“A lot of people. And I’m one of them.”
“You’re involved in this podcast?”
“It’s a docuseries. I’m helping the producers. Getting us all together. All of us. The jury.”
Maya felt sick.
“We can share what we think about what happened,” Rick said, “after all this time. And knowing what we know now …”
Rick paused as if they were already on television.
“… would you still vote ‘not guilty’?”
Maya was suddenly aware of the crowds pushing past them in the courthouse hallway. All these strangers who’d come to this building for justice, absolution, or revenge.
“No thanks,” Maya said.
“I’ve talked to the others,” Rick offered. “They’re coming.”
“All of them?”
“Carolina died. I don’t know if you knew that.”
Maya didn’t. Carolina Cancio had been in her eighties during the trial. Still, Maya felt a sting of embarrassment at being so out of touch after everything they’d been through. Twenty weeks times seven days times twenty-four hours …
But Maya hadn’t spoken to Carolina, or any of the others, in years.
“How?” she asked. “When?”
“Cancer. Four years ago, her family said.” Rick shrugged. “And Wayne told the producers no. Actually, he told them ‘fuck no.’ ”
Wayne Russel. Maya wondered whether he’d ever been able to get himself together. She hoped so. But if he was the same man she’d seen at the end of their deliberations, it was best for him to stay away.
“But all the rest,” Rick continued, “the other eight … they’re coming.”
“I hope you all have a good time.”
“I came here to ask you to join us.”
“No.”
“We were wrong,” Rick said.
Maya couldn’t hold back a sudden flare of anger. “I read your book. You have every right to torture yourself with as many regrets as you like, but leave me out of it.”
A few strangers glanced over, then quickly went about their business.
“A girl died,” Rick said with an earnestness that Maya recognized all too well, “and her killer went free because we made a mistake. Doesn’t that bother you? Don’t you want to do something—anything—to make up for it?”
“Even if I thought Bobby was guilty—which I do not—there’s nothing we can do about it. We have to move on.”
Rick looked around the courthouse hallway. “You’re a criminal defense lawyer. You work in the same building that Bobby’s trial was in. You’ve ‘moved on’ all of two floors away.”
“Goodbye,” Maya said.
“I found something.”
“What?”
“I’ve been investigating.”
She wasn’t surprised. She knew better than most how obsessive he could be. Once he became fixated on something, especially if it concerned unfairness or injustice, he never let it go. But when it came to the Jessica Silver case, he wasn’t the only one. Jessica Silver’s parents, Lou and Elaine, had been worth three billion dollars. Hell, Maya thought, by now they were probably worth twice that. Lou Silver owned some meaningful percentage of the real estate in Los Angeles County. His daughter’s disappearance had been investigated by the very best.
“Dozens of LAPD detectives worked this case,” Maya said. “The FBI. Journalists from all over the world descended on the city, PIs worked nights and weekends for the family, teams of lawyers on both sides of the trial, armies of amateur bloggers and conspiracy theorists with YouTube channels and …” Maya stopped herself. She couldn’t allow herself to get sucked back in. “There is no more evidence left to be found.”
“Well, I found something.”
“What?”
“Come to the taping.”
“What did you find?”
He stepped closer. She could feel his warm breath on her cheek. “I can’t tell you now.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s complicated. It’s a delicate … Look, just come to the taping and I’ll show everyone—all of us—incontrovertible evidence that Bobby Nock killed Jessica Silver.”
Maya looked into his pleading eyes. She could see how much he needed this. He believed, to the core of his being, that they had made an unforgivable mistake.
Maya didn’t know if Bobby Nock had killed Jessica Silver. That was just the thing: She’d never known. That’s why she’d acquitted him. Not because he was innocent, but because there simply wasn’t enough evidence to ever know for sure. Better, she’d argued, that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent be wrongly punished.
Maybe Rick genuinely believed that he’d found elusive, definitive proof. But Maya had long since given up any hope that it existed. She had spent ten years learning to live with her doubts. And Rick, if he was ever going to get free of this, would have to do the same.
Rick had once been someone she’d cared about. His was not a face that should cause the sick clenching feeling that was now in her stomach. He was a good person. He deserved a happiness that she knew would never be found amid the detritus of Jessica Silver’s death.
“Good luck,” Maya said quietly. “I hope you get what you want from this. But I can’t be a part of it.”
She turned and walked away.
She did not look back.
MAYA’S OFFICE AT Cantwell & Myers was on the forty-third floor of the firm’s downtown skyscraper. She sat at her desk, a midcentury modern piece that her assistant had picked out from a corporate furnishings catalogue. She was finding it hard to focus.
She turned to the windows and took in the skyline of the new downtown, a fleet of sleek skyscrapers cresting into the air. Half of these buildings weren’t even here a decade ago. How many of them were owned by Lou Silver?
The blue skies over Los Angeles looked eternal, even primordial—the same color today, the same color tomorrow, the exact same shade of blue as they had been ten years ago on the afternoon a teenage girl vanished. It had happened only a mile from this very spot. People always said that L.A. had no sense of history, but Maya had learned that precisely the opposite was true. L.A. was a time capsule of itself, wrapped up and preserved forever in an immutable sky-blue shell.
“Got a quick sec?”
Craig Rogers stood in the open doorway. He wore a dark suit, perfectly tailored. His close-cropped hair was sprinkled with white at the temples. When she’d first started working for Craig, she’d had to consult his CV to figure out how old he was—was he closer to thirty or to fifty? It seemed impossible to tell. She’d finally found his year of college graduation and did the math: He was fifty-six years old.
In his youth, Craig had been a civil rights attorney. He’d been one of the crusading black lawyers bringing civil suits against the crooked LAPD officers of the Rampart Division, back in the eighties. In the nineties, he’d worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on Thomas v. County of Los Angeles. Now he was a senior partner at Cantwell & Myers.
Had Craig sold out? Maybe. But he hadn’t come cheap. At Cantwell & Myers, he had unparalleled resources to devote to the cases he deemed important.