'It's you I'm trusting on this, you know, not him.'
Before leaving the building after the hearing, Hardy had decided to go on up and share a few impressions with Jennifer. He also had a list of questions written on a legal pad in his briefcase. Now they sat, knee to knee, in the tiny interview room by the guard's station. Jennifer was expressing her displeasure with David Freeman.
'He's a slob and he doesn't believe anything about me – not even that they raped me down there.'
Hardy pulled his chair back. He wasn't sure how their knees had gotten so close and he didn't want to be misinterpreted. 'That's the thing about the pros in this law business, Jennifer, and it's why David's so good. It's not personal. If you getting raped would help your case in any way, he'd jump on it with both feet. But, unfortunately, it doesn't. I mean, it happened because you escaped.'
'If I can get off I'm going to go back down there, find that guard and kill him. I swear to God.'
Instinctively, Hardy looked up at the bare yellow walls, fairly secure in the knowledge that this room wasn't tapped. He hoped. Leaning forward, he unconsciously lowered his voice. 'It would be a good idea to keep the death threats to a minimum for the next few months, okay?'
She smiled. 'It's what you call a figure of speech.'
'I know. But sometimes the sense of humor thing around here gets a little fuzzy.'
'I'll watch it.' Jennifer stared a minute through the glass to the empty guard station. 'I like your wife.'
Hardy nodded, somehow wishing this hadn't come up, knowing that it had to. Maybe, in fact, it was another reason why he'd felt the needed another visit, to reassure himself that the connection between Jennifer and Frannie was unimportant. 'She said you had a nice talk.'
Jennifer shrugged. 'We did. It was. Just mostly girl stuff but I haven't talked to anybody like I was a normal person in so long…'
'I thought Dr. Lightner talked to you every day here.'
He saw her processing his knowledge of that information. It wasn't clear what she made of it. 'Well, sure… Ken.'
'I mean, doesn't he talk to you like a normal person?'
Out of any context, she smiled. Hardy thought he'd like to videotape an interview with her and analyze when these random smiles appeared, but he was almost afraid of what he'd find. 'Ken doesn't count,' she said. 'Besides, I don't think anybody's normal for him. Normal doesn't have any meaning. It's one of those psychological buzzwords.'
Hardy had already heard enough jargon to know what she was saying, but she had left open an avenue for questions. 'What about down in Costa Rica? Didn't you meet anybody down there?'
Her eyes shifted to him, then away. 'No. I didn't think it would be a good idea.'
'So what did you do?'
Again the empty guard station seemed to grab her attention. She spoke into the window. 'The first few days I just stayed in the hotel. Then I went to the beach, I read a few books.'
Hardy could probe this by asking her which ones but it wasn't his intention to interrogate her. Like her rape, anything that had happened to her in Costa Rica wasn't going to have much effect on what she'd done or didn't do last December.
'Did I tell you I'd seen your mother?' he said.
'You'd said you were going to. How was she?'
'She wasn't good, Jennifer. Your father had beat her up.' He didn't think she needed to hear any details. The vision of her mother's battered body was still coming back to him.
Jennifer looked down at the table, a thumbnail to her mouth.
'I understand this thing – this beating – it passes down through generations in families,' he said.
Her eyes came up, pained. 'We've been through all this.' And, she was saying, we're not going into it again. She became brisk, business-like, and bizarrely, almost cheerful. 'Anything else? You said you had some questions.'
Hardy took his pad from his briefcase. Last night he had reviewed the notes from his visit to Jennifer's house, his questions.
Yes, she had stayed in the house in the months between the murders and her arrest, except she hadn't been able to make herself go upstairs. She had gone into their bedroom once to get her clothes and some personal items, and the experience had been so upsetting she hadn't been able to make herself go back in.
'So how did you do the inventory for Terrell?'
'Well, that's why I messed it up,' she said. 'Nothing was gone from downstairs, they hadn't taken my jewelry. I didn't even think about the gun.' She held up a hand. 'I know. A big mistake.'
'She might at other times not be telling the truth, Hardy thought, but this, he decided, wasn't one of them.
'Might there have been another gun?' Hardy asked.
'What other gun? Where?'
'I don't know. Anywhere. Maybe Matt had a gun? A toy?'
She shook her head. 'No. We wouldn't let him own one. It was something Larry and I agreed on. When he was an intern he said he saw too many accidents.'
'So no gun?'
'No gun. Why do you ask that?'
'Trick question. The dog that barked in the nighttime.'
This time she sighed. 'This can make a girl tired, Mr. Hardy.'
'Just one more, a straight one. Okay?'
She nodded.
'Crane amp; Crane?'
Her face skewed up. 'I don't know. Chess and checkers? Is this a quiz or something?'
'It's a law firm. Have you ever heard of it?'
'Why?'
'You tell me first.'
She shook her head again. 'It's not familiar, no. Now why?'
Hardy was putting his notes away. 'Larry might have called them about something.'
Jennifer gave it another minute. The female guards came back to their station. They passed a bag of Fritos back and forth.
'I don't know what it could be,' Jennifer said. 'Just some more nothing.'
21
Hardy was feeling better about his office – the dart board was in place, moved in and nailed up over the weekend. It was early afternoon and he was getting back into the groove, throwing some '20 Down,' trying to hit all the numbers on the board in descending order, ending with a bull's-eye. In his glory days Hardy had often done it in under ten rounds – thirty darts – and his all-time record was twenty-four. Now he'd already thrown eight rounds and was hung up on '11,' which was normally his easiest shot, his 'in and out' number in a wide range of money games.
Freeman entered without knocking. Hardy missed again.
'This is not billable,' Freeman said.
'I'm thinking,' Hardy replied. 'Thinking counts.'
The older man closed the door, then walked over and sat on a corner of Hardy's desk. 'I'm thinking, too. I'm thinking that we get a trial in two months so Dean Powell can get free ink in time to get elected, and I can't object because my client wont' let me.'
Hardy pegged another dart, finally hitting the '11.' He held a last dart and threw it randomly – or thought it was random until it smacked into the middle of the '10.' He was getting it back.
