sometimes. Tried to help.
Juliana, of everyone, would know me, right now.
Eighteen
By ten in the morning the temperature in the Valley had risen to ninety degrees and swimming in Mike Donnato’s unheated pool was like swimming through razor blades — the dead cold chill of the water and the hot sun slashing.
I glided back and forth — four strokes, flip … four strokes, flip — across the tiny oval. This was what my world had shrunk to: fifteen feet of icy chlorination. In the current freak show that was my life, I had been turned into a seal, whooshing and snorting empty circles in a tank.
Believe me, I was grateful. Devon County had gotten the bail reduced, from half a mil to one hundred thousand dollars, after arguing successfully that I was not a flight risk, nor, since this had been a crime of passion, a danger to the community. As a condition of the bail agreement, I would be on home detention under the supervision and responsibility of the FBI. Good friend and former supervisor Mike Donnato had volunteered.
As shocking as the daily dive into the frigid water was the realization of how a legal maneuver had taken me through the mirror, made me prisoner, incomprehensibly, of
“Why don’t you take a nap?” Mike had suggested during the long rush-hour slog back from jail.
I lay on the half-lowered passenger seat, staring up at the beige interior, body tissue swaying subtly on the bones. That might have been the low point: humbled and inert, in Mike Donnato’s station wagon.
The trees had filled in since I’d been there last, the ocher two-story postmodern had already increased in value by a third. We pulled in at sunset, the twin round windows reflecting like rosy moons, the development bathed in uncertain light. I had been condemned, of all things, to suburbia.
He guided me like a regular guest, between the faux Greek revival columns that framed the doorway, to the floral-scented living room, and soon a glass of red wine, trusting me with a long-stemmed goblet. He dumped a pile of catalogues from the mailbox on the coffee table and went upstairs. Someone was home from school. Soon I heard a halting clarinet.
Devon County was a former LAPD detective who had become a federal prosecutor and then gone into private practice. Over the years there had been a small growth industry in our town of cops going to law school and then representing their own, mainly because the policeman’s union often paid for representation. Devon was smart and capable, and, most of all, he was not a press whore. What everyone at the Bureau respected was how he kept a low profile in a potentially tabloid case where a state senator had been shot and wounded by his male lover, a senior federal agent out of our Sacramento field office who nobody had known was gay. Although he could have made the national news every night, Devon County considered it in the client’s best interest to keep that story out of the papers.
I first glimpsed Devon County through the heavy mesh of the booking cell. He was a hefty guy, overweight, with a shaved head and goatee, looking more like a con than a cop. It was barely dawn; he wore a sweatshirt and baggy warm-up pants; you might have thought he was out for a run, except for the crutch. He had become a lawyer because he had been forced to retire from the department on disability after a horrific crash during a high-speed chase. He made legendary use of the crutch in the courtroom.
There was to be no more “special handling.” Devon would remain outside the cell, I would be inside, and we would speak through yellowed mesh. When I protested there would be no privacy, Devon said that’s the way the lawyers liked it.
“You know why they have this double screen?” he asked. “So you can’t spit on your attorney.”
“I’d laugh if I knew how.”
“We’ll try to improve the jokes.”
“Devon,” I said right off, “you have women on your staff. Shouldn’t I have a woman represent me?”
He shook his head confidently. “You would suffer the backlash of the prosecution’s theory.”
“You already know the prosecution’s theory?”
“They will claim the obvious, which is you went after him in a fit of jealous rage. ‘Fatal attraction.’”
“Not true—”
He held up a hand. “
“You understand that you are being charged with attempted murder. You are looking at potential penalties of twenty-five years to life.”
Incomprehensible.
“Apparently the condition of the victim, Detective Andrew Berringer, has been upgraded to stable.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill him.”
I cringed.
“You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.” He was speaking intently, close to the mesh. “We need to have a truthful, but
“Do you?”
“Yes, you need to preserve your ability to use me as witness on my own behalf. You can’t put me on the stand if you know I would perjure myself.”
“Good. So let me ask the questions in my own peculiar way. This is not a tell-me-what-happened. It’s not like interrogating a suspect, all right? We have to do this surgically.”
“You’re talking to a pro,” I assured him. “Although it might not appear that way, under the circumstances.”
“I never forget who I’m talking to,” Devon said.
He produced a leather binder and a Cartier pen with a blue stone in the cap. In the following weeks, I would watch that stone as it whipped legal arabesques around my words.
“If the police were claiming that you were in apartment ten in Tahiti Gardens at nine-thirty p.m. Monday night, would they be wrong?”
“No, they would not be wrong.”
“If they claimed you fired a weapon at Detective Andrew Berringer, would they be wrong?”
“They would not be wrong, but — could I ask one thing?”
He waited.
“Is there some legal way I can stay involved with my kidnap investigation?” I told him about the Brennan case and how close we had come to capturing him.
“Not when you’re suspended from the Bureau, darlin’.”
“The Bureau’s going to drop the ball.”
“Nothing you can do about it.”
“Any way I can stay in touch with the victim?”
“Why would you want to stay in touch with the victim?”
“She’s a fifteen-year-old girl. Her world just ended. I don’t want to personally let her down.”
