Page 2 of Fifty-Fifty

Something evil.

And I had felt its touch. It had hung over this case like the ravens hanging over the city.

Watching.

Waiting.

Then swooping down to kill with a sharp claw and razor bill. Dark and black, fast and deadly.

There was no other way to describe it. No better word for it. People can be good. There is such a thing as a good person. Someone who does good things because they enjoy it. Why, then, can’t the opposite be true? Why can’t a person just be evil because they enjoy it? I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but now I could see the sense. Evil is real. It lives in dark places, and it can consume a human being like a cancer.

So many had died. And perhaps more would die before the end. When I was a kid growing up in a small, cold house in Brooklyn, my mom told me there was

no such thing as monsters. The stories I’d read as a kid about monsters and witches and taking children away from their parents, into the forest, well, she said they were just fairytales. There are no monsters, she said.

She was wrong.

The Criminal Court building elevators were old and painfully slow. They took me to my floor, I got out and walked the corridor to the court room, following

everyone else inside. I took my seat at the defense table next to my client. After the huge audience was seated, the doors were closed. The judge was already ensconced on the bench.

A hush fell as the jury filed in.

They had already given the paperwork to the clerk. Paperwork they’d completed in the jury room. My client tried to say something, but I didn’t hear her clearly. I couldn’t. Blood roared in my ears.

I was a pretty good judge of which way a jury would fall. I could call it. And I was right, every single damn time. I knew before I took a case on whether my client was guilty.

I’d spent many years as a con artist before I turned those skills into a law practice, with little adjustment. Conning a drug dealer out of two hundred grand isn’t a kick in the ass away from conning a jury into bringing home the right verdict. Innocent people went to jail all the time – but not on my watch. Not anymore. I’d learned – in bars, in diners, on the streets – how to read people. I was good at it. So when it came to plying my trade in the courtroom, I knew whether my client was guilty from the first meeting. And if they were guilty but wanted to maintain their innocence in court, I wished them good luck and waved

them goodbye. I’d been down that path years ago, and the cost was too great to

bear. I’d ignored my gut, let my client walk. He was guilty and I’d turned him

loose. He hurt someone. So I hurt him. In some ways, I was still paying for that mistake. No one is infallible. Everyone can be conned.

Even me.

Reading clients and reading juries was my bag. This case wasn’t normal.

There was nothing remotely normal about it.

This was the first verdict that I couldn’t call. I was too close to it. In my mind, it was an even split. The verdict may as well come down to a coin toss. A fifty-fifty. I knew what I wanted to happen. I now knew who the killer was. I just didn’t know if the jury would see it. I was jury blind.

And I was tired. I hadn’t slept in weeks. Not since that dark red night.

The clerk stood and addressed the jury foreman.

‘In these matters, have you reached verdicts upon which you are all agreed?’

asked the clerk.

‘We have,’ said the jury foreman.

PART ONE

SISTERS

Three Months Earlier