“She spent the whole trial trying to hold hands with him over the divider.”
From A Deeper Sleep, the fifteenth Kate Shugak novel:
“The perp says he was out of town at the time. Real sincere on the stand, as I recall, young and clean-cut and all his family in the courtroom, including his Miss Alaska fiancé.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding.”
“I would if I could. She spent the whole trial trying to hold hands with him over the divider.”
“What happened?”
“The third time the judge told her to stop holding hands with the defendant, he raised his voice, and she burst into tears. You should have seen the jury, you’d have thought he’d just shot their pet cat.”
“Not guilty?”
“Not guilty.” He sighed. “The case was mostly circumstantial anyway. As I recall it, Brendan–“
“Brendan McCord was prosecuting?”
“Yeah. One of his first cases. He was good, even fresh out of law school. Brendan said a member of the jury came up to him after the verdict and scolded him for harassing that nice young man and putting his fiancé through such a terrible ordeal.”
After five and a half years with the Anchorage district attorney Kate had also seen the inside of her share of courtrooms, and she had very few illusions left about the wheels of justice. “What happened to the perp?”
Jim brightened a little. “Six months later he accompanied his fiance to the Miss America pageant in Dallas and shot a cab driver during a robbery. He is currently enjoying the hospitality of the state of Texas at Huntsville. One of four hundred and ten on death row, last time I checked.”
Chatter Kate Shugak Uncategorized A Deeper Sleep Kate Shugak No Fixed Line the Kate Shugak series
