Mercy (A Neon Lawyer Novel Book 2) Read online

  The neighborhood they were in was typical for West Valley. The city’s median income per household was almost thirty percent less than Salt Lake City’s, just twenty miles away. It had the highest crime rate of any city in Utah and in fact had been found to be one of America’s most dangerous cities according to the FBI crime data, along with its neighboring cities, Kearns and Magna. Together, they formed the most dangerous area in the Mountain West, with one violent or property crime occurring every five seconds.

  They found the home they were looking for and parked out front. Brigham saw several men on the porch, and they eyed him as if he were a cop.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  “No way. I’m not letting you go in there by yourself.”

  “Molly, this is about a case that your office is prosecuting. I can’t let you see whatever my investigator has in there.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t even… Yeah, I’ll wait here.”

  Brigham stepped out of the car and walked, as slowly and nonthreateningly as he could, to the front porch. “Hi,” he said. “I’m looking for Jennifer Vest? She told me to meet her here.”

  One man, probably no older than twenty, blew out a puff of acrid smoke and said, “She in back.”

  “Thanks.”

  He snuck past them, careful not to step on anyone’s shoes, and entered the house.

  A party was in full swing. Kid Frost was blaring over a stereo, a song Brigham recognized from high school, and he tried to make his way to the back without touching anyone. A white guy in a suit at a Hispanic gang party was asking for an ass kicking.

  He got to the back door and saw Jen and another man sitting in deck chairs smoking. He stopped next to her, and she smiled.

  “Surprised you actually had the guts to come down. Most lawyers are scared of this place.”

  “I’ve seen worse. What did you have for me?”

  “This is Ramon. Ramon, Brigham. Ted Montgomery’s lawyer.”

  Ramon blew out a puff of smoke and held a cell phone up. “Check this out, holmes.”

  Brigham watched the video.

  His guts tightened to the point that it was uncomfortable. A mix of disgust and excitement coursed through him, and he didn’t know whether to celebrate that the testimony of one of the State’s key witnesses was blown or to be outraged that a cop who investigated a few hundred cases a year could be bought so easily.

  “Friend of Ramon’s is recording,” Jen said. “But you’d have one problem; he won’t come to court. I don’t know how you’d get it in without someone there to vouch for it.”

  “I don’t need anyone there if it’s used to impeach a witness.”

  “I’m guessing you want it then?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because it’s two thousand dollars.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll pay it out of Ted’s fee.” He turned to Ramon. “Can you email it to me?”

  “No problem.”

  “Um, this might be a weird question, but you okay taking a check? I don’t have two grand in cash laying around.”

  “For you,” Ramon said with a wide smile, “I won’t even require ID.”

  27

  Brigham watched Rebecca watching the video in their conference room. He’d already seen it more times than he could count, but the expression on her face was what he wanted to see. It would likely be the same expression the jury would have when they saw it.

  Rebecca’s mouth fell open as if she were on a sitcom. Brigham couldn’t help but grin.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “I can’t believe I just saw that. That guy’s a homicide detective.”

  “They don’t pay cops a lot. Robbery-Homicide as a detective is a little better, but if you’ve got a bunch of kids and a wife to support, that small paycheck really stings.”

  She shook her head and mumbled “Holy shit” again. “So what’re we gonna do? Take it to the judge or something?”

  “No, no way. I want to surprise the prosecution with this. I’m not handing it over, either.”

  “But they filed a reverse discovery motion. We have to give them anything we’re gonna use in trial.”

  “I’m not going to use it in trial. I’m going to use it as impeachment.”

  “And we don’t have to give notice for impeachment evidence. Nice.”

  “Not really. I would’ve rather presented it to the jury with someone vouching for it, but the guy who took the video refused to come to court.”

  She straightened her glasses. “So you’re just gonna ask him if he’s ever accepted bribes and then when he says no show this to impeach him?”

  “Yup.”

  “What if he says yes?”

  “If we had an honest cop who admitted all his mistakes, it’d be tough to make him look bad in front of the jury. In fact it might even backfire on us. But no way he says yes. No cop in the world would say yes to that question.”

  “Can’t we just use it so he doesn’t take the stand at all? I mean, the jury’s gonna remember what he said, even if he is a crooked cop.”

  He shook his head. “Things like this go to weight, not admissibility, meaning the jury can weigh whether this is enough to disregard his testimony. Has nothing to do with whether his testimony is admissible, though.”

  She adjusted her glasses, looking down at the still image of the detective accepting a brown bag from a street thug. “Holy shit.”

  They spent several days analyzing the video: every detail, every sentence, every background noise. Brigham made a transcript of it and read the transcript a few times. This video was a good starting point, a wedge to pry open the door that would lead to a not-guilty verdict. But it wasn’t enough. The fact was, even if the jury disregarded the testimony of the detective and Ted’s admission of guilt in front of him, the nurse still saw the death. And there were the children.

  Monica was old enough to be considered an adult, but Devan and David were too young to take the stand without prior approval of the judge, and no such approval had been asked for by the prosecution.

  On Saturday, Brigham came to the office and stood in the lobby, wondering what had brought him in on the weekend. He tried to never come in on weekends if he could avoid it.

  That uneasy feeling was still tightening his guts, and he couldn’t wait for this case to be done with. It brought up things better left forgotten.

  He went up to the office and saw Scotty milling around. He was humming to himself and organizing stacks of files.

  “What’re you doing here?” Brigham asked.

  “Oh. Hey. Just catching up. You?” he said.

  “Came to work on my crosses in Montgomery. I didn’t know you ever came in on a Saturday.”

  He looked away sheepishly. “You’ve been so busy, I didn’t want to give you any of the new cases we’ve been signing up.”

  Brigham leaned on the filing cabinets. “I’m not a one-trick pony. I can handle more. But thank you.”

  “You don’t want to defend shoplifting and DUIs when you got something like this. When we lose thefts, I mean, who gives a shit? They’ll have to take a class, but so what? They can get it expunged from their records in a few years. But losing the Montgomery thing… that guy will die inside, and his kids’ll be without a father. That’s a lot of pressure.”

  “You know, I read that criminal defense attorneys have the lowest life expectancies of any profession because of the stress.”

  Scotty grinned. “Tommy used to say it feels like your balls are always in a vise, and there’s two ways to react to it: you can hate your balls, or you can love the vise. But if you hate the vise, then it’s time to find another job.”

  He chuckled. “I sure could use some of his advice right about now.” He paused. “You and I never talked about his death.”

  “Nope.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Do I want to what?”

  “Talk about Tommy’s death.”

  Scotty twitched, his shoulder
going up and then relaxing. “Not really. There’s nothing to talk about. He had a lot of demons that followed him here. He knew it was coming. He never talked about the future without saying something like, ‘If I make it to fifty,’ stuff like that.”

  Brigham looked over the files Scotty was organizing. “Thanks, Scotty. For everything. I know you took a big chance coming out with a new lawyer who doesn’t know anything.”

  “Shit,” he said, returning to his files, “you know more than any attorney I know. You just don’t recognize it.”

  Brigham worked late into the night, and when he left the office, the moon was out. He hadn’t even noticed the transition from light to dark. It was disquieting for a few minutes to step out into the night when he expected the day.

  He waited at the stop for the train. The blinking sign said it’d be eight minutes before the next train, so he sat down and stared at the passing cars. When he’d been a kid, he’d made up stories about the people he saw on the streets or at a mall. That guy was a spy, that guy was a bank robber and didn’t want his wife to know, that gal was going to be an astronaut who walked on Mars… He was fascinated by people and their stories.

  People were so fragile, so weak, and subject to so much pain that the overwhelming emotion he felt when he looked at them was pity. He saw people, and he just felt sorry for them. They had to go through all this just to live.

  The train pulled to a stop, and he hopped on. He sat on a bench at the back and stared out the windows as the train pulled away. The city passed before him as flashes of light. He still made up stories about the people he saw, but the stories were much harder to take in.

  That guy was starving, that woman was prostituting herself to feed a son at home, that guy was planning a robbery to pay for his daughter’s hospital bills. He wondered if the difference between childhood and adulthood was the recognition that the world wasn’t divided into good and bad people—just good and bad decisions.

  The Trax stopped near the pizzeria, and he stepped off and hurried up the sidewalk. He kept his hands in his pockets and his head down. The city was a sea of blinking lights behind him. The pizzeria stood on top of a small hill close to the University of Utah. He’d transferred there after Katrina destroyed his own law school. Everyone transferred to any schools that would take them, and most people searched out of state. The devastation made the city seem unrecognizable, and no one wanted to stay. Luckily, Brigham was done and had to take only a few Bar prep courses in Utah, so the change didn’t shock him as it had some of his classmates who transferred to different states.

  He went down the steps to the pizzeria. The walls were coated with crayon, marker, or pen from every student who had come through here in the past fifty years. They wrote names, anagrams, aphorisms, and sometimes just ranted on every inch of the interior brick walls. The Pie was a staple of the University of Utah as much as any of the buildings on campus. The atmosphere was always jovial and the pizza hot and gooey, but that’s not why Brigham came here.

  Sitting in the corner, he could watch people for hours without anyone noticing: the way they spoke, the way they moved and interacted with one another. The way their eyes betrayed their true emotions when their words tried to convey something else. Jury selection wasn’t about asking questions, it was about gut feelings. The half a second when he first saw someone and got an impression was the moment Brigham used to pick his jury. Everything else didn’t work.

  He ordered a slice of barbeque chicken and a Diet Coke and sat in his favorite corner seat. The place was packed and loud, The Doors blaring from the jukebox tucked away in the opposite corner. He scanned the crowd and was about to dig into his pizza when he saw a familiar face: Rebecca.

  She was seated with three of her friends, splitting a large pizza and a pitcher of beer. He watched her, the way she laughed carelessly and freely. She had a joy that Molly lacked. Molly was somber and slightly melancholy, where Rebecca seemed to live in wonder of the things around her. He could see that if he hadn’t been with Molly…

  But there was no use thinking of things like that. He was with her, and he cared deeply for her even if the cold sting of betrayal still stuck in his guts like an ice pick.

  Rebecca saw him, said something to her friends, and came over.

  “Hey,” she said, a wide smile on her face.

  “Hey.”

  She sat down. “I didn’t know you came here.”

  “I took some classes at the U before the Bar. I’d come here all the time. Best pizza I’ve ever had.”

  She hesitated. “Are you here alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you come join us?”

  “And ruin your girls’ night? I’m cool.”

  “You’re not going to ruin it. Come hang with us.”

  “I’m okay. I gotta get home and work after this anyway.”

  She pulled her shirtsleeves over her fingers and wrists, absently playing with them a moment. “Hold on.”

  She rose and walked to her friends and said something to them that didn’t make them happy. They discussed it a moment, though Brigham couldn’t hear a word they were saying, and then Rebecca came back and sat across from him.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “I told them I had to bail for work. Now we can both work at your house.”

  “It’s fine, be with your friends. I’m really okay.”

  She hesitated. “I’d rather be with you.”

  Brigham swallowed and looked away. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m with Molly.”

  “Are you? Because it seems like you’re here by yourself.”

  The truth stung. Since she’d gone to the DA’s office, something was different between the two of them, some secret that they both knew about but neither one of them wanted to discuss. But he wasn’t sure what that secret was.

  “I better go.” He rose from the table, leaving his food, and slipped past her and out of the restaurant. As he headed up the stairs, he glanced inside and saw her return to her table, her eyes on him until he reached the top and couldn’t see her anymore.

  28

  It’d been three days since Brigham had seen Molly. They’d texted several times and spoken on the phone once, but he could tell something had changed, and they both knew it. For him, it wasn’t that she worked for Vince Dale, although he was one of the worst people Brigham knew, a man who used power because he could. When he’d run for office, he’d campaigned to abolish the distinction between juvenile and adult crime. “If a kid commits an adult crime, he should face an adult punishment,” he had said.

  It was a statement the hard-line voters of his district couldn’t get enough of. It ignored all the research and common sense that said children were not adults, that they could not think like adults, could not reason like adults and determine consequences. But it was catchy and made him appear tough on crime. Now he was working on a new child-crimes task force at the DA’s office that was to begin trying more juveniles as adults.

  Brigham knew Vince didn’t really care one way or the other about whether juveniles were tried as adults. It was a maneuver to get into office. And once there, he couldn’t even imagine how hard and dirty Vince Dale would fight to keep his post as top prosecutor.

  Brigham had finished preparing his cross-examinations of the State’s witnesses in Ted’s case. The preparation was nothing more than going through various scenarios and general ideas about what he would attack should that scenario present itself. The fact was, no one ever really knew what a witness was going to say on the stand, and much of the cross would be based on what was brought out on direct examination by the prosecutor.

  The trial was coming up, and Ted hadn’t come in for any preparation. Brigham had left half a dozen messages and sent email, but Ted hadn’t responded. In desperation, Brigham called his brother Timothy, who one of his paralegals had wisely collected contact information from.


  “This is Tim,” he said.

  “Tim, hey, it’s Brigham Theodore, Ted’s lawyer. Have you seen him? I can’t get him to return my calls.”

  “Yeah, I saw him yesterday. He’s been spending a bunch of time with his kids.”

  Brigham leaned back and put his feet on his desk, staring up at the wooden slats in the ceiling. “I really need him to come to my office to go over his testimony. I’ve called several times. And texted and emailed.”

  “Well, I’ll try and let him know you’re lookin’ for him.”

  “Okay. Thanks. So how long are you in Utah for?”

  “Until this whole shit-storm blows over. Depending on which way it goes, I might be inheriting three kids.”

  “You’re a saint for it.”

  “I love the kiddos. What else can I do?”

  “Yeah… well, if you see him, please tell him to call me.”

  “Will do.”

  Brigham hung up and let his head rest on the back of his chair. It wasn’t uncommon for clients to disregard the advice of their lawyers. In fact, it was more the norm, and the aberration was following the advice. But on a murder case in which he had three children to think of, Brigham thought Ted should take it a little more seriously. It was almost as if he wanted to be convicted.

  As the day drew to a close, he realized he’d made no progress since the day had begun. He’d thought about the trial all day, worked on different aspects of it for eight hours straight, and felt absolutely no more prepared, running in place and not moving forward an inch.

  Night fell quickly. Tomorrow, he decided, he wouldn’t be at the office. Scotty was doing a great job training Rebecca and Gerald, and Brigham didn’t have any court time scheduled until after the Montgomery trial. To get a fresh perspective, maybe he needed to go down to the canyons tomorrow or go camping. Something to change the environment and hopefully get some new inspiration.

  As he was heading out of the office, the elevator dinged and opened. Molly stepped out wearing a black suit with a red blouse. Brigham’s heart dropped into his stomach. The pain told him he had missed her, though his mind told him he was still angry with her.