Page 35 of One of Us Is Guilty

And I probably won’t be the last.

13

Eddie

‘Everything will be fine,’ she said.

Normally, I’m the one who says those words. Or something to that effect.

This was the first time I’d heard that phrase from a client.

But that’s what Vanessa said as she was booked for murder.

Nonchalant. Like this was just an administrative error that would be quickly corrected. A minor inconvenience. And it wasn’t just the privilege talking. It was either the kind of supreme confidence that comes with wealth and power, or it was something else. It could have been the knowledge that she was innocent.

Innocent people always believe they will be freed.

In the beginning, anyway.

Then they meet the American Justice System.

Beliefs can change pretty fast in a courtroom.

I told her I would work on her bail. She would be out in a couple of hours. Even as I spoke, her words were still echoing around in my head. Sending goosebumps over my flesh.

Everything will be fine.

I hoped, for her sake, that she was right.

I told the booking sergeant to make sure she had a cell to herself. He looked her up and down. Nodded. The criminal justice systemtreats people differently according to their status. It shouldn’t be that way, there was nothing in the constitution or the statute books to even hint at it. Quite the opposite. The line was that everyone was equal under the law.

The only problem was that justice is a business, like everything else in America.

Health. Birth. Imprisonment. Even death. Somewhere, somebody was making money from every part of life in the good old US of A.

Walking out of the precinct, I had a million thoughts running through my head and I needed some fresh air and perspective. With the sidewalk beneath my feet, and my back to the precinct building, I looked up at the ash-gray sky, took a lungful of gasoline fumes from the traffic rolling by and tried to get my head straight.

As a con artist, I had survived by listening closely to my instincts.

Right now, every part of me was itching to get away from this one. I had a bad feeling. Something wasn’t right here. The circumstances of this case didn’t add up. The only thing I was certain about was that I didn’t trust my client. Did that make her guilty?

It might.

And then again it might not.

She was hard to read. One minute, I believed she was innocent. The next, my gut was telling me to run far and fast from this case. Staring straight ahead, my mind elsewhere, I didn’t fully register the large black SUV that pulled up at the curb. I paid no attention to the two men who got out of the front of the car.

Not until they stood right in front of me.

One had short black hair, and a puffy face. Huge shoulders that looked like melons stuffed under his shirt collar. Zits on his neck and cheeks. He looked to me like he was in his mid-twenties, so I guessed his adolescent acne was probably behind him. Then I saw the veins bulging in his neck, his skin tone a vivid, dark pink.

All signs of heavy anabolic steroid use.

He wore a black woolen overcoat over a black suit. Lace-up boots, not shoes.

The man next to him was shorter but wider and about the same age. He had cropped, bleach-blond hair with a scar running across the top of his head. Same woolen overcoat. Same black pants. Same boots.

Both men held their arms way out from their body, the result of overdeveloped lats. They each stood with their feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent. They were probably used to handling other human beings who didn’t want to be handled.