Helen ground her teeth together. “No, I have not. We don’t plea out rape cases in this office. We try them.”
“I understand that,” Gloria continued, holding Helen’s eye. “But the defendant is a popular figure in town, and we don’t have a witness to the rape. And given Mandy’s reputation . . . we could lose, General.”
“What’s your point? Losing is always a risk.” Helen took another step forward. “Why don’t you spit out what you are really trying to say?”
Gloria sucked in a quick breath. “Do you want to risk losing a high-profile case so close to the election?”
Helen scowled at her chief deputy. “The election will never sway me from doing what’s right. Mandy Burks deserves to be heard. You got that?”
Gloria’s face turned crimson. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Do you have our requested jury instructions ready to go?”
“I need to tweak a couple of the patterns, and then I’ll walk them down to the judge’s chambers and give them to Clarice.”
“All right, then get to it. I don’t want any holdups once we start pretrial motions this afternoon. If everything goes smooth, we may have a jury in the box by the end of the day and might even squeeze in opening statements.”
“That’s not going to happen,” a raspy voice said from the doorway.
Helen wheeled at the sound and saw an unwelcome visitor standing in the opening, holding a newspaper in his hand.
The Honorable Harold Page was a tall, skinny man with thin white hair and a bald spot on the back of his head. He eased into the room, nodding at Gloria and Trish and then propping himself on the edge of Trish’s desk.
“Your Honor, what gives us the pleasure?” Helen asked, not bothering to keep the annoyance out of her voice.
Page folded the paper and stuck it into the crook of his armpit. “You’re not going to like it,” he said, and the frown on his face caused his eyebrows to crease. Page had been a circuit court judge in Giles County since Ronald Reagan was president, and most members of the bar didn’t even know what he had done before taking the bench.
Helen did. The judge had been an assistant district attorney when she had joined the office in the early eighties. They had worked on a few cases together, and she had found him to be dim witted and dull. She also hadn’t liked the way he would sometimes put his arm around her and let his hand drift a little too close to her backside. But Page was affable and had family connections littered throughout the town. He won election to the court in 1983 and had always been perceived as a prosecution-friendly judge.
Helen never liked the man and still didn’t. If there was one quality in a human being that she detested above all else, it was laziness, and Harold Page was lazy. She suspected he was about to prove it again.
“I’m waiting with bated breath,” Helen said. “What am I not going to like?”
“General, my judicial assistant just got off the phone with Sandra over in Lou Horn’s office. Sandra told Clarice that Lou is vomiting in the bathroom. Not sure if it was something he ate or if he’s come down with a bug.” He stopped, and Helen gazed back at him with a cold stare.
“And?” she said.
“He’s asked for a continuance until tomorrow morning.”
“Faking a sickness to get more time is a rookie play, Harold,” Helen said. “You’ve been doing this long enough to know that.” Helen rather enjoyed calling Page by his first name, which she regularly did when they weren’t in an official proceeding. Page had been on the bench so long, Helen figured his wife probably answered, “Yes, Your Honor,” when he asked for sex after turning off the lights in their bedroom at night. She knew that the informal address irritated him, and that was why she did it.
“We’ve both known Lou for an awful long time, Helen,” Page said, also forgoing formality. Helen could tell that it pained him to do so. “Have you ever seen or heard of him telling a lie to get out of court?”
Helen hadn’t, but she wouldn’t give Page the satisfaction of agreeing with him. “He looked fine this morning,” she said.
“Really? I thought he appeared a little pale.”
Helen chuckled. “That’s because he knows he’s going to get his butt kicked. There were a lot of pale faces in court today.”
Page sighed and pushed himself off the desk. “You may be right, but all the same, Lou’s never lied to me before. I’m going to continue the trial until nine in the morning.”
Helen gave him a tight smile, knowing that further argument would be fruitless. “Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Page walked around Helen to the door and, after twisting the knob, paused in the opening and gazed at her over his shoulder. “Any chance y’all might settle? Seems like there would have to be room for a deal in this situation.”
Helen shot a glance at Gloria, who was now sitting behind her desk. The assistant prosecutor crossed her arms and averted her eyes, making Helen wonder if the judge had planted the seed of a settlement with Gloria while pleas were being taken in the other cases. Helen gritted her teeth and turned back to His Honor. “Why is that, Harold? Because the defendant is rich and about to open an auto plant?”
The judge’s jaw tightened. “I was thinking more about the victim and her mother. This trial will be torture for them and . . . could air a lot of dirty laundry.”
Helen glared at Page, feeling sick to her stomach. “Not if the judge on the case follows the law.”
Page’s face flushed dark red, and he narrowed his eyes into slits. For a long three seconds, he said nothing. When he spoke, his voice was low and filled with menace. “Because of your many years in this office, I’m going to give you a mulligan this time, General.” He paused and pointed a shaky index finger at her. “But if you ever make an insinuation like that toward me again, I’m going to hold you in contempt, and you’ll spend the night in a jail cell. Do you understand?”
Helen maintained her glare and swallowed back the words she wanted to say. “Yes,” she managed.
Page waited a half beat for an apology that wasn’t coming before shaking his head. “I’ll see you at nine tomorrow morning.” Then he slammed the door behind him.
6
At 1:30 p.m., the exact time when the trial of Michael Zannick should have started, the courtroom was empty except for Helen, who sat in the back row of the jury. She had taken her heels off and was scratching her left calf with the stockinged toe of her right foot. The Zannick file lay on the chair next to her, and she had finished reviewing Sheriff Springfield’s investigative report for at least the hundredth time. She took a sip of coffee from a Styrofoam cup. It tasted harsh and bitter. Exactly the way she felt.
Helen rose from her seat and began to pace the floor, digging her toes into the hardwood. She had dispatched Gloria to notify Mandy and Lona as well as to update their other witnesses on the change of schedule. Helen suspected that her young assistant was now in the office going over the pretrial motions and the witnesses whom Helen was going to let Gloria handle during the trial. Though the office of the district attorney general was out the double doors and down the hall, Helen preferred to work in the quiet of the empty courtroom away from the ever-ringing phone, the nagging emails, and the annoying drop-ins from defense attorneys.