Plea of Insanity by Jilliane Hoffman Read Free Book Online

said sharply. ‘If this does go that far, a jury’s going to want to see someone young and pretty and feminine representing a young, pretty, dead mommy and her kids.’
    ‘You want a woman?’ Rifkin asked. ‘Why not bring in Karyn Seminara? She’s a DC who can at least offer you some experience. Lisa Valentine? Priscilla Stroze? I can keep going, if you want.’
    ‘Because I’ve seen Julia in court. Have you? I had a hearing before Farley last month and I actually caught her giving an opening. She can give the victims a voice, Charley, a face – not just a particular number of years on a résumé. She can keep it human, and she can keep a jury in that room. Especially when things get dull and dry and it’s all about forensics, fingerprints and DNA and everyone wants to take a little nap after lunch. Look, in her three years in this office she’s had more than her fair share of trials – even more than the fair share of a few As and DCs combined – and not counting two hung juries, she’s got a perfect conviction rate to date. Not too shabby, I think. Besides,’ he added, his eyes not yet releasing the Division Chief’s as he sat back slowly in his seat, ‘you might be surprised to find, Charley, that Julia’s got some pretty sharp teeth. And like me, she’s not afraid to use them.’
    Charley Rifkin stared back for a long moment, then held his hands up defensively. ‘Like I said, Rick, it’s your case. Pick who you want, but don’t fuck it up on me. I like to think that after twenty-seven years in this office, I can smell the bad ones – the headaches that come back to haunt you. That come back to haunt this office. This one, I gotta tell you, I think it stinks, Rick. Like the perfect storm, it’s got all the ingredients brewing for high profile. A fuck-up on that can follow you around for the rest of your career.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Remember that, Ricky. Remember that.’
    Rick nodded, as he smoothed a wrinkle from his suit jacket. ‘I appreciate the warning, Charley.’ Then he turned to Julia. ‘Of course, we may be getting way ahead of ourselves. After all this, I don’t even know if Julia’s gonna want to try this case with me.’
    She had yet to take her eyes off the diploma, not wanting to interject herself any further into the scary little King-Kong-Godzilla-go-round that had gone down right in front of her. Even if it was true that opportunities like this knocked only once, Julia now wasn’t so sure she wanted to open the door, for fear it might just slam back in her face and catch a few fingers in the process. Maybe she wasn’t competent enough to try a murder yet. Maybe she still did have her baby teeth, and everyone would see her struggling to learn the ropes on the eleven o’clock news, like Charley Rifkin was predicting.
    Just a few years ago, Julia Anne Valenciano, Esquire, could never have imagined she would be sitting in this seat. She wasn’t someone who’d always had a burning desire to become a prosecutor, or a judge, or even a lawyer, for that matter. There were no attorneys in her family, no pals whose parents were lawyers. In fact, most of her friends from Great Kills, the Staten Island neighborhood in New York where she mostly grew up, never even went on to college. But even though no one in her family had a college degree, her not getting one was never an option. So after toiling and commuting away four years at Rutgers University in neighboring New Jersey for a liberal arts degree – only to find after graduating that there was no such thing as a career in liberal arts – she’d drifted into law school when the grace period on her student loans was up and a friend told her some of the absurd salaries that lawyers in New York City made. The problem was, she unfortunately discovered after Georgetown had cashed her tuition check, the fields of law that actually paid those absurd salaries made her sleepy, and criminal law was the only class that had truly