“Of course,” she said.
He shut the door and took a seat. If the prosecutor on the Belen Vasquez case had gone over Maya’s head and delivered a plea offer straight to Craig, she’d bury that asshole.
“Our PR department,” Craig said, “has been contacted by the producers of something called Murder Town.”
She should have known that Rick Leonard wouldn’t be put off so easily. Of course he’d reach out to her boss.
“They’re doing an eight-hour docuseries on the Jessica Silver case,” she said, “and they want all the former jurors—me included—to participate.”
“So they’ve spoken to you?”
Maya briefly described her run-in with Rick that morning.
Craig seemed pleased. “This is excellent. You’ll do the show?”
“I said no.”
Craig frowned. “May I ask why?”
“I don’t believe there is meaningful ‘new evidence’ left to be found. Even if Rick has fashioned himself into some kind of amateur sleuth. The facts are long established: blood, DNA, security cameras, cell tower logs, the ambiguous text messages …” She still remembered it all. “The bones have been picked clean.”
“I thought they never found the body.”
“Metaphorically.”
Craig leaned back in his chair, as if to suggest that these “bones” might be more than metaphor.
“There is no way,” Maya said, “that Rick Leonard has found Jessica Silver’s body.”
“Amateur or professional, if you spend ten years digging … But this is precisely why I would suggest that you attend.”
“Define ‘suggest.’ ”
“It’s your choice,” Craig said. Which was something people only said when it wasn’t. “You’re free to do whatever you like.” Which was something people only said when you weren’t. “The firm is with you.”
Maya was well aware that her role on the Bobby Nock jury had been among the reasons that Cantwell & Myers had hired her. Had it helped her to sign clients? Of course it had. It was part of her sales pitch. Many criminal defense attorneys had been former prosecutors, but Maya had been a former juror—and in one of the most infamous trials of all time. She hadn’t just been on the other side of the aisle—she’d been on the other side of the courtroom. Who knew better than she did how a jury decides? What defendant, guilty or otherwise, would not want the counsel of the woman responsible for the acquittal of Bobby Nock?
Yes, the verdict had helped Maya get her foot in the door. But the verdict hadn’t finished eleventh in its class at UC Berkeley Law. The verdict hadn’t guided three dozen clients through intricate plea bargains and won acquittals in all four of her cases that had gone to trial. The verdict hadn’t made partner in three years. And given everything else that the verdict had done to her over the years, she refused to apologize for the few things that the verdict had done for her.
“Everyone already thinks Bobby Nock did it,” Maya said. “Who cares what Rick Leonard says—for the thousandth time—on a TV show?”
“You’re a partner now,” Craig said. “Which means that anything said about you—personally—reflects on all of the other partners. We support you one hundred percent on issues of character. Which is why I would encourage you to support yourself.”
Craig’s ability to frame everything he wanted as if it were in her own interest was impressive. What he really meant was that the firm would defend itself from being tarnished by Maya’s role in a case from which they had not earned a dime.
“It’s one thing to have stuck to my guns for a decade out of principle,” she said. “But it’s another thing altogether to be an idiot clinging to a stupid decision even after new evidence proves me wrong.”
“We all endeavor to learn from our mistakes, don’t we?”
The twisted part was that if Rick Leonard really did have new evidence that definitively incriminated Bobby Nock—and Maya publicly apologized—she’d be in a better position, PR-wise, than she was in now. Some defense attorneys might be recalcitrant apologists for killers, but not Maya. She’d be someone who could claim to have followed the evidence wherever it led her, even if that meant changing her mind. She’d walk into courtrooms ever after with the presumption that she was a straight shooter.
All she would have to do, after hearing this mysterious new evidence, would be to admit that she’d been wrong.
Maya didn’t say much as Craig handed her a memo with the details. The reunion would take place in a month. Once again, the jury would be invited to spend the night at the Omni Hotel, on Olive Street. The same hotel at which they had originally been sequestered.
Maya never actually uttered the word “yes” at any point in the conversation. She just nodded and listened, trying to ignore the twitchy feeling of being trapped.
Finally, Craig stood. He glanced at her desk and grimaced.
“Is that Belen Vasquez’s husband’s head?”
She’d set the photographs out earlier. “Yeah.”
“I heard they’re giving you reckless endangerment. Well done.”
After he left, Maya remained seated, tapping her fingers against the smooth surface of the grim photographs.
What would she have made of these ten years earlier? The earnest, naïve, twenty-six-year-old girl who’d first entered the courthouse—that was a different person, one whom Maya dimly recalled, like someone she’d once met at a party.
Sometimes Maya still got angry. There were so many people to be angry with: the judge who’d kept them sequestered for too long, the attorneys who’d manipulated them, the talk show hosts who’d turned them into punch lines. She wanted to shout at all of them: She hadn’t killed Jessica Silver.
Jessica’s face was forever submerged just beneath the waterline of her memory. At any moment it could resurface. She’d be standing in line at a coffee shop and suddenly there it was. Jessica’s blue eyes, her smooth cheeks, her incandescent smile. The famous image of a beautiful young girl who’d simply been wiped off the face of the earth. Whoever had murdered her was the monster who deserved all of Maya’s rage, and everyone else’s too.
And yet, sitting at her desk, the killer was not the person at whom Maya directed her anger. No, the present inheritor of Maya’s bitterness, the person most responsible for putting her in this position, was Juror 272.
CHAPTER 2
RICK
MAY 29, 2009
Who the fuck can’t get out of jury duty?” was how Rick Leonard’s roommate Gil put it that morning. They were in the kitchen of their two-bedroom apartment.
Rick was a twenty-eight-year-old grad student. He’d never been called for jury duty before, though he remembered his dad receiving a summons when he was young. Plus a few teachers in grade school who’d been replaced by substitutes. If Rick was being honest, jury duty sounded like a high-class problem. Even complaining about it—“Ugh, can you believe it, I got stuck with jury duty”—carried an air of sophistication.
“If you want to get out of jury duty, dude,” Gil said, “you can a hundred percent get out of jury duty.”