Trial and Terror by ADAM L PENENBERG Read Free Book Online

happening. “I’m not your attorney anymore.”
    “Nevertheless, congratulations. You escaped the conspiracy. This time.”
    Marsalis had tracked down her unlisted number. Hanging up would accomplish nothing; she had to play this out. “What conspiracy?”
    “Raines charging you with aiding and abetting.”
    “How did you—” she cut herself off. “So you read the papers.”
    “Did Bragg include ‘Vee have vays ov making you talk’ in his article?”
    Summer swallowed hard.
    Marsalis continued. “Cruz will get his sweetheart deal, as promised. But the D.A. will swear Levi to secrecy, keep it out of the press. And Levi will agree.”
    His predictions were the product of craft, logic, and surveillance. Summer figured Marsalis had gained access to the hearing’s transcript by cracking the courthouse computer network. As for the rest, that was just a matter of connecting the dots. In fact, Summer had arrived at much the same conclusions.
    But she decided to test the waters. “How do you know?”
    “Like I know everything. Like I know all about Sonia—where she is and what she did. Like I know everything about you, things you don’t even know.”
    Summer’s heart pounded. “Where is my mother?”
    “First, this important information from our sponsor. Turn on your television. You won’t be sorry.”
    Summer knew she would be but picked up the remote anyway. “What channel?”
    Marsalis chuckled softly. “It doesn’t matter.”
    Summer clicked on the set and Rosie appeared. She was in deep sleep but in real time, her hand cupped under her breast, her thumb in her mouth. The picture peeled away to reveal Summer, clenching the remote. The camera zoomed in and her face haunted the whole screen.
    She placed the phone back in its cradle and stared at herself staring at herself.

Chapter 6

 
    As far as Summer was concerned, arraignment court was one big fat Freudian id. Angiers’s courtroom was chock-a-block with the usual post-weekend crime crush, the air stale and used up, recycled though hundreds of lungs. Mothers, girlfriends, and brothers (rarely fathers in this age of single-parent households) cried over the perps detained in the cage. Crime-chasing lawyers, their ties loose around their necks, swept the room and the hallway outside, looking for anybody with a grand salted away.
    While Angiers heard a case at one end of the courtroom, Summer stood at the other, her back grilled against the arraignment cage, facing the local news media—cameramen, photographers, TV and print reporters—all angling for a shot of SK, who, along with five dozen other prisoners, was cuffed inside.
    There was a continuous clamor from inside the cage, obscenities directed at the bailiffs and at SK, the lone woman, who kept her eyes shut, either in silent prayer, Summer thought, or trying to maintain composure.
    A Channel Six camerawoman juked left then right, but Summer blocked her shot. The woman didn’t dare step out of the press box. Angiers had already warned the swarm: no questions, no missteps, or they would all be booted.
    Where the hell was Levi? Summer needed another body. She saw Rosie, racing from client to client, most of whom she had never met—they were merely names at this point, files, allegations—and caught her eye. But Rosie ignored her. Summer gave a mental shrug.
    “Looking good, Summer,” Eddie Brockton, one of the lawyers shagging clients, called over to her. “You always did have more bounce to the ounce.”
    Summer imagined throwing up in her mouth. There went her fantasy of moving to a private law firm. She couldn’t believe she had been so desperate to escape her life that she’d considered working for him.
    Brockton was a one-time D.A. poster boy who’d been axed when cocaine assumed more importance in his life than his career. One night, after Summer had just started work as a public defender and Brockton still worked for the D.A., Summer went out with him and downed too many margaritas,