Play Dead

I call her back, and she tries her best to make me feel better, but I’m certainly not having any of it. “I started the case with an innocent client and a dog. Now my client is in jail for the rest of his life, and the dog is gone. I pulled off the daily double.”

“Andy, I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel terrible; I’m just saying that you can’t wallow in it. And you can’t let it prevent you from capitalizing on your progress.”

“Which progress might that be?” I ask.

“Come on, you know as well as I do that you’ve learned an amazing amount about the crime. All along you’ve been operating on two parallel tracks, the investigation and the trial. You’ve been wishing that they could coincide, but they didn’t. The good news is, you only had to win one of them to win.”

She’s right, of course. I could have won by getting Richard acquitted, but I can just as certainly win by finding out the real killers and bringing them to justice. And we have taken some substantial steps toward doing that.

Laurie and I talk it out for a while. The truth is, we know who Stacy Harriman really was, and we can assume that she was killed to prevent her from someday testifying. We even have a rough idea of the conspirators involved in her murder. What we need to do is keep pushing until we and the rest of the world know everything. And I’m going to make that happen if I have to hire every investigator in America.

I take Tara for a walk and then drive to Karen’s to take her to dinner. The devastating verdict has left her subdued, and it’s obvious that she has done quite a bit of crying.

During dinner we talk mostly about Richard and the need to keep him hopeful. It may be false hope, something I usually try to avoid in dealing with clients, but this time it’s necessary. The suicide watch will not last forever, and if Richard is determined to kill himself, he will manage to do so.

Karen promises to do what she can and asks a bunch of questions about the status of the investigation. I tell her everything, and I can feel her optimism starting to return the more she hears.

It’s almost eleven o’clock when we leave the restaurant. As we near Karen’s house, she says, “Do you think I can visit Richard tomorrow?”

I shake my head. “I doubt it; they’ll be transferring him back to Rahway. I’ll be able to see him because I’m his lawyer. I want to explain to him that it’s my doing he’s under a suicide watch.”

“Andy, I wrote a letter to him this afternoon. I wanted so badly to talk to him, but I couldn’t, so it helped me to write it. Could you give it to him tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

We pull up in front of Karen’s darkened house, and we both get out of the car. Karen starts to get her keys out as we go up the steps, but it’s hard for her to see in the dark. “I hope we didn’t have some kind of power failure,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because I’m sure I left some lights on.”

I look over at the attached garage and see that there is a small light coming from underneath the garage door, which is open a few inches. I’m about to say that she obviously has electricity, when suddenly I’m gripped by a clarity of thought and an instinct I didn’t know I possessed.

“Karen!” I yell, and I pull her arm just as her key reaches the door. She screams in surprise, and we lose our balance and fall back down the two steps. At the very moment this is happening, the front door seems to explode at its center in front of us.

Another noise comes from inside the house, and I grab Karen and we start to run. I make a quick decision that the street is not the place for us; it is too well lit. Instead I lead her into the alley, back into a darkened area that serves as a corridor between the houses on this block and the block behind it.

There are sheds and Dumpsters back there as well, but it’s hard to navigate in the darkness. I can hear someone pursuing us from behind, so I pull Karen down behind one of the Dumpsters. It is so dark that I can’t see Karen, which means the intruder shouldn’t be able to see us.

My heart is pounding so hard that it feels like somebody is using the Dumpster we’re leaning on for a bongo drum. “Andy?” Karen whispers-I guess, to confirm that I’m still there, since we’re not actually touching. I reach out and touch her arm, hoping it will stop her from talking.

I can clearly hear someone coming toward us, stalking us. I’m in a near panic, not knowing whether we should try to run some more or stay there and hope the night makes us invisible. The danger in running is that we are likely to bang into something and call attention to ourselves. Based on what happened to the door, the shooter has such a powerful weapon that he will not have to be terribly accurate to hit us in this enclosed area.