First Chapter
Wednesday June 15, 2005
Baton Rouge, LA

Claire Rivet sat straight-backed, eyes downcast, and hands clasped on the mahogany table before her. Anyone who didn’t know her might think she was praying. She never prayed.

The judge, his robe open against the heat, flipped through his notes. Shoes scraped the tongue-and-groove flooring, newspapers rippled open and shut, voices passed in guarded whispers. It looked to Claire as if all of Baton Rouge had turned out to hear the verdict.

When the rear door flew open, a hush fell over the courtroom and heads turned to watch the jurors file in behind the bailiff. Claire watched too. Each face, each tense muscle held a clue and a good prosecutor’s job was to decipher those clues into victory or defeat. She exhaled.

The jury foreman read the verdict: guilty, on all four charges. A collective sigh rose and faded into the mechanical clank of an air-conditioner built for an earlier era.

The courtroom began to empty. Claire watched as Leroy Milson was cuffed and led out the back. She stood and gathered her notes into three separate file folders already thinking about her next case: a burglary, one latent fingerprint, one eyewitness.

Erwin Tyson, the investigator who’d worked the Milson case with her, reached over the rail and patted her back with his rough hand. She felt other congratulatory taps as she loaded her briefcase. She smiled and nodded as another “Congratulations” flew her way. Why were they congratulating her? It always made her wonder. She’d been hired to prosecute criminals, to get the likes of Leroy off the streets. There was no right way, wrong way, good way, or bad way of doing this. She was doing her job.

LaVerne reached a hand out. “Thank you, Mz Rivay.”

Claire shook the dark hand with a sure grip. The bruise under LaVerne’s left eye had faded to a shadow. “Thank you, LaVerne. Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah, you, too.”

Claire glanced at Wendy and her husband seated in the third row. The husband nodded and forced his lips into an unsure smile, but kept his arm locked around his wife’s shoulders. Wendy, head bowed, was focused on a secret world, a world where she was in control, a world that no longer existed outside her mind. If she didn’t slit her wrist within a year, she might have a chance, but Claire had seen women like Wendy before and she recognized destruction when she saw it. Leroy had made a mess there.

LaVerne would make it. Claire knew that much. LaVerne was a fighter. She’d grown up fighting and she’d keep on fighting until she had her life back, or whatever could pass for a normal life after Leroy’s violation.

Claire shoved open the heavy oak door. Hot humidity as thick as coal dust gagged her as she stepped onto the granite courthouse steps. Before she could move, cameras and microphones surrounded her, dwarfing her beneath the taller reporters vying for her attention.

“Back up, I can’t breathe.”

She knocked a long microphone away from her mouth. She hated this part of the job. She would just as soon leave these vultures to her colleagues, but she’d been warned to be nicer. Her boss, the DA, had told her to make the press her friend. Felt like befriending an alligator; never knew when you’d be eaten alive.

“How do you feel about today’s verdict?” someone asked.

Sweat beaded on her upper lip and brow, under the sparse bangs, and the long dark strands cascading past her shoulders. “It’s correct.”

She tucked her head and pushed forward, the crowd of reporters parting and regrouping around her.

A man shoved a fat black microphone toward her nose. “You have a hundred-percent conviction record on rape cases, what’s your secret?”

Was that true about her conviction rate? “Let me through, please.”

She flashed through her last few cases, most of which were plea bargained down to a lesser offense in order to find and charge accomplices, or to collect evidence on someone higher up the food chain. A necessary tactic, but one she deplored nonetheless. But a rapist? Never. She refused to bargain. If he was caught, she wanted him off the streets, forever. A stand that almost saw her fired last winter when a rapist she was trying was tied in with drug smuggling down in the Gulf. His lawyer wanted to deal, said the man had the goods on two South American players.

“Do you expect an appeal?”

“What do you think about the rape in Raceland?”

“Are you handling the Clifford case?”

She focused on the blonde with the high voice and urgency pasted on her face. An icon. The sort favored by the networks. “What rape?”

“The young woman found beaten to death. Will you prosecute?”

A wave of vertigo overwhelmed her. Her step faltered. What a stupid question. Always stupid questions. “Raceland’s out of my jurisdiction, please let me through.”

She broke out of the crowd and headed for Erwin’s gray Taurus, waiting at the curb. “What woman in Raceland?” she asked, sliding into the passenger seat.

Erwin removed his glasses and wiped the lenses with the bottom of his shirt. “Oh, that’s a bad one. A twenty-two-year-old, raped and beaten to death. Young waitress, poor thing. Actually, she was found in a field between Raceland Junction and Bowie. I heard the body was taken to New Orleans for the autopsy.”

“Why not here?”

“Orleans’s closer.”

Claire closed her eyes and massaged her thobbing temples. Sweat glued her dark strands to her face and neck. “Drop me at home. I’m finished for the day.”

Erwin pulled into traffic. “That’s one for the books.”

“I can’t take an afternoon once in awhile?”

“Sure you can, but you never do.”

Claire glanced out the window. Dark bulbous storm clouds marred the horizon. A bad one blowing in. She pictured the young woman, lying in the field. A field. Another image popped into her mind, but after years of practice, she was able to shove it away before it could take hold. Had the woman died quickly, or had her life ebbed away as she fought off the pain?

Again the image tried to force its way in.

A field.

She reached for the air-conditioning vent and focused the stream of cool air on her face. Jurisdiction or no, she had to learn more about the rape. For too long, she’d put off what must be done.