— There were more than likely no official documents regarding Callie’s beating, and certainly nothing that tied it to Buddy’s disappearance.
— No one had ever asked Leigh about the $82,000 she had used to help pay her way through law school. Before 9/11, nobody was asking questions about piles of cash. Even with Buddy’s ill-gotten gains, Leigh had worked as a waitress and a bartender and a delivery driver and a hotel room cleaner and even lived out of her car to save money. It wasn’t until Walter had found her nesting in the stacks of the Gary Library and invited her to sleep on his couch that Leigh had ever had a sense of permanency.
Maddy. Walter. Callie.
She had to keep her eye on what was important. Without them, Leigh would’ve already taken the Glock and ended Andrew’s miserable life. Despite evidence to the contrary, she had never thought of herself as a murderer, but she was damn sure capable of pre-emptive self-defense.
There was a quick knock before the door opened. Jacob Gaddy, one of the associates, was balancing a sandwich and a can of ginger ale on two file boxes. He set them down on the floor, telling Leigh, “I confirmed the tox screen was negative. You’ll find the indexes on top of the boxes. The search of the house turned up some really high-end, artistic S&M photos framed in one of the back hallways, but nothing in the bedroom.”
Leigh wasn’t worried about the photos. Fifty Shades had taken the shock away from millions of housewives around the world. She waited for Jacob to put her lunch down on the edge of her desk. She knew why he had volunteered to play waiter. She would need a second chair at the defense table, and the associates would go into a cage match if it came to that.
She decided to put him out of his misery. “You’ll be my second. Make sure you know the case backward and forward. No mistakes.”
“Yes ma—” He caught himself. “Thank you.”
Leigh banished the almost ma’am from her mind. She couldn’t suspend her review of Andrew’s files any longer. She took a sip of ginger ale. She finished the sandwich as she flipped through the pages of notes she’d made so far. With any case, she always searched for weak spots that the prosecutor could exploit, but now she was looking to see how she could use those weak spots to build a shadow case that would send Andrew away for the rest of his life.
All while keeping herself and Callie free.
She had argued against the prosecutor before. Dante Carmichael approached his job with a front-runner’s sense of entitlement. He liked to brag about his win/loss record, but it was easy to brag about your wins when you only ever tried cases you were ninety-nine percent certain would go your way. This was the sole reason that so many rape cases were not prosecuted. In matters of he said/she said, jurors were inclined to believe a man was telling the truth and a woman was looking for attention. Dante’s plea deals were more like extortion to keep his record untarnished. Everyone who worked at the courthouse had a nickname, and Deal ’Em Down Dante had come by his honestly.
Leigh paged back through the official correspondences. Dante had proffered an incredibly generous deal in April of last year, a month after Andrew’s arrest. She was loath to agree with Reggie Paltz, but her gut was telling her that Dante Carmichael had laid a trap. Once Andrew took a plea on the Karlsen assault, he’d be linked by MO to the three others. If Leigh was careful, if she was clever, if she was lucky, she would find an alternate way to push Andrew into that trap.
By habit, she picked up her pen. Then she put it back down. Strategizing her potential crimes on paper was never a good idea. Leigh mentally ran through her options, trying to find different ways to screw up while holding herself blameless.
Andrew wasn’t her only obstacle. Cole Bradley had forgotten more about the law than Leigh had ever learned. If he thought she was throwing the case, firing would be the least of her worries. The timing was also an issue. Normally, Leigh had months if not a full year to prepare for a criminal trial. And that was when she was honestly defending her client. Now, she had six days to become intimately familiar with the crime scene photos, forensic reports, timelines, witness statements, police incident reports, medical reports, rape-kit analysis, and the heartbreaking victim’s statement, which had also been recorded on camera.
The video was the reason Leigh kept letting herself get distracted. She could run dozens of strategies on her shadow case against Andrew Tenant, but every single option would require her to aggressively question his victim. As a defense attorney, it wasn’t just expected of her, it was required. Tammy Karlsen had been violently attacked and raped, but those physical scars would pale in comparison to the emotional destruction she would undergo at Leigh’s hands.