Tell Me No Secrets

H
e was waiting for her when she got to work. Or so it seemed to Jess, who spotted him immediately, standing motionless at the comer of California Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street. She felt him watching her as she left the parking garage and hurried across the street toward the Administration Building, his dark eyes colder than the late October wind that played with his straggly blond hair, his bare hands clenched into tight fists outside the pockets of his well-worn brown leather jacket. Did she know him?

His body shifted slightly as Jess drew closer, and she saw that his mouth was twisted into an eerie little half grin that pulled at one side of his full lips, as if he knew something that she didn’t. It was a smile devoid of warmth, the smile of one who, as a child, enjoyed pulling the wings off butterflies, she thought with a shudder, ignoring the almost imperceptible nod of his head that greeted her as
their eyes connected. A smile full of secrets, she understood, turning away quickly, and running up the front steps, suddenly afraid.

Jess felt the man move into position behind her, knew without looking that he was mounting the stairs after her, the deliberateness of his steps vibrating throughout her body. She reached the landing and pushed her shoulder against the heavy glass revolving door, the stranger stopping at the top of the steps, his face appearing and reappearing with each rotation of the glass, the sly smile never leaving his lips.

I am Death
, the smile whispered.
I have come for you
.

Jess heard a loud gasp escape her lips, understood from the shuffling along the marble floor behind her that she had attracted the attention of one of the security guards. She spun around, watching the guard, whose name was Tony, approach cautiously, his hand gravitating toward the holster of his gun. “Something wrong?” he asked.

“I hope not,” Jess answered. “There’s a man out there who …” Who what? she demanded silently, staring deep into the guard’s tired blue eyes. Who wants to come in out of the cold? Who has a creepy grin? Was that a crime now in Cook County? The guard looked past her toward the door, Jess slowly tracking his gaze. There was no one there.

“Looks like I’m seeing ghosts,” Jess said apologetically, wondering if this were true, grateful that whatever the young man was, he was gone.

“Well, it’s the season for it,” the guard said, checking Jess’s identification even though he knew who she was, waving her through the metal detector as he’d been doing routinely every morning for the past four years.

Jess liked routine. Every morning she got up at 6:45, quickly showered and dressed in the clothes she had carefully laid out the night before, gobbled a piece of Pepperidge Farm frozen cake directly from the freezer, and was behind her desk within the hour, her calendar open to the day’s events, her case files ready. If she was prosecuting a case, there would be details to go over with her assistants, strategies to devise, questions to formulate, answers to determine. (A good attorney never asked a question to which she didn’t already know the answer.) If she was preparing for an upcoming trial, there would be information to gather, leads to run down, witnesses waiting upstairs to be interviewed, police officers to talk to, meetings to attend, timetables to coordinate. Everything according to schedule. Jess Koster didn’t like surprises outside the courtroom any better than she liked them inside it.

After she had a full grasp of the day that lay ahead, she would sit back with a cup of black coffee and a jelly doughnut and study the morning paper, starting with the obituaries. She always checked the obituaries.
Ashcroft, Pauline, died suddenly in her home, in her sixty-seventh year; Barrett, Ronald, passed away after a lengthy illness, age 79; Black, Matthew, beloved husband and father, no age given, donations to be sent to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of America
. Jess wasn’t sure when she’d started making the obituaries part of her regular morning routine, and she wasn’t sure why. It was an unusual habit for someone barely thirty years old, even for a prosecutor with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office in Chicago. “Find anyone you know?” one of her partners once asked. Jess had shaken her head, no. There was never anyone she knew.

Was she searching for her mother, as her ex-husband had once suggested? Or was it her own name she somehow expected to see?

The stranger with the unruly blond hair and evil grin pushed his way rudely into her mind’s eye.
I am Death
, he teased, his voice bouncing off the bareness of the office walls.
I have come for you
.

Jess lowered the morning paper and let her eyes glance around the room. Three desks in varying degrees of scratched walnut sat at random angles against dull white walls. There were no framed pictures, no landscapes, no portraits, nothing but an old poster from
Bye Bye Birdie
haphazardly tacked onto the wall across from her desk by a few random pieces of yellowed Scotch tape. Law books filled strictly utilitarian metal shelves. Everything looked as if it could be picked up and moved out with only a minute’s notice. Which it could. Which it often was. Assistant state’s attorneys were rotated on a regular basis. It was never a good idea to get too comfortable.

Jess shared the office with Neil Strayhorn and Barbara Cohen, her second and third chair respectively, who would be arriving within the half hour. As first chair, it was up to Jess to make all major decisions as to how her office was run. There were 750 state’s attorneys in Cook County, over 200 of them in this building alone, 18 attorneys to every wing, 3 attorneys to every room, each watched over by a wing supervisor. By eight-thirty, the labyrinth of offices that made up the eleventh and twelfth floors of the Administration Building would be as noisy as Wrigley Field, or so it often seemed to Jess, who usually relished these few moments of peace and quiet before everyone arrived.

Today was different. The young man had unnerved her, thrown her off her usual rhythm. What about him was so familiar? she wondered. In truth, she hadn’t gotten a good look at his face, hadn’t seen much past the eerie grin, would never have been able to describe him for a police sketch artist, could never have picked him out of a lineup. He hadn’t even spoken to her. So why was she obsessing on him?

Jess resumed her scanning of the obituaries:
Bederman, Marvin, 74, died peacefully in his sleep after a lengthy illness; Edwards, Sara, taken in her ninety-first year. …

“You’re here early.” The male voice traveled to her desk from the open doorway.

“I’m always here early,” Jess answered without looking up. No need to. If the heavy scent of Aramis cologne wasn’t enough to give Greg Oliver away, the confident swagger in his voice would. It was an office cliché that Greg Oliver’s winning record in the courtroom was surpassed only by his record in the bedroom, and for that reason, Jess had always made sure to keep her conversations with the forty-year-old prosecutor from the next office strictly professional. Her divorce from one lawyer had taught her that the last thing she ever wanted to do was get involved with another. “Is there something I can do for you, Greg?”

Greg Oliver traversed the distance to her desk in three quick strides. “Tell me what you’re reading.” He leaned forward to peer over her shoulder. “The obits? Christ, what some people won’t do to get their name in print.”

Jess chuckled in spite of herself. “Greg, I’m really busy. …”

“I can see that.”

“No, really,” Jess told him, taking quick note of his conventionally handsome face, made memorable by the liquid chocolate of his eyes. “I have to be in court at nine-thirty.”

He checked his watch. A Rolex. Gold. She’d heard rumors that he’d recently married money. “You’ve got lots of time.”

“Time I need to get my thoughts in order.”

“I bet your thoughts are already in order,” he said, straightening up only to lean back against her desk, openly checking his reflection in the glass of the window behind her, his hand brushing against a stack of carefully organized paperwork. “I bet your mind is as neat as your desk.” He laughed, the motion tugging at one comer of his mouth, reminding Jess instantly of the stranger with the ominous grin. “Look at you,” Greg said, misreading her response. “You’re all uptight because I accidentally moved a couple of your papers.” He made a great show of straightening them, then whisked some imaginary dust from the ragged surface of her desk top. “You don’t like anybody touching your stuff, do you?” His fingers caressed the wood grain in small, increasingly suggestive circles. The effect was almost hypnotic. A snake charmer, Jess thought, wondering momentarily whether he was the charmer or the snake.

She smiled, amazed at the way her mind seemed to be working this morning, and stood up, moving purposefully toward the bookshelves, though, in truth, she had no purpose in mind. “I think you better go so I can get some work done. I’m delivering my closing argument this morning in the Erica Barnowski case and …”

“Erica Barnowski?” His eyes reflected the path of his thoughts. “Oh yes. The girl who says she was raped …”

“The
woman
who
was
raped,” Jess corrected.

His laugh invaded the space between them. “Jesus Christ, Jess, she wasn’t wearing panties! You think any jury in the land is going to convict a guy of raping some woman he meets in a bar when she wasn’t wearing panties?” Greg Oliver looked toward the ceiling, then back at Jess, automatically smoothing back several hairs he’d displaced. “I don’t know, but her not wearing panties to a pickup bar smacks of implied consent to me.”

“And a knife at her throat is your idea of foreplay?” Jess shook her head, more in sadness than disgust. Greg Oliver was notoriously accurate in his assessments. If she couldn’t manage to persuade her fellow prosecutors that the man on trial was guilty, how could she hope to convince a jury?

“I don’t see a panty line under that short skirt,” Greg Oliver was saying. “Tell me, Counselor, you wearing panties?”

Jess’s hands moved to the sides of the gray wool skirt that stopped at her knees. “Cut it out, Greg,” she said simply.

The mischief in Greg Oliver’s voice spread to his eyes. “Just what would it take to get into those panties?”

“Sorry, Greg,” Jess told him evenly, “but I’m afraid there’s only room in these panties for
one
asshole.”

The liquid chocolate of Greg Oliver’s eyes hardened into brown ice, then immediately melted as the sound of his laughter once again filled the room. “That’s what I love about you, Jess. You’re so damn feisty. You’ll take anybody on.” He walked toward the door. “I’ll give you this much—if anybody can win this case, you can.”

“Thanks,” Jess said to the closing door. She walked to the window and stared absently out at the street eleven stories below. Large billboards shouted up at her:
Abogado
, they announced. “Lawyer,” in Spanish, followed by a name.
A different name for every sign. Open twenty-four hours a day.

There were no other high buildings in the area. At fourteen stories tall, the Administration Building stuck out like the sore thumb it represented. The adjoining courthouse was a mere seven stories high. Behind them stood the Cook County Jail, where accused murderers and other alleged criminals who either couldn’t make bail or were being held without bond were kept until their cases came to court. Jess often thought of the area as a dark, evil place for dark, evil people.

I am Death
, she heard the streets whisper.
I have come for you
.