Guilty (9 page)

Before Kate could reply, the doors to courtroom 207 flew open with a
whoosh
and were held by a pair of grim-faced deputies as a gurney rolled through them. It was moving fast, wheels rattling, with EMTs on either side pushing it and a couple of cops flanking it. Everybody was running, which told Kate that the condition of the person on the gurney was grave.

"Hold that elevator!" one of the EMTs yelled to someone Kate couldn't see. The wide hallway with its soaring, vaulted ceiling was busy and noisy, with cops and deputies and official personnel of all types rushing around, going in and out of various courtrooms calling to one another and talking on cell phones and two-way radios. Heavily armed SWAT officers in their helmets and bulletproof vests moved from room to room en masse. Kate assumed the building, which was still being evacuated, was being thoroughly searched. The staff from the coroner's office was on the scene now, as well, and their bright lights and painstaking procedures added to the general confusion. But the EMT's voice was loud and sharp enough to cut through the din. A path was cleared even as the gurney barreled past.

Kate caught a glimpse of an IV bag swinging crazily on a thin metal pole as it dripped clear liquid down into the arm of the man on the gurney—who, Kate realized with a shiver of recognition as he went past her, was the young, thin, black-haired cop whom she'd last seen lying on the floor of the cell in the secure corridor.

"He's alive," she said aloud, and realized she was glad. It was a glimmer of hope, a shred of something positive, to hold on to on this hellish day.

"They leave the dead ones lay," Remke agreed, snapping the latch closed on her medical kit. Kate shuddered. Judge Moran, the slain deputies—all were still in the courtroom. Deliberately, she tried to push from her mind the horrible images the thought conjured up.

The gurney trundled noisily toward the elevators, and Kate's head turned as she watched it go. She recognized one of the two cops loping behind it: the lean, black-haired man in plainclothes—a detective, she guessed, from his clothes—who had been her lifeline throughout the ordeal. From his tense expression and the way he was sticking close to the gurney, she guessed the man on it must be someone of importance to him. A relative, possibly, because they shared the same raven hair.

She hoped he would not lose someone he loved today.

With all eyes still craning after the gurney, which had just disappeared from view, Kate figured this would be a good time to make her exit. She knew the cops would want to talk to her, she knew she should give a statement and stay on the premises until she was told she could leave, but she couldn't.

Her emotions were too raw. The shock was too new, too awful, for her to trust herself to be thinking properly. She could not make a mistake. For Ben's sake as well as her own, she had to very careful, very calculating, in what she said and did next.

A mistake could cost them everything.

Accordingly, she put down the now half-empty can of Sprite that Remke had procured for her from a nearby vending machine, curled her icy fingers around the handle on her briefcase, and stood up, ignoring the light-headedness that immediately assailed her. Her knees wobbled, but she ignored that, too. Her despised shoes were under the bench where she had kicked them off, but she left them where they lay. Their torment was more than she could deal with at the moment. She would be better off escaping—because that's what she was doing—in her stockinged feet.

"Thanks," she said to Remke with a quick, grateful smile. It was good to know that even in such extremis she could smile, that she could look and sound normal enough for the EMT to smile back at her.

"You start feeling funny, you give us a call, hear? Sometimes shock keeps people from realizing what bad shape they're in for a couple of hours."

"I will," Kate promised, and started walking toward the stairs. The terrazzo felt slick and cool beneath her feet. Taking the elevators would be quicker and much easier, considering the uncertain state of her legs, but they were in heavy use, and she was afraid of who she might run into. The DA's office was almost certainly on the scene in full force by now, although, probably because nobody except law enforcement types and medical personnel were being allowed to enter the building, she hadn't seen anyone she knew. At the very least, witnesses were surely being rounded up and segregated until they could give their statements. And she—by taking the blame, or credit, depending on one's point of view, for the killing of Orange Jumpsuit—had made herself far more than just a witness. Anyone in authority who knew the details of the events in courtroom 207 should by rights prevent her from leaving until her statement was made and all the pertinent questions were asked and answered.

That's what she would have done herself.

She knew what the right thing to do was. And she had no intention of doing it. Not if there was any possible way to avoid it.

What she needed, all she needed, before all the official stuff kicked in was just to buy herself a little time in which to calm down, assess the situation, and think everything through.

Fortunately, she had the perfect excuse: Ben was sick and needed her. Who could blame a mother for rushing to her son? The truth was, though, right now she probably needed him more. Since the moment of his birth, he had been her rock, her anchor, her touchstone in a hard, cruel world. His dependence on her was the engine that had brought her this far, and remembering that she was all he had gave her the strength to gird her loins and face the need to work through one more crisis one more time.

I
thought it was all over.

What she was feeling was grief. A profound sense of loss made her chest ache. The happy, hopeful future she had been building for the two of them had just been popped like a soap bubble.

So cry me a river,
she told herself grimly.

Hanging on to the banister, being careful because the steps were damp and slick from all the people running in and out and she didn't want to slip and delay her exit and maybe even end up needing another EMT, she reached the bottom of the enormous curved staircase without attracting any undue attention. But even before she took the first step across the lobby toward the contingent of cops now guarding the entrance she saw, through the tall windows and banks of revolving doors, the pandemonium going on in front of the building, and stopped in her tracks.

Her eyes widened.

It looks like the entire city's out there.

Ambulances and fire trucks and police cruisers with their red and blue lights exploding like fireworks on the Fourth of July jammed the narrow street for as far as she could see. Dozens of specialty units, including an armored SWAT vehicle and the bomb-squad truck, filled the lawn. On the sidewalks, crowds of onlookers holding a motley collection of umbrellas and shopping bags and newspapers over their heads to protect them from the rain gaped at the action while jostling the police officers charged with keeping them back. Closer, on the wide concrete walkway that led to the Justice Center's front steps, TV trucks with their antennae and satellite dishes jockeyed for position. A blond reporter—Kate couldn't be sure from the back, but she thought it might be Patti Wilcox from station WKYW—stood beneath an umbrella at the top of the wide front steps, talking excitedly into a microphone as a cameraman under another umbrella a couple of steps below filmed her. More reporters talked into cameras from various spots on the steps. Thick black cables snaked downward, shiny in the rain.

Oh, no.

Frozen no longer, Kate turned and padded quickly across the bustling lobby to the hallway where the public restrooms were located. A small smoking room furnished with a couple of card tables and chairs and a plethora of ashtrays had been elbowed in next to the ladies' room. As she had hoped, it was empty. At the far end of it was a little-used side door. On the stoop outside stood a tall, stocky cop planted foursquare with his back to her, almost certainly stationed there to prevent unauthorized persons from entering. The stoop must have been covered by a roof, because the area where he stood was dry, while around him the rain fell like a gently undulating silver curtain.

She stopped, eyeing his uniformed back uncertainly.

He's there to keep people out, not in. Just walk on past.

Easy to say, but her heart thumped wildly as she approached the heavy glass door. From guilt, she knew. Guilt combined with fear to tighten the hard knot in her chest, ramp up the queasiness in her stomach, increase the dryness in her throat.

You 're a lawyer, remember. A respectable, upstanding citizen.

A shiver went down her spine at the thought. She felt like—no, she
was
—a fraud. And it seemed to her in that moment as though the truth of what she really was should be so obvious that anyone could see it at a glance, like Hester Prynne's scarlet A.

Keep going, damn it.

The door was unlocked. When she pulled it open, the cop glanced around in surprise, then registered her apparent harmlessness before stepping aside to make room for her. As she stepped out onto the stoop beside him he nodded a greeting, and she nodded back. Shrieking sirens assaulted her eardrums, their impact muted only slightly by the dull roar of the rain. More cop cars crept into view, strobe lights flashing, moving super-slowly as they jolted over sidewalks and curbs in an effort to get around the ever-increasing crowd.

Momentarily, she was glad for the pandemonium. It gave her a legitimate excuse to look anywhere but at the cop.

She could feel his gaze on her face.

A rush of cool air, redolent of damp earth but innocent of the terrible smells of cordite and blood and death that permeated the Justice Center, swirled around the stoop, catching stray strands of her hair and reminding her that it now hung loose. She was also shoeless and disheveled, she realized nervously. Maybe she even had blood on her somewhere. Would he notice? And what would he do if he did? She breathed in greedily sucking in the smell of the outdoors, trying to purge the other smells from her system, even as her gaze slid warily toward the cop. He was young, younger even than she was, she guessed, a beat cop with a square, earnest face and dark hair shorn high and tight in an unbecoming military-type haircut that made his ears seem to stick out.

"Terrible thing." With his voice raised to be heard over the commotion, he made small talk with her, shaking his head.

"Terrible," Kate agreed, heart thumping, and kept walking.

"You're going to get wet," he warned.

"I don't have far to go."

Just as easy as that, she moved past him and out into the rain, squinting as the rain came down, her hand sliding along the slick iron handrail as she went down the quartet of narrow metal steps to the sidewalk below. The concrete felt wet and rough beneath her feet. Water rushed by in the gutters. She was almost instantly soaked, and had to push her hair back from her forehead to keep wet strands from straggling onto her face. The downpour was merely chilly rather than cold at first, but as the moisture quickly worked its way through her clothes to her skin, she was suddenly freezing. Ordinarily, she would have gone right, then headed straight down Fulton Street. But then, ordinarily there was not a mob of police and reporters and onlookers blocking the way that she would have to fight her way through. Some of whom would surely recognize her. Some of whom might try to stop her, or ask her questions.

She shivered, from a combination of the cold and the prospect of being stopped and questioned. Turning left away from the front of the building, she stayed on the sidewalk, which put her some six feet in front of the surging throng that was being allowed no closer than the weeping, golden-leaved linden trees lining the curb, and walked steadily in the opposite direction. Two cops in navy rain slickers with PPD emblazoned on their backs strung yellow crime scene tape in front of the crowd; the whole building was being sealed off.

Using her briefcase as a shield, ostensibly from the rain but mostly to keep from being recognized by anybody who might know her, Kate ducked her head and hurried past another stream of newly arriving law enforcement and crime scene types rushing down backstreets toward the Justice Center. The emergency vehicles' flashing bubble lights were reflected in windows and puddles and shiny car bumpers, providing a distraction, making the scene surreal, like it was being lit by a revolving disco ball. The noise was deafening. The tension in the air was palpable. The good thing was, with so much going on she was just one among hundreds, and no one noticed her.

"Kate!" she thought she heard a woman yell, but she didn't look around. She didn't even slow down. There were lots of Kates in the world, anyway. The call probably hadn't even been meant for her. And if it had been—well, she didn't want to know.

Her feet splashed through the freezing, shallow stream the rain had turned the sidewalks into as the street sloped slightly downhill. Her briefcase kept the brunt of the downpour out of her face. She was glad to gradually leave the insanity behind, glad to turn one corner and then another through the narrow colonial lanes with their boxy, modern buildings before finally emerging some five minutes later onto the busy corner near Benington's Department Store.

From there it was easy to hail a cab.

"Wait! What do you think you're doing? You can't get in! You're all wet." The driver, a young man with dreadlocks and a goatee, turned around to look her over with horror as she slid into the backseat, thankful to get in out of the driving rain at last. "You gonna get the seat wet. Next customer not gonna want to sit on a wet seat."

He had a point: She was oozing water like a squeezed sponge.

"Out, out."
He made shooing motions with his hands toward the closed door. Kate stared at him.

I don't believe this.

Considering her other problems, this one was almost ludicrous. Kate thought about informing him that it was illegal to refuse a fare, and never mind whether terminal wetness actually qualified as a legitimate reason under the law, but she didn't have the energy for the argument she was sure would ensue.