The prosecutor grumbled something into his tie about needing his boss’s sign-off, then slunk away. Maya slid the photographs back into her briefcase and shut the clasps with a satisfying snap.
THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE was crowded. Dozens of conversations echoed off the domed ceiling. Courthouses were among the last places where all strata of society still brushed shoulders—rich , poor, old, young, people of every racial and ethnic background in Los Angeles walked across the marble floor. Hurrying to make it back to the office, she enjoyed being temporarily enveloped in the democratic crush.
“Maya.”
The voice came from behind her. She recognized it instantly. But it couldn’t be him … could it?
Forcing herself to breathe, she turned. For the first time in ten years she found herself face-to-face with Rick Leonard.
He was still thin. Still tall. He still wore glasses, though the silver wire frames he’d worn as a grad student had become the thick black frames of a sophisticated professional. He still dressed formally, today in a light gray suit. He must be in his late thirties now, just a bit older than she was. The decade’s wear had, cruelly, made him handsomer.
“I’m sorry,” Rick said. His voice sounded smooth. Assured. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”
Maya remembered Rick’s awkward hesitancy. Now he carried himself like a man who’d finally settled into his own skin.
She, on the other hand, was flushed with anxiety. “What are you doing here?”
“Can we talk?”
There had been plenty of times, over the past decade, when she’d been sure she’d seen him: in grocery stores, restaurants, and once, even more improbably, on a flight to Seattle. Each time she’d felt her skin go cold before she’d been able to reassure herself that she was imagining it. What would the chances have been that she’d just bump into him in a Walgreens? But now he was really here. In the courthouse. This was happening.
She dumbly repeated her question: “What are you doing here?”
“I tried email, phone. Your office. But I never heard anything back. I came to talk to you.”
She hadn’t received any messages, but of course, she wouldn’t have. Her assistant was under strict instructions to hang up on anyone who called asking about the case. Maya kept a spam filter on her email that redirected any incoming messages containing the names of the case’s key figures. Her street address was unlisted. She’d purchased her house under an LLC to keep her name off the property records.
Maya had achieved the precise level of infamy at which total strangers knew exactly one thing about her. Sometimes she imagined what it would be like to be an actress embroiled in scandal, or even a politician in the throes of disgrace. Those people’s misdeeds were catalogued, public, keyword-searchable. They were open books of iniquity. But all of Maya’s sins remained blessedly private—with one exception.
Whenever anyone realized who she was, it was the only thing they’d want to talk about. Prospective paralegals had alluded to it during their job interviews. Prospective boyfriends had dropped hints about it on first dates. Maya avoided corner seats at birthday dinners so as to never again end up trapped at the table’s end, fake-laughing off some joke about it made by a friend of a friend. She had done everything she could to put it behind her, and it had not been enough.
Evidentiary hearings were public. Her name would have been on Belen Vasquez’s court filings. Showing up here had been Rick’s best way to find her.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked, pretending not to know the answer.
“The anniversary is coming up,” Rick said.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Maya lied.
“On October nineteenth, it will have been exactly ten years since Bobby Nock was found not guilty of murdering Jessica Silver.”
Maya noticed his careful use of the passive voice. But she knew all too well that someone had found Bobby Nock not guilty of Jessica Silver’s murder. Actually, twelve people had.
Maya and Rick had been two of them.
TEN YEARS AGO—before she was a lawyer, before she had ever seen the inside of a courtroom—Maya had answered a summons for jury duty. She’d checked a box and put a prepaid envelope in the mail. And then she’d spent five months of trial and deliberation with Rick and the others, sequestered from the outside world.
None of them had been prepared for the controversy that greeted their verdict. Only after they’d emerged from their sequester did Maya learn that 84 percent of Americans believed Bobby Nock had murdered Jessica Silver. Which meant that 84 percent of Americans believed Maya and Rick had let a child-killer go free.
Maya had searched to find another issue on which 84 percent of the population agreed. Only 79 percent of Americans, she’d discovered, believed in God. She’d been grateful to learn that at least 94 percent believed the moon landing was real.
Under the hot glare of public condemnation, Rick had been the first of the jurors to recant. He’d gone on all the news shows and apologized. He’d begged the forgiveness of Jessica Silver’s family. He’d published a book about their experience, claiming that their unjust verdict had been entirely Maya’s fault. He accused her of bullying him into acquitting a man he’d always been sure, deep down, was a murderer.
A few of the others had joined him in renouncing their decision. Most, like Maya, had stayed quiet. Hoping to wait out the storm.
Sometimes she still wished she’d chucked that jury summons in the trash like a normal person.
“ALL THE NEWS channels are planning retrospectives,” Rick continued. “CNN, Fox, MSNBC. Plus 60 Minutes, some of the other magazine shows. Of course they would, given all the attention the trial received at the time. Given what’s happened since.”
Over the years, she’d talked about the trial with her parents. She’d talked about it with her friends, of which, since her notoriety, there were fewer. She’d talked about it with a parade of therapists. She’d provided the broad strokes to her senior partners and recited anodyne details to some of her clients. But in ten years she had never, not once, discussed the case publicly.
“I’m not talking about what happened,” Maya said. “Not to CNN. Not to 60 Minutes. Not even to you. I’m done.”
“Have you ever heard of Murder Town?” Rick asked.
“No.”
“It’s a podcast. It’s very popular.”
“Okay.”
“They’re making a docuseries for Netflix. Eight hours. Adapted from the podcast.”
Maya thought about all the hours of her life that had been swallowed up by the Jessica Silver case. Four months of trial, followed by three weeks of heated deliberations. During the sequester, every waking hour of Maya’s life had been, in a sense, given over to the case. When she thought about the suite at the Omni Hotel in which she’d slept every night—how well she could recall every strip of fleur-de-lis wallpaper in that room, every inch of beige carpet—it seemed the case had consumed her sleeping hours as well. Sometimes, back then, to pass the time she’d done the math in her head. Twenty weeks times seven days a week times twenty-four hours a day was … She still knew the multiplication by heart.
“Who,” she asked, “wants to spend eight more hours going over what happened to Jessica Silver?”