What He Believes (3 page)

“Who are you?”
Lilah asked, her eyes flicking back and forth between
me and
Noah
.

“I’m Noah Cutler,
and this is my associate, Charlotte Holloway.
 
We’re lawyers.”

“Lawyers,” she
repeated the word, and her eyes got even wider, like she couldn’t believe she
was in a situation where lawyers were going to have to be involved.

“Yes,” Noah said
gently.
 
“We heard about your case,
and we wanted to come down and offer our services.”

Lilah shook her
head sadly.
 
“I’m sorry, I don’t
have any money.”

“We’d like to work
for you pro bono,” I explained.

“I don’t know what
that means,” she replied.
 
She took
in a deep shuddering breath and pushed her bangs out of her eyes.
 

She didn’t know
what pro bono meant?
 
That seemed a
little bit of a stretch for a nineteen-year-old.
 
But maybe I was being too hard on
her.
 
Just because I knew what pro
bono meant didn’t meant she did.
 
I
knew nothing about her, what her life was like,
her
education.
 

“It means we’d like
to work for you for free,” I explained.

Lilah frowned and
bit her bottom lip, revealing perfectly straight white teeth.
 
“Why would you want to do that?”

“Because we think
your case is going to be a big one, and we’d like to help you,” Noah said, not
pulling any punches.
 
I glanced at
him out of the corner of my
eye,
glad he was telling
her the truth and not trying to pretend like we were here just out of the
goodness of our hearts.
 

“Why is my case
going to be big?” Lilah wanted to know.
 

Noah smiled.
 
“Why don’t we start at the beginning,”
he said.
 
“First things first.”
 
He reached into his briefcase and pulled
out a sheaf of papers.
 
“This
document says that you agree that we’ll be representing you legally in this
case.”

Lilah glanced at
the paper,
then
looked back up at me and Noah.
 
She reached down, picked up the pen, and
signed the documents.
 
“This means
you can’t tell them anything we talk about, right?”

“Right,” Noah
said.

She’d signed the
paper without even looking at it, which made me think she might really have
been naïve enough to not know what pro bono meant.
 
Although somehow she’d
known about lawyer/client confidentiality.

“So, why don’t you
tell us what happened,” Noah said.

“Ry’s dead,” Lilah
announced.

“Ry, that was your
boyfriend?” I asked.

“Yes, Ry.
 
Ryan.
 
He was my boyfriend, but he’s dead
now.”
 
She was talking with a flat
affect, her tone completely devoid of emotion.
 
I glanced at Noah.
 
Come on,
I was thinking.
 
If my boyfriend had just died, if I’d
killed him in self-defense before being thrown in jail, I would be freaking the
hell out.
 
I would be crying,
screaming, pleading for someone to get me out of here.

This girl was
announcing her boyfriend’s death like she was reciting a weather report.

“Do you have any
idea how he died?”
 
I asked.

“I killed him,”
Lilah said simply, and hearing her say the words knocked the breath out of
me.
 
I glanced at Noah again, but he
was looking straight ahead, his eyes trained on Lilah.

“You killed your
boyfriend?” he asked.

“I had to,” she
said.
 
“Ry, he… he found out about
some things, and he just… he was trying to… he wanted me to do things I wasn’t
comfortable with.”

It was the first
time her voice had betrayed any kind of emotion since she’d been brought in
here, and her eyes were wide with fear.
 

“What kind of
things?” I asked gently.
 
If she was
talking about sexual things, it was probably better for the question to come
from me, a woman.

“Sex things,” she
said quietly.

“He tried to rape
you?” I prompted.
  
“And so you
stabbed him?”

“I don’t
remember.”
 
The fear had drifted
from her eyes, replaced with something almost catatonic.
 
A shiver of fear drifted up my
spine.
 
Something was off about this
girl – a girl her size had almost been raped, and yet had somehow been
able to not only fight off her attacker
but
kill him?
 
Why was her boyfriend trying to rape her?
 
And how had she been able to overpower
him?
 

“You don’t
remember?” I pushed, not even bothering to keep the skepticism out of my
voice.
 
“You don’t remember that you
stabbed your boyfriend--” I glanced down at the police report in front of
me—“twenty-seven times and then slit his throat?”

“I had to,” she
said.
 
“He wanted it.”

“He wanted what?”
I asked.

“Charlotte.”
 
Noah put his hand gently on my arm.

I looked at him,
annoyed.
 
What was he doing?
 
This girl obviously had some kind of
screw loose, and the sooner we let her know we weren’t buying her story, the
better.
 
We weren’t going to be able
to help her if she insisted on lying to us.
 
A self-defense case was difficult as
hell to win under normal circumstances, but now this girl was trying to tell us
she didn’t remember what had happened?

She was going to
have to get over that, and fast.

Taking on a
high-profile pro bono case was one thing.
 
It was quite another to take on a high-profile pro bono case you had no
chance of winning, with a client who was going to sabotage her own case by
working against you.

Even I knew
that.
 
It was Criminal Law 101, not
to mention common sense.

“Have you seen a
doctor?” Noah asked her.

Lilah shook her
head.

“Have you told
anyone that you’re a victim of an attempted rape?” Noah asked.

I looked at him,
my eyes widening in surprise.
 
Was he really believing
this bullshit?
 
That her boyfriend had almost raped her
and so she’d gone so crazy that she’d somehow overpowered him and slit his
throat?
 
And that all she had on her
was a mark on her face?

I had no problem
believing she was the victim of something – I knew that in these
situations, the victims were made to feel as if they didn’t have a voice, and
that was the last thing I wanted to happen to Lilah.

But something
about this just felt off.

“Yes,” she
said.
 
“Well, no.
 
I mean, I told them Ry came after
me.
 
But they didn’t… I’m not
sure.
 
I think I saw them write it
down.”
 

“On the police
report you mean?”
 
I said it very
pointedly, knowing that if the police had thought anything was off, if they’d
had reason to think that Lilah had been raped, they would have taken her to the
hospital and made sure she’d gotten an exam.

Noah gave me a
pointed look right back, one of those
‘the police miss things, Charlotte,
you should understand that better than anyone after what we’ve been through’
looks.

“Where’s the
murder weapon?” I asked.

“Charlotte!”
 
Noah exclaimed.

“I mean, where’s
the knife you used on Ry?”

Lilah didn’t seem
offended by my question, or the fact that I’d just referred to her boyfriend’s
death as a murder.
 
Her eyes kept
that same blank look.
 
“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”
 
I tried to keep from scoffing, but it
was difficult.

She shook her
head.
 
“Everything just… it all
happened so fast.”

“Do you know where
you got the knife?”
 
I pressed her,
trying to keep my tone a little more neutral, if only because I didn’t want to
risk Noah reprimanding me again.

“What?”
 
Lilah seemed startled by this.
 
She put her cuffed hands up on the table
and
steepled
them, her fingertips rubbing together
rhythmically, almost like a nervous tic.
 
She was wearing dark nail polish, the kind the girls in my undergrad
wore, the ones that were trying to be badass and compensate for the fact that
they were upper middle class and getting a private school education.

“Ry was found in
the bedroom,” I said.
 
“It’s a
strange place to have a knife.”

Lilah shook her
head.
 
“I don’t know.
 
Maybe I went out in the kitchen and got
it.”

I nodded and made
a note on my legal pad, making sure not to look at Noah.
 
Did this girl really expect us to
believe that her boyfriend tried to sexually assault her in the bedroom,
then
she ran out into the kitchen and grabbed a knife before
she returned to the bedroom where she then slit his throat?

“Do they really
think I did this?” Lilah asked.
 
“Like, do they think I really hurt him?”

I frowned.
 
“You just said that you did,” I pointed
out.
 
“You said it was
self-defense.”

“I don’t know what
it was,” she said.
 
She pulled at
the sleeves of her jumpsuit as much as her hands would allow her to.
 
The bones of her wrists stuck
prominently out from her skin, and I wondered how they’d even found handcuffs
small enough to fit her.

“Did you have a
psych
eval
?” Noah asked.

She shook her head
no.
 
“They gave me this.”
 
She pushed her hair away from her face,
and I tried not to gasp. A
zig-zag
gash ran up the side of her temple, with a line of exposed stitches sloppily
holding it together.
 
“A doctor did
it,” Lilah whispered.
 
“A prison
one.”

Even I knew that
was bad.
  
If she’d seen a
doctor, then she should have at least been checked for signs of trauma.
 
Not to mention the fact that her cut was
an open wound, the skin newly stitched together.
 
She should have at least have had a
bandage covering it.
 
It was just
begging for an infection.

“Oh for fuck’s
sake,” Noah growled.
 
“He did that
to you?”

“No,” Lilah shook
her head.
 
“He didn’t.
 
One of the girls here did, in the
holding cell when I first came in.
 
She said I was looking at her, so she slammed my head into the wall.”

The story hardly
made any sense.
 
If she’d been
slammed into a wall, wouldn’t she have been a little more nervous, traumatized,
something?
 
And why had she said she
hadn’t seen a doctor?
 
Obviously she
had, she had stitches.

This girl was
either seriously fucked up in the head, or she was a stone cold killer.
 

Possibly both.

Noah was out of
his seat and pounding on the door that Lilah had come through.
 

A guard appeared,
a different one than the two who had brought her in.
 
This one was younger, fresh-faced, his
eyes still bright, his spirit not broken by the overwhelming desperation of his
job.

“I want my client
taken to a hospital,” Noah said.
 
He
was dialing a number on his phone, waiting for someone on the other end to pick
up.

“I don’t have the
authority to authorize something like that.”
 
The guard was nervous, you could
tell.
 
I would have been, too.
 
Noah looked like he was one step away
from going unleashing the wrath of God, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the
other end of it.

“I know,” Noah
said.
 
“Which is why I’m taking care
of it.
 
I just wanted to give you
the heads up.
 
Get a transport
ready.”
 
He smiled, the smile of a
man who was about to get his way and didn’t give a fuck.
 

An hour later, Lilah
was being taken to New York Presbyterian for evaluation.

**

When we got
outside the prison, the air was humid, clinging and hot against my skin.
 
I had an uneasy feeling in my stomach,
the kind of anxiousness that settled deep into you and wouldn’t let go.

I couldn’t wait to
talk to Noah about what we’d just heard.
 
I realized we hadn’t figure out exactly how this dynamic was going to
work between us.
 
I was just a law
student, after all, and he was my boss.
 
And my fiancé.

We began walking
through the parking lot to where Jared had parked the Town Car and was waiting
to take us back to the city.
 
I
wondered how Jared had been able to just sit here, outside of a prison that was
surrounded by deep woods on all sides, in the dark of night.