Tell No Lies Read online

  For the umpteenth time, the line fell silent between them.

  Finally, she spoke. "Okay, I guess I'll see you when you get home."

  "Yeah, okay." He picked up the picture frame with his free hand and studied it. He was certain that if they were in the same room they'd be able to get past this. "I love you."

  "Is that all?"

  Is that all? She'd been expecting something else but he didn't have a clue what it might be.

  "Claire, I told you I was sorry."

  "Yeah, you did, didn't you? Never mind. I'll see you tonight." The words were cold, without feeling or intonation. And for the first time that he could remember, she hung up the phone without telling him that she loved him, too.

  At quarter to five Jeff barged into Jack's office after only a half-hearted attempt at a knock.

  "What now?" Jack asked, tossing him a nasty look.

  "You've been a little crabby lately, Jack." Jeff grinned like the Cheshire Cat, as if even Jack's foul mood wasn't going to spoil his own good one. "Not getting enough sleep?"

  "No, now that you mention it, I'm not. Which is why—"

  "Well, don't expect to go to bed early tonight."

  "That's exactly what I plan to do."

  "Uh-uh. Not tonight. Dunne just called, and he's got plans for you. Wait till you—"

  "No. Stop. I don't care what plans he has for me. I'm going home" —Jack looked at his watch— "in about fifteen minutes. I promised Claire."

  The phone rang and they ignored it.

  "Don't worry about Claire. She'll understand. The Dems are in town, the big ones." They talked over the second ring as they waited for it to flip to Beverly. "Dunne's arranged a little meeting for you, it seems."

  "No. I told you, I'm going home."

  "You're not listening, Jack. These are the big guns, out of Washington. He's arranged for them to meet you, and if all goes well, you might land a coveted endorsement from the House Minority Leader himself. I'm talking a TV spot with him telling everyone to vote for you."

  "Yeah, how much is my campaign paying for this 'coveted endorsement,' if I might ask?"

  Jeff laughed. "Aw, Jack, you've become such a cynic in your few months on the campaign trail."

  "I prefer 'realist.'" Jack stood and started putting the files on his desk into some semblance of organization. "It doesn't matter. I'm going home. I don't need any endorsements."

  A buzz from his phone interrupted them, and then Beverly's voice filled the office.

  "Jack, I know you didn't want to be disturbed, but it's Mr. Dunne, and he's insisting on talking to you or Jeff. I can't find Jeff, so what should—"

  "He's in here with me. Just put him through."

  Jack motioned for Jeff to take the call. "Tell him I left for the day," he mumbled as he sat back down in his chair, resigned to another twenty minutes in the office. Jeff pressed the button for the speakerphone.

  "Hey, Greg. I've got Jack here with me," he said, his voice more animated than usual. Jack wondered if Jeff had started calling Dunne "Greg" on his own or whether he'd been instructed to. "He's ecstatic about the plans for tonight."

  Jack glared at Jeff; there hadn't been even a touch of sarcasm in his voice.

  "Hey, Jack!" Dunne's low voice reverberated from the small speaker on the phone.

  "Hi, Gregory. You've outdone yourself."

  "Yeah, how 'bout that? Do I take care of you or don't I?"

  "You do. You do." Jack laughed a bit. "There's only one problem."

  "Hold on, Greg." Jeff quickly pressed the mute button, and the smile left his face. "Don't you dare, Jack. Do you have any idea what strings he's pulled for you? You get on that phone and you ask him when and where and you tell him how grateful you are. Don't be an idiot."

  Instinctively, Jack looked over at the photograph again, and Jeff saw him do it.

  "I don't have a choice," Jack said. "I need to go home."

  Jeff's tone softened. "I'll call her and explain, if you want me to. But you've gotta do this. You are right about one thing. You don't have a choice."

  Moments later, Jack agreed to meet Dunne at the Ritz-Carlton in Clayton at six thirty so Dunne could prep him for a meeting at seven. Dunne and Jeff continued to talk, but Jack had troubling following their conversation because of an overwhelming preoccupation with figuring out what he was going to tell Claire. His ruminations were cut short when Beverly came in and slipped a note in front of him. "Michael's on Line 2," it read.

  That was strange. Michael never called him at work. In fact, it seemed that in the past six months Michael wanted as little to do with him as possible.

  He interrupted Jeff and Dunne and, after ushering them quickly through their farewells, he picked up the handset to talk without Jeff hearing both sides of the conversation.

  "Michael, what is it?" His voice sounded more alarmed than he'd intended.

  "Dad, how come you haven't left yet? Mom said you were leaving by five today."

  "Yeah, I was, but—"

  "Don't forget you're supposed to pick up the cake."

  The panic in his gut hit him immediately and hit him hard. He looked at Jeff. "Oh fuck," he thought, and then realized he had spoken it aloud, and both Jeff and Michael had heard it. Is that all? Her question reverberated in his head. "Claire's birthday. Today is Claire's birthday." Jeff rolled his eyes, but Jack couldn't tell whether this was meant to express his displeasure at having another problem to deal with or whether he was just commenting on Jack's apparent incompetence as a husband. "Oh fuck," he repeated.

  "You mean you forgot?" Michael's voice rose an octave.

  "Michael, listen to me. Where's Mom? Is she home?"

  "Yeah. I can't believe you forgot her birthday."

  "What's she doing?"

  "Right now she's sitting out on the deck with Marcia." He paused. "They're drinking wine." He said it as if he had top-secret information and Jack was lucky to be privy to it.

  "Does she look mad?"

  "I don't know, Dad! She's just talking."

  Jack scribbled a note and shoved it across the desk to Jeff. Call Dunne and tell him I won't be there.

  Jeff shook his head.

  "Go get her," Jack said into the phone. "I need to talk to her."

  He heard Michael set down the phone; as he waited, he tried to take a deep breath. "Fuck," he said one more time.

  Jeff pushed Jack's note back across the desk. "I'm not calling him, Jack. You're going. Claire knows how important this campaign is. She'll get over it."

  "No. She won't." He stood, suppressing the urge to make some smart-ass remark about the reasons why Jeff was still single. "Can you get out of here now? I want some privacy."

  But Jeff didn't move, except to shake his head in disbelief. Before Jack could repeat his demand, Claire was on the phone. "Hey." She didn't sound mad, just apathetic. Maybe damage control was still possible.

  He motioned for Jeff to leave and then turned around and sat on the desk with his back to him. "Hey, happy birthday. Starting the celebration without me?" The line was silent but he pretended he didn't notice. "Did you have a good day?"

  "Thank you. Yes, I did."

  He glanced over his shoulder and watched Jeff close the door behind him.

  "I've got a surprise for you." He knew what he was about to do was extremely risky, but, as Jeff had said, he didn't have a choice.

  "You do?" She was skeptical, but interested.

  "I booked us a room at the Ritz. We've got eight o'clock dinner reservations, and then we're going to stay the night at the hotel. How's that sound?"

  "Jack" —the skepticism was waning— "my parents are coming at seven, remember? They're having dinner with us. You said you were leaving by five. Shouldn't you be on the road now?"

  "My lovely wife, you're so gullible." He winced at the irony of his statement even as he teased her. It would be a miracle if he pulled this off. "That was just a ploy. They're coming over to watch the kids for us."

  "Rea
lly?"

  He heard her warming up to the idea. "Yes, really."

  She sighed. "I sort of thought we'd all get a chance to be together tonight."

  He jumped on that comment. "I was thinking we needed a chance to be alone. Don't you think we need that?"

  "Well, yeah, I know we do." She paused, he knew, to weigh her decision. "And here I thought you'd forgotten, the way you bolted out of here this morning."

  "I like to keep you guessing." She giggled then, and he gave a silent thanks to God that she'd decided to share a bottle of wine with their neighbor. "I wanted to come home early to pick you up, but I realized I'll get in late tomorrow, so I need to hang around and wrap some things up, okay? How much wine have you had? Can you meet me at the hotel around quarter to eight?"

  "Just a glass. I'm fine." If he were there with her, she'd be looking at him with her eyes narrowed and a little smirk on her face as she tried to decide whether or not to believe him. He glanced at his watch to determine how much time he had to negotiate for all the arrangements he'd promised. "Okay, I'll be there," she said finally.

  When they finished with the details, he asked to speak to Michael. After explaining the plan to ensure that Michael didn't blow Jack's cover, he hung up and dialed Jeff's extension. "Call Dunne and tell him I have a half hour to spend with those guys, and that's it. Come seven thirty I'm out of there."

  He hung up before Jeff had time to protest. Next he called Claire's mom and begged, and then he called the restaurant and begged some more. And finally, when all the other arrangements had been made, he called the hotel and booked a room. He didn't have to beg, though—he merely had to pay the price.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE BARNARD EVENT—and the media had truly turned it into an event—began every morning exactly as Jack expected, with a mob on the courthouse steps to greet him. He'd known when he first agreed to take the case, back in early August, that it would be like this. And yet every morning he still had to brace himself as he turned the last corner on his short walk from the parking garage.

  He was accustomed to such scenes. He'd tried many cases in which he'd been forced to push through a crowd of spectators just to get to the front doors of the courthouse. But he'd never had to make the journey as a candidate for office who was prosecuting the most emotionally charged case to hit the city in years. And on this final day of the trial, before the jury retired to deliberate, walking the gauntlet had been particularly unsettling.

  Once inside the courthouse, though, once he took his seat at the prosecution table, he forgot about the crowd outside. He even forgot about the crowd inside. He knew everyone was there, of course—not only the spectators but the reporters and family members of the victim and the defendant, too—but for Jack, entering the courtroom always felt like coming home. Whereas some attorneys saw the courtroom as a dangerous, foreign country to be conquered, Jack felt like a native son who spoke the language fluently and was able to translate it effortlessly for the people who mattered most—the jurors.

  Earl had always claimed that "jurors simply love Jack Hilliard," and if the current trial was any indication, his claim held true. Jack had developed a rapport with the jury during the long voir dire—two and a half days long because of the pretrial publicity that had saturated the city—and none of the defense efforts so far had been able to break that. Once he began to put his witnesses on the stand, the trial progressed quickly. He'd built his case methodically, as a carpenter builds a house, laying a strong foundation and then carefully framing each component until the structure couldn't be knocked down. He'd begun by letting the cops tell the story of their discovery of Cassia in the woods, and then he'd questioned each investigator, each lab technician, each eyewitness, each piece of the puzzle that had led them first to Cassia and then to Hutchins. And then, when the skeleton had been laid, he'd brought it to life with the testimony of those closest to Cassia: her mother and father, her brother, even a teacher and her best friend. After a week, he'd rested his case and passed it to Hutchins's attorney, Millie Rubin. It was now Thursday morning, and Millie was ready to call her last witness. With any luck, they would present their closing arguments after lunch, and then the waiting would begin.

  But first he had to get through the last witness.

  "Your Honor, I'd like to call the defendant, Clyde Hutchins, to the stand." Millie's voice was strong over the loud whispering that swelled from the gallery.

  Jack hadn't expected Hutchins to take the stand; murder defendants rarely did unless they had an alibi or pleaded self-defense. But the day before, after Judge Baxter had adjourned for the day, Millie had pulled Jack aside and given him the news: against her advice, Hutchins insisted on testifying. Jack had seen from the honest worry in Millie's eyes that she hadn't been sandbagging him. He almost felt bad for her, because the defendant's testifying in such a case—in which the crime was brutal and the evidence overwhelming—was akin to sealing the prosecution's case with a kiss and putting a pretty bow on top for good measure. So, although the news had come as a surprise, it hadn't really concerned him. He'd merely nodded sympathetically and returned to his office to plan the next day's cross-examination.

  But as night fell, as the background noises of computer keyboards and ringing phones became less frequent but more noticeable, and the soft bell of the elevator down the hall signaled another person leaving for the day, Jack grew inexplicably nervous about Hutchins taking the stand. He found himself unable to sit still in his chair, even though his notes for the cross-examination hadn't made it past the first page of a clean legal pad. He made a trip to the bathroom; he made a trip to the vending machines. He called Claire and asked to speak to the kids to say good night. He even stood in the doorway to Earl's dark office, gazing at his unusually organized desk, and began to miss him already.

  The reason for his discomfort became apparent, finally, after he accidentally startled Gwen, the night cleaning lady, who'd been humming to herself as she made her way from office to office, emptying trash cans and dusting the few exposed surfaces on the lawyers' desks.

  "Oh! Excuse me, Mr. Jack!" she said, addressing him in the semiformal way she'd adopted after he'd asked her, years ago, to call him Jack. The words came out slowly and muffled, as if she had a mouthful of marshmallows. This was not unusual or surprising—all her words came out this way: she suffered from mild mental retardation.

  Jack stared at her in a daze. Only when her face scrunched up in confusion at his failure to respond did he issue an emphatic apology and insist that he'd been entirely at fault.

  On the way back to his office, he suddenly realized the source of his agitation: Gwen's voice. Despite the fact that he'd heard it many times over the years, and despite the fact that its owner was a well-adjusted middle-aged woman who held a full-time government job, Gwen's voice always evoked just the slightest hint of pity.

  And it was that same, reflexive pity Jack feared the jury would feel when Clyde Hutchins took the stand.

  Jack trusted the jury to understand that Hutchins's slightly diminished mental capacity didn't have any bearing on guilt or innocence; an insanity defense wasn't at issue. But he knew that logic and emotion seldom agreed, and he feared the effect on his case, however subtle, if the human evidence of that diminished mental capacity was paraded right in front of them.

  So he studied the jurors' faces as Hutchins trudged to the witness box. His intent was twofold: he wanted to gauge their reactions to the defendant, and he also wanted to maintain the connection he'd developed with them throughout the trial. When the clerk administered the oath, Jack felt only minor relief by his inability to identify any speech impairment from the defendant's one-word response. He knew it might still manifest itself under the pressure of questioning.

  His confidence began to build again, though, as Millie carefully walked her client through the events leading up to the abduction and murder. The defendant's speech was slow, but he enunciated clearly, so the slowness could as easily have bee
n part of his style as it could have been related to his mental disability. Overall, it didn't seem to have any effect on the jury, other than causing a few of them to glance at the clock.

  What assured Jack the most wasn't the lack of a noticeable speech impairment. Rather, he had no idea what Hutchins intended to achieve with his testimony, and he could tell from Millie's demeanor that she didn't know either. As far as Jack was concerned, the defendant was giving the State a gift that surpassed even the written confession he'd signed just after his arrest. He kept expecting Hutchins to start making excuses for what he'd done, or even somehow to attempt to pin the blame on Cassia Barnard—an unbelievable tactic, to be sure, in this particular case—but none of Jack's conjectures came to pass.

  Perhaps Jack's ignorance should have caused him some uneasiness. At the very least, it should have caused him to decline to question Hutchins when Millie finished her direct and passed the witness without any hint of damage to the State's case. But Jack didn't like the idea of ending the testimony with a murderer having the last word. He wanted to drive home the point that the guy understood exactly what he'd done, both before and during the execution of the crime. With the written confession as backup, he couldn't imagine any scenario in which he'd be caught unaware.

  He rose from his chair when the judge looked at him, and he ignored the whispered "What are you doing, Jack?" from Frank, who sat at the prosecution table with him as second chair. He walked to a spot just near the back corner of the jury box, where he felt a part of it without actually stepping inside. After a brief nod to its occupants, he turned and faced the defendant.

  "Mr. Hutchins." He stared at the small, skinny man, waited until he looked him in the eye. He wanted so badly just to ask the guy, Why are you testifying against yourself? What could you possibly hope to achieve? But Jack was more than familiar with the age-old rule that every trial lawyer knew and ignored at his peril: don't ask the witness a question unless you already know the answer.

  So instead, he began simply. "You've just described to us what happened on the day of Cassia's abduction and murder, is that right?"