’t know what to make of her theory.

“Three. I stopped talking to the cops when they came down on me. I told them I was getting a lawyer.”

His expression turned rueful. “Kiss of death.”

She smiled, but without any humor. “God bless the USA.”

He carefully capped his fountain pen and set it on the legal pad.

“And four. I just got laid off. Let me come in and work here to defray my bill. I’ll do anything. Staple documents. Lick envelopes. Play a crazed hostile witness while you prep for cross examination.”

Nussbaum hesitated. When he finally spoke he seemed to have both stress and a smile in his voice.

“You’re admitted to practice in New York, you said?”

“Yes. And I’m taking the California bar exam in February.”

“Then, Counselor, when this matter is resolved we may have a desk for you in the library. In the meantime, we’ll work out a fee agreement.”

“Thank you,” Rory said. “How much trouble am I in?”

“I wish I could say you weren’t in any trouble at all. You shouldn’t be.”

She nodded. For a moment, he looked like he was contemplating the lawsuit he’d file on her behalf six months from now, for malicious prosecution.

“But if the Ransom River PD wants to take this all the way, you’re in big trouble. They can twist the evidence and implicate you on the slimmest of pretexts. Face it: They have the power. They can make your life hell.”

“I don’t know if they actually believe what they’re alleging, or if they’re trying to rattle me, or just want a scapegoat to pin the blame on.”

“We’ll have to address all three possibilities.”

“I’m scared witless,” she said.

“If the police, or the media, or anybody else wants to talk to you, refer them to me,” Nussbaum said.

“What can you do?”

“Guard your back. Be ready if they arrest you or try to take you in for more questioning.”

“Nothing, in other words.”

Nussbaum’s expression was melancholy. “Keep your mouth shut and your head down. I’ll deflect the incoming missiles.”

“Good luck with that,” she said.

R
ory got back to the house midafternoon. It felt strange to be home at two p.m., instead of in a buzzing office, or in a drafty warehouse filled with documents, or in an old Range Rover, carrying a backpack and refugees’ files. Two p.m. meant
Judge Judy
reruns and commercials for companies that bought your gold jewelry at ten cents on the dollar. Two p.m. was the time of loose ends.

And she had a bad feeling that she herself had become a loose end of the very worst kind. She pinched the bridge of her nose.

She checked her messages. She’d applied for twenty jobs so far: with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and law firms in New York, L.A., San Francisco, and even, as a safety application, Ransom River. For a numbing second she saw herself at the checkout stand at Beddie-Buy, thirty-five years old, worn out, holding a silent competition with Riss to scan customers’ throw pillows the fastest. Then she checked e-mail and perked up. A San Francisco firm wanted to speak to her. A phone interview: the first elimination round in job jujitsu. But it was a start.

The knock on the front door made her jump like a cricket. She ran upstairs, peered out the dormer window, and saw Seth’s truck parked in the driveway. He was directly below her, standing on the porch. She ran back down and let him in.

“How’d the meeting with the attorney go?” he said.

“If you enjoy eating bile, it was amazing.”

For a second he looked disappointed, as though he’d hoped she might
simply welcome him in and be glad to have him there. But the world had moved on from those days.

“The gunmen. I’ve been thinking,” he said.

She led him into the kitchen and put on a fresh pot of coffee. She avoided looking at the television, as though it might flare to life of its own volition and suck them through the screen into an episode of
Dog, the Bounty Hunter
.

“My brain’s fried. Feed it to me,” she said.

“Church and Berrigan. Here’s the point I keep coming to. Not only was the attack not personal, but it was never supposed to develop into a siege.”

Rory had two mugs in her hands. “What do you mean?”

“The gunmen were there to grab four hostages and
take them away.
But the attack went wrong.”

She set down the mugs. “Because the bystander counterattacked. There was chaos. That slowed them down.”

“They were supposed to get in and out with you and the other three ‘chosen’ hostages. But they blew it. They didn’t move fast enough. The cops arrived before they could escape with you and the others.”

“That makes sense,” she said.

“That’s why the gunmen ended up barricaded inside. That’s why you ended up against the window. That’s why they wasted time inventing demands that sounded ridiculous: because there weren’t supposed to be demands.” He paused. “Just an abduction.”

“Me.”

It jumped into clear relief against the confusion and mayhem of everything that had happened. “It was a kidnapping that went bad.”

The chill drip of adrenaline, of threat and fear, began working down her arms to her fingertips.

“Why?” she said. “To cause a mistrial? Certainly not to influence my vote. Nobody in the history of jury tampering has attempted to rig a trial by kidnapping a juror
from the courtroom.
Not even Tricky Dick Nixon and his pal Ronnie Reagan.”

“No. Jury tampering generally leans toward blackmail and quiet bribes.”

“Nobody does it in front of the judge and lawyers and the press, in the middle of testimony.”

“So it wasn’t your role in the trial. It was you.”

“That is goddamned freaking me out.”

He stared at her. She hadn’t moved.

“Aurora Mackenzie. The ice sculpture of freak-outs,” he said.

“Is that an insult?”

“Hardly. Rory, you could be
on fire
and you’d have exactly the same expression on your face.”

That, for some reason, nearly made her crack. She turned to the coffeemaker and poured mugs for both of them.

“The media is playing up the terror angle,” she said. “Cop hatred. But the gunmen had the perfect opportunity to execute the defendants, and they didn’t.”

“It wasn’t political,” Seth said.

“It was about me.”

He watched her for a moment. “Your NGO work. Political? Dangerous?”

“Always political. Rarely dangerous. Seth, I spent ninety percent of my time evaluating case histories and court filings and transcripts of deportation hearings. I bought myself a parka because I worked for seven months in a warehouse outside Helsinki, reading bureaucratic reports. I wasn’t hired for my razor-sharp legal mind. I was a glorified paralegal. A document drone. That’s not what the siege was about.”

“Dangerous,” he said.

“No.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I went into the field only twice. And not to places where the government is going to reach out
to America
and seek revenge against an expat aid worker.”

“Where?”

“Once to Syria.”

“That’s dangerous.”