The Hallows

  ALSO BY VICTOR METHOS

  An Invisible Client

  A Gambler’s Jury

  The Shotgun Lawyer

  Neon Lawyer Series

  The Neon Lawyer

  Mercy

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Victor Methos

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542042741 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542042747 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542042727 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542042720 (paperback)

  Cover design by Christopher Lin

  First edition

  To Ms. Whiting, my high school English teacher, who let me cut my other classes and lie down in the back of her classroom as long as I read a book while doing so, and was the first person to tell me they liked my writing. How seldom we recognize the people who set the sails of our lives.

  CONTENTS

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  “Murder.”

  I looked into the jury’s faces. Twelve men and women and two alternates, chosen at random from Miami-Dade County. My client sat at the defense table, dressed in a pinstripe suit and a Rolex watch. This was South Beach, after all, and the juries here needed to see wealth. From The Art of Jury Trial as War (a book I was in the process of writing), chapter 7: “In any jury trial, in any part of the country, the jury has to believe the defendant is one of their own.”

  I swaggered over to the table where the lead detective on the case and two prosecutors sat. Their closing had been by the book, fact after fact after fact. The Art of Jury Trial as War, chapter 4: “Juries can’t tell an important fact from an irrelevant fact, so pick the best ‘facts’ you’ve got and run with them.”

  In a murder case like this one, they had to see that the victim had it coming. That the victim had done so much wrong and was such a nasty person that it was only a matter of time before someone killed them, and it might as well have been my client.

  Of course, that didn’t really apply when your client was innocent, which my guy miraculously was.

  I winked at the detective.

  “Murder,” I said, turning back to the jury. “Just say the word. Murder. Sort of hangs in the air, doesn’t it? Brings up these horrific images of every movie you’ve ever seen, all the slasher films, the assassination films, the Mafia films. But it’s not like that, is it? The evidence you heard these past five days was, in the words of a wise woman from long ago, banal. Evil is banal. It’s boring and tame. There’s no devil with a pitchfork and fire spurring someone on. It’s just men. Men and the wickedness they do.” I shrugged. “Banal . . . is it, though? It takes a special kind of man to do something so heinous, strangling the victim, a young woman barely out of her teenage years, to death.” I lifted my hands, simulated the strangling, and stepped closer to the jury. “To wrap your fingers around an innocent girl’s throat and squeeze . . . to see life drain from her eyes, to know she’s about to die, and to keep going . . . that sort of evil should never seem banal. And Marcus Green is not a man capable of that type of evil.”

  I looked to the judge, a cherubic man named Clemens, who appeared half-asleep.

  “You were instructed by the judge that you must be impartial in your reasoning. You took an oath before this trial that you would uphold the law, that you would do what’s right and what’s just. And what is justice? It’s doing what’s fair. Don’t buy into this nonsense the prosecution has fed you.” I took out a coin, flipped it into the air, and caught it with one hand. Then I opened that hand, revealing that the coin wasn’t there. I opened my other hand, which held the coin. “What the prosecution has done on this case is what I just showed you: a magic trick. They tried to distract you with things about Marcus’s past. And it’s all true. Marcus was a drug addict, and somehow, by the grace of the Lord, he pulled himself out of that life. And far be it from the government to give him a second chance, even though he’s paid his dues.

  “You heard from him yesterday. You saw him get up on that stand, tears in his eyes, and tell you how much he loved Mindi Bower. That he was going to marry her, that he wanted children with her and to grow old together. And someone took that away. Poof,” I said, making the coin disappear again. “Just like that, the love of his life was gone. Imagine what that would feel like.”

  I paused and looked to Marcus, who had put his head down, just as I’d instructed him to do.

  “Now imagine the police come to you and start grilling you. Where were you? What was your relationship like? Let us see the last text messages you two sent each other. Detective Pascal over there held Marcus in a room for seven hours and grilled him with her partner to the point that he broke down and wept. A man who had been through the most horrific thing a man can go through, seeing the corpse of the person he loves on his floor, and they tortured him like he was a terrorist.”

  I leaned forward on the banister in front of the jury. I didn’t like to invade their space—jurors hated that—but I also knew that after five days of gruesome photos, a recording of a heartbreaking 911 call by a neighbor, and a medical examiner who’d gone into excruciating detail about the strangulation, they were beaten down and numb. Being right in their faces would get their attention.

  “The prosecution told you Marcus has a temper and that temper flared up and he killed Mindi. Really? How do they know he has a temper? Have you seen it? Have you heard from a single witness anything that indicates he has a temper? Did you see anything on that detective’s video interview that indicated he had a temper? Because all I saw was a man weeping over the loss of the woman he loved.”

  I took a step back. “The fact is, there is no motive, there is no physical evidence. There are no witnesses other than a neighbor who says she didn’t see anything until coming into the house and discovering Mindi’s body. What we do have is a broken kitchen window someone climbed through, missing cash and jewelry from the home, and a grieving husband who testified that he arrived during a home invasion and scared the monster off . . . but not before that monster killed Mindi.” I pointed to the prosecutors. “They have nothing here but circumstantial evidence and a hope that they’re right. Because that’s what this is really about: hope. They hope they can get a conviction in this case because it’s in all the papers, and because Mindi was an up-and-coming actress. This prosecution is grotesque, and it’s enough. Marcus hasn’t even had time to grieve for the loss of his love and the life he was supposed to have with her. Enough’s enough. Let him go home. Please, just let him go home and grieve.”

  I turned to the detective and prosecutors, winked one more time—rubbing it in their faces because they knew they would lose this and had still made me do the trial—and then sat down.

  The prosecutors shook their heads at the judge, indicating they were done, and the judge began instructing the jury on the deliberation process.

  “I was told you were good, but I had my doubts,” Marcus whispered, leaning over to me.

  “Ain’t over till it’s over.”

  “I’ve been in sales for thirty years, and in my business it’s all about reading people, and that jury is going to acquit me. You were worth every penny. Even if it was ten times what I would’ve paid the next guy.”

  “Just remember that when you get
your final bill.”

  We rose as the jury filed out, and Marcus’s girlfriend ran up from the audience and hugged him. Another young actress. They were easy to find in this town for people like Marcus, who drove Rolls-Royces and could convince girls that they knew a producer or a director looking for talent. South Beach was the new Hollywood.

  I left the crowd and went to the bathroom—small but paneled with what I was sure was imported wood and accented with brass shined to a gleam. It’d be a shame for the country’s wealthy to have to tolerate an average bathroom. I was splashing water on my face when the door opened and Detective Pascal walked in. She wore the leather jacket I had bought her for her birthday. She leaned against the sink next to mine and folded her arms.

  “He’s gonna walk,” Sarah said.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Would it be too presumptuous of me to ask if you felt bad?”

  “You know my emotions never come into it.”

  “Oh, I know, Tatum. That’s why we broke up. You’re like a block of ice. And that says a lot coming from a cop.”

  “I thought we broke up because you were having sex with your partner?”

  A man walked in just then. Sarah said, “Find another bathroom.” The man glanced between the two of us and left.

  “I just thought this case, this case, will get to him. Nineteen-year-old girl, fresh off the bus and looking for help to make her dreams come true, and instead she finds Marcus Green, who strangles her to death in the middle of the afternoon. I thought, naively, just for a second, that you might feel bad defending him.”

  “Hey, if you and those clowns at the prosecutor’s table had done your jobs, he wouldn’t be walking. Always, always, always make sure your victim is clean as a whistle, and if they’re not, you tell the jury every horrible thing about them at the beginning of the trial. After I was through with her past, it looked like you guys were trying to hide it. Once you break trust with a jury, bam, that’s it. Game over. Also, not that this little detail matters to the government, but he’s innocent.”

  “He is not innocent. He broke that window himself, and there is no way any jewelry and cash are missing and some mysterious man in a mask just happened to run out of the house when he came home. You’re blinded on this one because you want so badly for him to be innocent.”

  I turned to her. “Sarah, I’ve done this a long time, defended thousands of clients, and I can count on one hand the number who were innocent. Trust me, I know when it happens. It’s like lightning striking. Marcus didn’t kill that poor girl, and if he serves the rest of his life in prison for something he didn’t do, you’re going to have to live with that . . . and so am I.”

  I wiped my face with a paper towel. “Lunch?”

  “Lunch? You can eat at a time like this?”

  “What? I’m hungry.”

  “Fine. You buy. I’m sure you can afford it, given how much you probably got from that piece of shit in there.”

  2

  No sooner were we seated at Elevate, the top seafood place in South Beach, than Sarah and I both got the call: the jury was back with a verdict. Five-day murder trial, sixty hours of testimony, and they had returned a verdict in a little over an hour.

  I insisted we at least eat an appetizer: the jury could tolerate one more hour. We had some sort of crab-and-spinach dip, and Sarah said she was sorry she’d cheated on me. That it just happened.

  “No,” I said. “Train accidents just happen. Letting your partner have sex with you in your own bed every weekend for months doesn’t just happen.”

  “He decided to stay with his wife,” she said, ignoring what I had just said.

  “You cops are so predictable. You two will hook up again at some point, and then he’ll ‘choose’ to stay with his wife again, and you’ll be alone again. What’s with you and these damaged guys? Find someone nice and settle down.”

  She shook her head. “It didn’t even hurt you a little, did it? When you found out, I thought you would throw something at me, break something, have some sort of reaction.”

  “Sorry, emotions aren’t something I can afford to have. The Art of Jury Trial as War, chapter three: ‘Never, ever let your emotions cloud your judgment. If they do, you’ve already lost.’”

  “If it wasn’t so pathetic, it would almost be funny that you use your legal tactics in your relationships.”

  “Love is war, just like jury trials. Lawyers started as mercenaries battling to the death to settle disputes between the people that hired us. We’re a guild of assassins, and assassins that feel emotions don’t get very far in life. You gonna eat your roll?”

  We got back to the courthouse about an hour after the clerk had called us. The judge was already on the bench and the prosecution was at the table. Marcus was sitting on the defense side, and I strolled up and sat next to him. The judge gave me a dirty look, but not too long of a dirty look. He wanted to retire soon, and retired judges almost always became mediators or arbitrators. And the way mediators and arbitrators got business was lawyer referrals. So they could be jerks only up to a point to lawyers like me who ran the most powerful firms in the state.

  The bailiff handed the judge the verdict form, and the judge read it impassively and handed it back.

  “It is my understanding the jury has reached a verdict in the matter of State of Florida versus Marcus C. Green?”

  A slim man in a button-down shirt stood up. “We have, Your Honor.”

  I rose and Marcus rose with me. This was the moment of truth. The moment that I’d worked toward for the past six months. All the strategy, the research, the late nights, and the hours of grilling Marcus over and over to prepare him for the prosecution’s cross-examination—it all came down to this moment. Some lawyers got so nervous at the verdict announcement they puked. I never did. Cool as a cucumber. When you’d done your work, the verdict was a given. No need to be nervous.

  So why, when I glanced down, were my fingers trembling? That hadn’t happened since my first trial.

  “We, the jury, in the above-entitled matter, on the first count, find the defendant, Marcus Cutler Green, not guilty of the offense of homicide in the first degree. We find the defendant, Marcus Cutler Green, on the second count, not guilty of the offense of aggravated kidnapping.”

  Gasps, cries, whispers. The audience couldn’t believe it. Marcus looked like he might faint; all the blood drained from his face. Narrowly avoiding life in prison could do that to a person. I grinned and nodded to the jury in appreciation. After a jury trial, I usually held a large barbecue for the jurors, a tactic that once had me in front of a disciplinary committee of the Florida Bar. But the case had ended, and influencing the jurors hadn’t mattered anymore, so the Bar complaint had been tossed. I made a mental note to instruct my assistant to set up the barbecue.

  I looked over to the prosecution, who kept their eyes forward. Only Sarah watched me, with a look of disappointment, while the judge thanked the jury and excused them.

  Mindi Bower had no family here except for a sister, a young woman of about seventeen or eighteen. Blonde and petite, she looked like a child in an adult’s world. Lost. She sat in the back. She got up without a word and left the courtroom, glancing at me only once. She held my gaze for a second and then disappeared out the doors.

  “I don’t even know how to thank you,” Marcus said.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll get creative with your billing and find a way,” I said, slapping his shoulder.

  His family all wanted to shake hands and spread congratulations around, and I glad-handed a bit and then sneaked out of there. Sarah was waiting by the front doors.

  “Congratulations, Counselor. Hope that felt good.”

  “No emotions means no emotions, win or lose.” I put on my sunglasses, and as I brushed past her, said, “Try not to be too sad. I’m sure there’ll be more innocent people you can falsely arrest.”

  3

  The prestigious law firm of Gordon & Graham sat in the Peterson building on Ocean Front Avenue in South Beach. The most expensive office space in this part of Florida. When Tim Gordon and I started this firm, we shared one office in a building that had been shut down by the health department twice. Within two years, we had moved into a decent office space with three associates and a few staff. Within ten years, we had moved into the Peterson with twenty-four associate attorneys and twice as many staff. Our firm was known for one thing and one thing only: winning. I had once been quoted in an interview for Miami Lifestyle magazine, saying, “I didn’t get into this profession to lose.” I hated slogans, but it had become our de facto slogan, and I swore nothing brought in more money than that little line dancing through the heads of rich and famous Miamians who’d had tin bracelets slapped on their wrists in front of the cameras. We even had it on our pens and mugs.