“Not at all.”
“How did you come to accept this case?”
“It was offered to me. Mr. Slater didn’t have time to come out of town, and he asked me to come in his place.”
“How did you propose to escort Miss Rigby back to New Mexico?”
“By air.”
She nodded her approval. Just to be sure, she said, “No three-day trips by automobile?”
“No, ma’am.”
“What does New Mexico have to say, Mr. Wallace?”
“Well, naturally they’d love to come get her—you know how those sheriff’s boys love to travel. But they understand our problem too.”
“They have no objection to Mr. Janeway?”
“They’re comfortable with him. One or two of them know him, as a matter of fact.”
“What about you, Miss Rigby? Do you have any objection to being escorted by Mr. Janeway?”
“I don’t care who takes me.”
“We sure don’t want to keep her any longer than we have to, Your Honor.”
“All right. The prisoner is remanded to the custody of the jailer, who will release her to Mr. Janeway upon presentation of the papers
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Next case.”
11
The Rigbys sat in stony silence in the first row of Judge Maria McCoy’s court. Archie Moon sat beside Crystal, directly behind the defendant’s table. The room was nearly empty beyond the second row: there were a couple of legal eagles—people who drift from court to court, endlessly fascinated by the process—and across the aisle sat a young blond woman with a steno pad. I was surprised to find even that much Seattle interest in the plight of a defendant in a legal action thirteen hundred miles removed.
“I shouldn’t even talk to you, you son of a bitch,” Crystal said.
I had found them in the cafeteria, eating sand-wiches out of a vending machine, and I sat with them and tried to explain how the deceit had begun, how the lie kept growing until the appearance of the cops put an end to it. We got past it quickly. It was my intent they now embraced, and they gripped my hand with the desperation of shipwreck survivors who come upon a lifeboat in choppy, hostile waters. I told them what was going to happen and what I was going to try to do. I would ferry Eleanor into Taos, meet with her lawyer, and see if any mitigating circumstances might be uncovered that would sway the court toward leniency. There had been a time, not too long ago, when I had done such work for a living, and I had been good at it. But I hadn’t even heard Eleanor’s side of things yet, so I didn’t know what was possible.
“I’ve got to tell you,” Crystal said, “we don’t have any money to pay you. None at all.”
“Call it one I owe you. If I can help in any way, it’ll be my pleasure.”
Crystal asked if she should try to come to New Mexico. I told her not yet: let me get my feet on the ground and see how the wind was blowing. Gaston Rigby watched us talk, his sad and weary eyes moving from her face to mine. “If it does become a question of money,” he said, “you let us know, we’ll get it somehow.” Archie Moon said he had a little money put aside, enough to get him to Taos if I thought he could do any good. I told him to keep that thought on the back burner and I’d let him know.
Then there was nothing more for them to do but take the long ride home, face a house that would never again seem so empty, and wait out the days and weeks and months for the justice system to do what it would. For me the case had taken on a kind of inevitable flow. Everything about it felt orchestrated, as if my part in it had been preordained. A woman named Joy Bender had killed herself in the Seattle jailhouse and had named me her chief beneficiary. The Bender case was an ugly one, full of posthumous rape-and-abuse charges. A letter had been left with Bender’s mother, who had released it to the press with a raging broadside at the system. In time the Bender letter had been discredited as the work of a sick and angry mind. The mother had written it herself, but the headlines were a cop’s worst nightmare for a month. Even now there was widespread public belief that the true facts had been covered up and the mother was being framed to clear the real villains, the jailers and the cops. Things like that do happen, often enough that people retain their disbelief when a case against the cops collapses like a house of cards. So the DA was primed and ready when I walked in and made a case that sounded halfway legit. When I mentioned in passing my real concern that Rigby might harm herself, he was all ears. When I told him she had already tried it once, this hardened man who had seen everything shivered and drew in his wagons. And the overworked and bludgeoned system in Seattle had bent a rule or two and sent New Mexico’s problem packing with the fastest reliable messenger—me.
I was still sitting at the table in the cafeteria when a shadow passed over my left shoulder, too close to be moving on by. I looked up and into the face of the young blond woman I had seen taking notes in the courtroom earlier.
“Mr. Janeway.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Trish Aandahl,
