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Chaptet Two, Keeping Secrets, A Legal Thriller

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CHAPTER TWO

Tuesday, January 3, 2017, Sussex State Prison, Sussex, Virginia

Tom Brower’s office was too warm, but Brendan didn’t care. The walk from his car to the prison entrance had been excruciating in the cold. Every breath had felt as if he was sucking needles into his lungs.

“Coffee?” Tom filled a styrofoam cup from the Mr. Coffee on the table by the door in his gray, government-issue office and handed it to him without waiting for an answer. He was the third warden Brendan had dealt with since taking over Ed’s case in 1986. He’d held the job for going on ten years.

Tom filled his own cup and sat down behind his big steel desk, littered with stacks of folders. “This is not the way I wanted to start the new year,” he said. “But that’s not news to you. I’ve never had to execute someone whom I’m certain is innocent. Can’t you get a stay?”

“I’ve got associates working round the clock. I called in the team yesterday morning as soon as I got the warrant. We’ve got sixty days. We’ll spend every minute trying to stop it. But you know that.”

Tom sipped his coffee, made a face, and put the cup down on his desk. “Don’t drink it. My secretary can’t count coffee measures. Ed doesn’t know yet, does he?”

Brendan shook his head. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Does he even suspect?”

“I don’t know. We’ve always talked about what we’re going to try next. The last time I was here, we’d lost that habeas writ before the Fourth Circuit up in Richmond.”

“That was new evidence, wasn’t it?”

Brendan sighed. “That’s right. The two witnesses who testified that Ed was having an affair with their roommate admitted that they had lied under oath. They had no knowledge of any affair. It was an important change in their testimony, but the court of appeal didn’t see it as significant.”

He remembered Judge Boyce, the lead judge on the panel in the Fourth Circuit, looking down at him from the bench and shaking his head. “I understand that these women have changed their stories. But I don’t see how that helps your client. The one who told the dean of the law school that your client was having an affair with her and wanted to marry her has never changed her testimony. There was ample evidence of motive, Mr. Murphy. Your client was unhappy with his wife, and he didn’t want the trouble and expense of a divorce, so he killed her.”

Allison Byrd. She’d testified at Ed’s first trial and then disappeared. Gordon had read her very damning testimony from that first trial to the jury in Ed’s third trial as Brendan had watched her claims sway all twelve jurors in the state’s direction. But she had been lying. There had been no affair. There had been no promise to do away with Anne, whom Ed still loved more than life itself. The dean had reprimanded Ed based on innuendo, hearsay, and gossip. Allison Byrd’s lies had put Ed on death row.

“What about a pardon from the governor or commutation of his death sentence to life without parole?” Tom asked.

“We’ve tried, over and over again. Anne’s family keeps buying the governor’s office to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Governor Reynolds might listen, though. Ed’s done so much good here. He’s helped the other inmates with their cases. He’s even gotten a couple of death sentences changed to life without parole. ”

“That’s the irony,” Brendan agreed. “He’s been able to save others but not himself.”

“I don’t get that.” The warden frowned.

“It’s the Fairfaxes again. Gordon’s right at retirement age, but he won’t step down because he’s constantly afraid we’ll get another reversal and another Commonwealth’s Attorney will let Ed plead to manslaughter for time served. That would have happened after the second reversal if Gordon hadn’t been the attorney on the file.”

“God, how I hate Gordon Fairfax, then. He’s putting me in an impossible position.”

“I know. He’s stepped way over the line between professional and personal. He called me yesterday to gloat. I didn’t give him a polite response.”

Tom looked out of the window beside his desk and studied the frozen landscape for a few seconds. Then he asked, “Does Ed’s son know?”

Brendan shook his head. “I’m going to tell him as soon as I’ve told Ed. Father Jim is on his way down from Richmond now to be with Ed after I’ve told him. We agreed that I should spend some time alone with him first, and then Jim should be with him.”

Tom looked relieved at the mention of Father James Lamb, the priest at St. Stephen’s in Richmond, who had been coming to see Edward Carter since Brendan took over his case. “I’m relieved to hear that.”

“You’re thinking suicide watch,” Brendan said.

“It’s required. You know that.”

“How long before you take him down to Greensville?”

“Not until a few days before the execution. He’ll still be here for most of his remaining time.”

Brendan studied the icy world that had caught Tom’s attention earlier. His eyes fixed on a puddle in the parking lot that was beginning to melt in the cold winter sun.

Why take lives, he wondered, when trials were such highly imperfect mechanisms to determine the truth? He thought of Emma’s steady dark eyes as he summoned his courage for what he knew he had to do. Medicine more often than law saves lives. At that minute, he wished he’d never made his way from his parents’ farm near Blacksburg to Virginia Tech and then to the University of Virginia Law School.

He felt Tom watching him and brought his gaze back from the melting puddle. “This isn’t going to get any easier no matter how long I sit here. It’s time to go see Ed.”

To see what happens next, click on the image below!

 

 

 

The Legal Thriller Business

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This has not been the week that I thought it would be.  First, I thought that my new puppy, Summer Moon, would stop harassing her much older brother, Rhythm, after I followed Caesar Milan’s sage guidelines for introducing a new puppy to an older dog.  Wrong.  Summer has yet to learn that (1) Rhythm is Head Dog and (2) she’s a Golden Retriever Puppy, not a baby Dragon, (3) and Caesar is supposedly RIGHT in all things DOG.  And just to prove her contempt for TRAINING, she swiped a burrito off the kitchen counter tonight and ate half of it before being discovered.  Sigh!

Second, I was unwittingly drawn into a conflict with the company that services my lap pool.  About two weeks ago, it began to bubble like a cauldron.  Getting into the spirit of Halloween, I thought.  But since a pool is not a cauldron, I called the pool service to ask them to come take a look.  That request degenerated into a demand that I (1) tell them what is wrong with the pool and (2) (well, since I didn’t know what was wrong) take pictures of the bubbles.  I told them I would be thrilled to pay them $75 to come diagnose it since (1) they are supposed to know what’s wrong, and (2) I was working on a brief for the California Supreme Court and I didn’t have time to take pictures of bubbles.  Eventually, the pool tech appeared, mumbled something about the auto-flow, and promised to have yet another tech who actually fixes things come to make the repair.  But a week went by, and no fixer pool tech ever appeared.  I thought of calling the office, but after my last conversation with the receptionist, I figured I’d just wait for the saner pool tech to reappear and summon the fixer pool tech.

But when the saner pool tech did reappear, I learned that psycho-receptionist was working to have him fired.  Apparently, that’s why she never sent the fixer pool tech.  She wanted to be able to say that the sane one had dropped the ball.  Which he did not do.  In the end, I had to call the owner of the company and tell him I wouldn’t be using his pool service anymore.  The saner tech had done a good job, but the psycho in the office was not a force I wanted to go on reckoning with.  I didn’t want my pool caught in whatever vendetta she had against the saner pool tech.  The owner promised free repair and pool service for a month, but I didn’t want to deal with any more unprofessional behavior from his front office.  I said, thanks, but no thanks, and hired a new pool service.

I felt a little sorry for the owner. He has just bought the business, and every customer is important to him. But apparently he didn’t realize that he took over a front office that doesn’t share his goals.

The lesson for me is that any business is built one customer at a time. That’s why I’m grateful for every new reader who finds one of my legal thrillers and decides to give it a try.

THE IRATE READER, THE DREADED TYPO, AND THE MYTH OF THE INCOMPETENT SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHOR — OR TRADITIONALLY PUBLISHED AUTHORS AREN’T PERFECT, EITHER

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Hi, everyone.  The air has changed in Southern California.  The heat of late summer that drives my breath back into my lungs, has suddenly dissolved into a cool, clear breeze.  It feels as if the world has come back into focus.  I’ve broken out the Pumpkin Spice candles and the Gingerbread tea and wrapped the house in garlands of silk autumn leaves that I bought on sale at Michael’s because the trees in SoCal are not going to provide real ones.  (Sigh!)

Our new puppy has come home.  Summer Moon.  She’s an English Golden Retriever. She isn’t golden, at all, of course.  She’s as white as the full moon.  Hence her name.  “Moon” because of her color.  “Summer” because she came home in late summer.  She looks like an angel but is full of mischief.  Her big brother, Rhythm, doesn’t quite know what to make of her.  She has two speeds: “on” and “off.”  And when she’s “on,” nothing in the house is safe from her tiny teeth, including Rhythm’s tail.

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I’ve just finished uploading the corrected manuscripts for Mirror, Mirror, so now the paperback version will soon be available on Amazon.  I used three proofreaders this time for the manuscript, and the last one read every one of the 120,710 words aloud plus punctuation marks.  When I was an editor/proofreader, before I went to law school, this is the way we read the final version of manuscripts because we had the best chance of catching errors by reading aloud.  So this time I thought I was safe from complaints about TYPOS.  But alas!

About a week after Mirror, Mirror had been published as an ebook, I got the message from Irate Reader.  “I like your book BUT—” Insert drum roll, thunder and lightning. “BUT it has TYPOS!!”  No hint of what those TYPOS might be.  I felt as if someone had sent one of my children home from school with a message pinned on his/her back, “Your child has CHICKEN POX!  Your HORRIBLE EXCUSE for a Mother!”

My first reaction was to protest.  Three proofreaders, I told her!  Every word and punctuation mark scrutinized, aloud!  But, alas!  Irate Reader was unrelenting.   Her next email cut even deeper. She called me, “UNPROFESSIONAL!” I had a big Breneˊ Brown moment after that.  If you don’t know about Breneˊ Brown, she describes herself as a “shame researcher.”  She is a professor at the University of Houston, who has written on the topic of shame and how it affects our lives.  When Irate Reader’s wrath descended upon me, I had been reading Dr. Brown’s book, I Thought It Was Just Me (But It isn’t).  And I knew that the paralyzing, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was shame.

Despite my best intentions, I’d humiliated myself in public, by telling a story that I had hoped many people would enjoy.  I wasn’t a woman with three post-graduate degrees, all cum laude.  I was an UNPROFESSIONAL with TYPOS.   Sort of like a careless excuse for a mom who’d sent her kid to school with CHICKENPOX and now the child had to be sent back to the incompetent parent.

I was deeply hurt by having my imperfections hurled in my face.  I thought about taking the book down.  FOREVER.  I’d worked so hard on it every night for six long months.  I’d worked on it on the nights when my heart had been breaking because my Golden Retriever Melody was dying.  I’d worked on it on the nights when I’d been so tired that I couldn’t see the page because I’d been writing for the courts of appeal all day.  But I had kept on going because I had thought my characters were telling me a story that would entertain and touch hearts.  And I’d launched that story into the world after so much time and care, happy and proud, and hoping to find readers with hearts to be touched.  But, now, within a week of its publication, it had been deemed worthless. TYPOS!  UNPROFESSIONAL! All because I’m not, and never will be, PERFECT.

“The quest for perfection is exhausting and unrelenting.”  Breneˊ Brown

Since self-publishing has become an option for writers, a myth has grown up that self-published writers are the only ones who launch books with typos.  That was the gist of Irate Reader’s “UNPROFESSIONAL” (SNIFF) label.   I got a does (dose, get it?) of this prejudice early on when I published my first novel, Dance for A Dead Princess.  At some point, one of the TOP 100 AMAZON REVIEWERS got her 3-star hands on it.   But she didn’t stop at 3 grudging stars.   She went straight to the top, to THE ZON itself and advised that I was illiterate. Why, there were whole sections of the book that hadn’t even been spellchecked!   REALLY!  THE NERVE!

Turns out, Ms. TOP 100 didn’t understand that the Tudor diary of Thomas, Carey, the First Duke of Burnham, is written in my approximation of Tudor English. That means the way Shakespeare wrote and spelled.   THE ZON backed way down after I explained the development of the English language and added, “Bet you wouldn’t have sent a QUALITY CONTROL NOTICE to Random House!”

So, just in case anyone else out there besides Irate Reader and Ms.Top 100 thinks that TYPO’s are the exclusive manifestation of the ignorance of self-published writers and that all the brains belong to the traditionally published ones, let me offer the following examples of TYPOS from novels you will recognize (and by the way, editions of these WITH TYPOS are worth hundreds of dollars)

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy

Characters are referred to as “harmoniously abandoning themselves to the rhythm of the music—like two small chips being tossed about on a rough but friendly sea.”

Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

A wall against which people set up their huts being described as “It stretched out long and grey and very high, and against the base the small mat sheds clung like flees to a dog’s back.” Editions of the book that include the misspelling can go for as much as $9500.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Some copies of this book are valued at a small fortune for this reason. On page 53, in a list of school supplies that young wizards are expected to bring to Hogwarts: “1 wand” is listed at both the beginning and at the end. That said, the typo did reappear in a few later printings even after it was caught in the second round, so it’s only the true first editions that are worth beaucoup bucks. [This example illustrates just how hard these pesky little TYPOS are to eliminate even after they have been found.]

“The Wicked Bible”

The1631 edition of the King James Bible by Robert Baker and Martin Lucas included an accidental new twist on the 7th Commandment, informing readers that “Thou shalt commit adultery.” This managed to incense both King Charles I and the Archbishop of Canterbury—its publishers were hauled into court and fined £300 (a little over $57,000 in today’s U.S. dollars) for the oversight and they had their printing license revoked. Most of the copies were subsequently burned, and the book picked up the sobriquet “The Wicked Bible” or “The Sinners’ Bible.” Only about 10 copies remain today—one was put up for sale by British auction house Bonhams just last year.

As for me, I went back over the book one more time.  I found some commas that only I would notice were out of place.  There were a couple of repeated words, a few line breaks, and an “it” for an “in.”  One very kind reader wrote to tell me that my dates were wrong at the beginning of one of the chapters.  (Bless her.)

So the corrected version is up.  I’m sure there are more TYPOS out there because perfection is unattainable for me.  But here’s the deal.  If you find any more and email me with the error, its location, and your address, I’ll send you a Starbuck’s gift card for a cup of coffee.  And I’ll send you my greatest thanks for liking my stories and for being my friend.   Even though I’m not perfect.

Hello,World. Again. Coming Soon, A New Legal Thriller.

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Hello, World!  I’m back.  I didn’t plan to be away so long.  A lot has happened since I last was regularly posting.  First, I finished and published Dark Moon, A Legal Thriller, chapters of which I posted here as I worked on the book.  My heartfelt thanks to everyone who read those early posts and to everyone who has since purchased and enjoyed the finished product. A special thank you to everyone who has written to me about his or her experience with Dark Moon.

 

Then in August of last year, I published my second legal thriller, The Death of Distant Stars.  Whereas Dark Moon is the story of a criminal trial, The Death of Distant Stars is about a civil trial, a wrongful death suit that Kathryn Andrews brought against the pharmaceutical company that made the drug that killed her husband, Tom.  Again, my thanks to everyone who has enjoyed Distant Stars, and my deepest thanks to everyone who has taken the time to write to me.  It is the best thing in the world to wake up to an email from a reader who has enjoyed one of my books.
My characters have a way of refusing to go away at the end of a novel.   Sarah Knight, one of the central figures in Dark Moon, came back in Distant Stars to defend Hugh Mahoney, who was accused of obstruction of justice.   Hugh, who sees the world differently after his experiences with Kathryn and Sarah in Stars, is returning in my latest legal thriller, Mirror, Mirror.   Although he plays a smaller role in this book, the way that Sarah did in Distant Stars, his brash, hard-charging personality is once again on display.  Hugh, like most of my characters, is not black or white but many layers of gray. Carrie Moon, ex-wife of the formidable Howard Morgan, of Ride Your Heart Til It Breaks, also has a minor role in Mirror, Mirror.  For all the readers who thought she was a silly wimp to stick with Stan Benedict, you’ll discover what Carrie is really made of.
The hero of Mirror, Mirror is Jeff Ryder, who at thirty-three, is on top of the legal world as the story opens. He is on the verge of making partner at Warrick, Thompson, and Hayes, the law firm you all first met in Ride Your Heart.  But Jeff is knocked off his perch on the day that he wins one of the biggest cases of his career, and his downward descent is rapid and terrifying until he finds himself in jail, accused of four murders, and with an alibi that he cannot use because it will destroy the woman Jeff loves.  More next time.