he never swung a bat nor caught a grounder. He was proud to be a lawman . . . even though he rarely left his tiny cream-colored cubicle at the Chatham County Courthouse.
From his beloved cube, Alton directed the transfer of inmates from the county jail to the courthouse, inputting inmate names, cell blocks, and arrest warrants then connecting them to indictment numbers. The right indictment numbers then had to be funneled to the correct courtrooms, making sure that each and every one of the thousands of accused felons made it to the right place bright and early come Monday morning trial and arraignment calendars.
It wasn’t exciting to many, but to Alton it was. As he was a lawman of sorts, the courthouse was Alton’s life.
From what Hailey read just before turning off the bedside light in her hotel room, Alton had never married and remained devoted to his only other surviving relative, the elderly sister of his “beloved mother,” his Aunt René.
Hailey’s first stop this morning was for a cup of hot tea in the courthouse cafeteria. She could easily overhear several sheriffs at the next table talking about Turner. He had worshipped his mother and bragged to her endlessly about every capture, arrest, and trial as if they’d all been his own. Not in a self-aggrandizing way, he was simply proud to be part of the team and wanted her to be proud of her “boy,” although Alton had been pushing forty.
Hailey stared down into her cup of tea. She’d tucked her own tea bag of Irish breakfast into her bra that morning so she’d have it once she got to the courthouse. It was her favorite brand but very hard to find. It was easy to score a bag of English breakfast, but Irish was another matter altogether. It was steaming hot and practically white with skim milk, just how she liked it.
It sounded like Alton Turner wouldn’t hurt a fly. Staring down at her tea bag floating in its cup, Hailey couldn’t help but wonder who could have murdered him in such a brutal way. The pain must have been excruciating.
Hailey caught a glimpse at a plain round clock above the cashier in the cafeteria. Court would start in a little over thirty minutes and she wanted a good seat. Gulping down the rest of her tea and giving a nod to the sheriffs seated next to her, she made her way to the courthouse bank of elevators and up to the Todd Adams murder trial.
And here she sat, soaking it in. State courtrooms almost universally had the same feel to them, the same smell, the same sounds, and the same vibe. Just being here made her miss her days as a felony prosecutor intensely. Homesick for her other life, waves of what might have been washed over her.
What might have been.
Her days fighting drug lords, rapists, child molesters, and killers had left her with an edge . . . quite an edge, as a matter of fact. Ten years in the pit of the Atlanta Fulton County Courthouse, waging war on the bad guys, had forever changed her.
But the reality was she’d never be the fresh-faced girl she was before . . . long before she became a felony prosecutor. Or even a law student for that matter . . . before another killer shattered her dreams. The murder of her fiancé, Will, just before their wedding, had left Hailey Dean broken . . . a shell of what she was and even now . . . a shell of what she could have been. What she should have been.
As one of the top litigators in the South, she developed a reputation as the most ruthless and hard-hearted prosecutor to have ever walked the courthouse halls. And she didn’t mind it a single bit.
But a part of her was sealed off forever. That part of her was her heart.
After nearly twenty minutes of waiting, the swinging doors in the courtroom opened and in walked a fleet of state lawyers, most of them carrying binders, files, and law books. The two men took seats at the state’s counsel table, closest to the jury. The two women, dressed in austere gray and navy blue, sat behind them.
No female lead counsel, Hailey thought. Not unusual. Any further thoughts as to gender bias evaporated into thin air when a side door of the courtroom opened from inside.
Out strode two huge, muscled Chatham County Sheriff’s officers, shoulder to shoulder. Behind them came two white, male attorneys. By the look of them, she assumed they were part of the defense team. The cut of their suits and the shine on their Italian leather loafers indicated a far bigger paycheck than a state prosecutor could ever pull in. The two were followed by a gaggle of underlings—paralegals, an investigator, a jury consultant by the looks of her, and two skinny law student types, apparently “interning” under the tutelage of famed defense attorney Michael P. “Mikey” DelVecchio.
Their hair was slicked back with some sort of gel that glistened in hard spikes under the courtroom lighting. They spoke quietly to each other, their heads slightly turned inward, DelVecchio with a smile on his lips. And then, at the end of the defense procession, with his head up, shoulders thrown back, muscled chest puffed forward, and looking like he was walking onto a football field to run a touchdown, came the defendant. Todd Adams.
His dark hair was smooth and shiny and clearly just trimmed for the big day. His suit was blue and tailored, fit him perfectly, and contrasted subtly against the light blue of a crisp, starched Oxford button-down shirt and crimson red silk tie. Adams flashed a perfectly aligned, bright white smile at his family, who settled in to take over the entire first row behind the defense counsel table.
Hailey watched and absorbed the interaction between Adams and his parents, his mom in particular. The two held a long gaze. Looking at Mrs. Adams, it was clear: She adored him, loved him, and, most important, believed him.
A rush of papers and sudden movement at the front of the courtroom was followed by a half a dozen minions rushing in. Then, in came the judge. Sharp-faced and gray-headed, Luther Alverson insisted on presiding over more jury trials than any other judge in the courthouse.
At eighty-four, he was also the oldest judge in the courthouse. So old in fact, he predated the state regulations on mandatory retirement. In order to prove himself still up to the task, he demanded that any and all Chatham assistant district attorneys and public defenders assigned to his court must go on trial every other week. His calendar was rarely backed up, and when a case went on his trial calendar, there would be no last-minute haggling, no eleventh-hour guilty pleas, no cheap deals.
Everyone stood as the judge seated himself with the simultaneous pounding of his gavel with three loud strikes. “Court’s in session. The Honorable Luther Alverson presiding.”
Like in a church at the end of a hymn, everyone sat back down in their seats in unison. The calendar clerk’s seat was positioned directly beside the judge’s bench. The clerk stood to read directly from the grand jury indictment, calling out the indictment number, a series of letters and numbers that had significance only to court employees, followed by the announcement “State v. Todd Adams.”
As her son’s name was read out loud, Tish Adams burst into tears, drawing every eye in the courtroom off her son and onto herself. Hailey immediately checked Julie Love’s mother, also seated in the front row but on the other side of the courtroom.
The look Dana Love shot at Adams’s mother could have cut stone. It was a look of pure hatred. It was clearly borne of resentment at the long years Adams was coddled by his mom, at the numerous excuses for Adams’s bad behavior she made, culminating in a final act of violence.
Adams’s defense team made a big stir at their table, scrambling among themselves, as it turned out, for a handkerchief the lead defense lawyer dramatically pulled from his lapel and handed back to Tish Adams. Immediately, prosecutors stood, and striding quickly toward the judge’s bench, barked out the word “Sidebar!”
“Counsel,
