The Client

XIII - State v. Lester Crowe

The day of Lester's trial arrived with all of the fanfare that befitted a small-town murder trial.

My phone chimed at six and I was at once fully awake, frenzied thoughts spilling out of my subconscious and into the forefront of my mind like children out of the door for recess. I knew caffeine would only encourage them, but I made my way to the kitchen to start a cup of coffee anyway. It was definitely not the day to mess with routine.

I found the newspaper propped against the front door in its transparent blue bag. Rachel bet me twenty dollars there'd be a front-page article today and she'd been right. Murder trial begins for alleged child killer. Top of the page, front and center. There was even a picture of Lester in all his drifter glory. The readers would eat it up.

I was up most of the night before going over the potential jury list and memorizing my opening statement. May it please the Court, pause, Honorable Judge Stone, opposing counsel...again and again. One technique I found helpful was to assign a point in space to whatever it was I was trying to memorize. As I practiced in the living room, I would begin my opening near the entrance to the kitchen, then start the next part at the edge of the sofa, and the next by the patio doors, always moving the same direction around the room (in this case, it was counter-clockwise). If I got lost during the real thing, I could imagine the next spot in the living room and use that to jog my memory. I'd write some bullet points on three-by-five notecards and place them on the podium in front of me, but I'd only use those as a last resort.

I was finally satisfied with everything around 4:00 a.m. and decided to try and get a couple hours of sleep. My nerves were always on edge the night before trial and I was lucky to get any sleep at all. I'd heard that no matter how many cases I tried, it would always be that way. Or should be, at least. "Once you get comfortable," an experienced trial attorney told me when I first started, "it's time to find another profession. If you're not worried, your heart's not in it."

The weather forecast for the day was eighty degrees and cloudy, but at 6:20 a.m. it felt closer to forty. The horizon was beginning to lighten, but the sun wouldn't rise for another thirty minutes. Even so, I could just make out the blanket of clouds that lay across the sky in wavelike striations. Not thunderclouds, thankfully. We didn't need rain. It would just be one more reason for a potential juror to "not be able to find" the courthouse and I wanted to be sure we had a large enough panel to pick a jury. The trial was going to happen today if I had to go door to door and drag each and every potential juror out of their beds myself.

I was the first one to my office building. The outer door was always left unlocked, so coming in early or late was never a problem. I made my way up the stairs and jiggled my key in the lock until the old door finally creaked open.

There was a white envelope lying on the floor just inside the door. Price was written on the front, barely legible.

Inside was a folded piece of paper upon which two words were written in the same broken script as the envelope: we're watching. I turned the envelope over and a small photo flitted out, twirling in the air before landing face up on the carpet. It was a small yearbook photo of Sarah. She couldn't have been more than seven or eight in it. The date was scribbled on the back, but I recognized the handwriting this time: Rachel's. I froze, my ears searching the silence for anything out of place in the office, but all I could hear was the blood thumping in my ears. I peered into the dark hallway—empty—then shut the door and locked it. There was no one hiding in my office closet, either.

Rachel kept Sarah's school stuff—art, poems, projects, and random pictures—in our bedroom closet, in a manila envelope stuffed between a small safe and a bag with a blow-up air mattress. Whoever had left the note had been in our house. In our bedroom. They'd gone through our things.