Plea of Insanity by Jilliane Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page A

fascinated her in four long years of night school. Then, in her last semester, and literally only days away from officially throwing out her waitressing shoes and selling her soul on the dotted line to one of the boring Washington DC corporate law firms she detested, she took a trial advocacy class and was instantly and completely hooked on the courtroom. From there it wasn’t too hard to make that leap into Law & Order on Wednesday nights and the role of prosecutor.
    She’d picked Miami because they’d offered, and because, besides having plenty of crime, they’d been the only DA’s office able to enclose with their offer letter a colorful city guide filled with pictures of happy, tan, bikini-clad residents apparently all commuting to work on jet skis and yachts. Of course, the two biggest and warmest and most insistent reasons of all to head down south were her Aunt Nora and Uncle Jimmy, who had homesteaded their condo in Fort Lauderdale years ago. A couple of months into her three-year commitment as an ASA, she’d realized that what was supposed to be a short-term stint at the government’s expense to gain courtroom experience, would actually become her career. Her calling, if you wanted to get all mushy about it. The pay was crummy and the hours were long. There were few weekends she wasn’t in front of her computer, and few nights that she left the office before six or seven – later if she was in trial. But no matter the complaints – from ornery judges and unethical defense lawyers to uncooperative, apathetic witnesses and thankless victims – at the end of most days she still felt as though she’d made a difference, however small, in someone else’s life. And sometimes, when she put a really bad guy behind bars, she knew that the difference she made might actually have been one of life or death, even if she never got credit for it. As a prosecutor, she had the power to change the often cruel world around her, and trying supermarket slip and falls just didn’t seem so important anymore, no matter how much money she could potentially make.
    Now she was being given the chance to take her career to another level. It was an opportunity she knew most prosecutors in her office would never be offered, an opportunity that only an hour ago she would never have hesitated to take. Only now she was unsure of herself. Trying her first murder was one thing; trying her first murder in front of a bunch of cameras, skeptical colleagues and an administration that she knew was waiting to watch her fall was another. Then Julia thought of something else just as troubling. Though she didn’t believe their recently escalated friendship was the reason Rick Bellido was asking her to second-seat, maybe that thinking was just plain naïve. And while she was confident that no one inside or outside the office knew about, or even suspected, their relationship – or whatever it was they were in right now – if it continued, chances were someone would eventually figure it out. Gossip ran recklessly and purposefully through the State Attorney’s Office, like a match on the trail of gasoline. What then? What would people speculate was the real reason she was second-seating a Major Crimes case? Or worse, she thought suddenly, what if it ended? And even worse than that, what if it ended badly? Then what? A million questions screamed for answers in her head; a million doubts demanded instant resolution. And all the while, she felt both men watching her, waiting for a decision, like a bad reality show, as the seconds slowly ticked by. Your fear of failure, Julia, should never be greater than your fear of regret , another wise maxim espoused by her wise Uncle Jimmy. Uncle Jimmy, the garbage man from Great Kills who could have been a philosopher. What would he tell her to do now? God, she didn’t want to fail and she certainly didn’t want to fail so publicly, but she sure as hell didn’t want to look back and see the now very obvious