fifth floor, like Economic Crimes.
Then there were the lifers who made a run at bigger and better things.
Daria fell into the latter group. While she’d never consciously decided to spend her entire legal career as a prosecutor, besides the possibility of moving to the feds, she’d never really had the itch to circulate her résumé. Once you’d put a rapist behind bars for thirty years, a slip and fall at the grocery store just didn’t seem all that exciting. Neither did bankruptcy law, corporate litigation, insurance defense, or helping sound the death knell on people’s marriages as a divorce attorney. A rabid fan of all cop and lawyer shows and everything FBI since she was a kid, Daria figured being a prosecutor was simply what she was meant to be. Unlike her older brothers — a hospital administrator and an eighth-grade science teacher — she’d never dreaded going to work in the morning. And God knew she’d never spent a single second bored in her job. On occasion sad, and a lot of times pissed off, but never bored. That didn’t mean she wanted to stay an overworked, underpaid division pit prosecutor for the rest of her career, though.
To prove to Vance Collier and the rest of Administration that she was a lifer with a future, in addition to trying cases that a lot of other ASAs would’ve pled out, she’d worked weekends, volunteered for on-call robbery duty even when it wasn’t her rotation, and handled holiday bond hearings without complaint. Coming in early and leaving late every day, watching jealously at times and scornfully at others while the support staff headed en masse for the elevators at 4:30 and most of her colleagues followed by 5:30. Some a helluva lot sooner. She’d made the requisite sacrifices: no boyfriend, no hobbies, no life, outside babysitting her brother’s ADHD triplets on her first long weekend off since Christmas.
If it was only a simple murder case that she needed to win in order to prove herself capable of heading up a unit full of specialized prosecutors, she’d have no real worries. The case against Talbot Lunders was circumstantial, yes, but the evidence, in the collective, damning. As a law school professor had once described it, making a circumstantial case was a lot like making a strudel: while a single sheet of paper-thin filo dough couldn’t support the weight of ten apples, if you capably assembled sheet upon delicate sheet, eventually you had a pastry with enough layers to support a whole bushel of fruit. The key was in the dogged construction, and, of course, in the oven you ultimately loaded your dessert into, which had to be brought to the perfect temperature before actually introducing the food, and that temperature had to be maintained throughout the whole baking process. The oven in the analogy, of course, referred to the jury — already plenty hot and fired up by the time you opened the oven door, ready to bake anything to a crisp the second you closed it. Too cool and nothing would gel. Considering Florida was a death penalty state — and, until a few years ago, the state’s preferred method of execution was a seat in Old Sparky — her professor’s analogy of a jury baking anything to a crisp was completely intentional. In other words, you had to pick the perfect twelve people — none of whom watched CSI or NCIS — set the right tone of outrage and shock, and by the time you slid your assembled facts through the door of that deliberation room, the only thing you had to wait for was the timer to ding.
Daria could handle that. She had a way with juries, almost like a sixth sense when she was picking them. She wasn’t sweating a conviction on Lunders, even with Manny Alvarez playing Wild West cop and making what was, arguably, a premature arrest. Because with the facts as she had them down at the Arthur, she could certainly set that perfect tone of grab-the-pitchforks indignation in the jury room, and she had enough circumstantial layers that when put together would be strong enough to hold together a death penalty request. The gruesome crime-scene photos would certainly help fuel the fire. The competition she faced, though well paid, was out of their element in Miami. Joe Varlack was a showman with a big voice who likely hadn’t personally tried a criminal case in a long while. She could eat both him and his sidekick Simmons for breakfast, complete with Louboutins and fancy briefcases. She was also confident she could keep Talbot Lunders’s pretty face off at least the front page of the paper and maintain the low profile the State Attorney was trying for. It was a fair assumption that if the cameras weren’t in court this afternoon the matter wasn’t on their radar.
Unlike other ASAs who saw certain cases as a means to make a name for themselves outside of the office, Daria was no media hound. If Lunders didn’t end up pleading out — like 90 percent of cases that passed through the system — when it came down to trying him, she wasn’t going to do it on live TV and in the court of public opinion, which could fuck up any verdict, as O.J. Simpson’s prosecutors could attest. She reasoned that as long as she didn’t go looking for press, the press wouldn’t come looking for her. Or Talbot Lunders. There were too many other headlines to chase. Too much other gory bad news going on worldwide for the people to revel in their morning cups of joe.
Unless …
Unless someone led the reporters and their boom mikes straight to a story that had everything the public at large wanted to read about in super-sized portions — perverted sex, brutal murder, and Birkin bag money. And kept harping on it until someone with a press badge finally paid attention.
Daria saw the train-wreck coming up ahead if Manny followed this breadcrumb trail laid by the defendant’s sniffling, sexy mother. It had been a decade since the serial killer Cupid had stalked his comely victims from happening ‘it’ clubs on Miami Beach, and yet his crimes still defined Miami to the world — as much as celebrities, yachts, teal water, and Cuban refugees did. Then there was Picasso, another monster who had hunted and killed young runaways in South Florida, commanding headlines and craziness a couple of years ago. And of course, the high-profile murder of Gianni Versace by a serial killer a few steps from the white sands of South Beach in 1997. Versace’s murder and the ensuing week-long hunt for Andrew Cunnanan had spawned an international feeding frenzy that had lasted for months on end. Three relatively recent, bloody blemishes on the suntanned reputation of a cosmopolitan city that drew an outrageous number of tourist dollars to its golden beaches, beautiful hotels and happening nightlife. It wouldn’t be good PR if news got out that not only was there yet another sadistic killer in the city, but speculation existed within law enforcement that that killer was still at large, trolling for victims at the hot spots that the tourists and their money loved to frequent, making chilling videos of his conquests.
She nibbled on a thumbnail, staring all the while out the window at the jail where Talbot Lunders was being held. She had a terrible habit of imagining the worst-case scenario of any situation and then multiplying it exponentially until she imagined herself right out of a job and facing eviction from her apartment for nonpayment of rent.
The truth was, if this case did become a circus like Cupid or Versace, or worse, a completely bungled O.J. Simpson that she couldn’t control, she knew she’d never get Collier’s seal of approval. And while that might not force her butt out on the streets, it certainly wouldn’t put her in the running for Chief of Sex Batt, or any other unit for that matter. She’d be a pit prosecutor for ever. A lifer stuck in neutral. Like a Hollywood actress that only got one shot at the box office, she knew she had only one chance to get this right. That meant she had to retain control over her case and make sure that whatever Manny Alvarez was doing to allay the fears his own conscience was conjuring up, it didn’t become public knowledge and it didn’t interfere with her prosecution.
She checked her watch: almost eight. The day was gone and she still had a ton of shit to do. The sun was starting to set over the Everglades, casting the jail in an ethereal, tangerine glow. If you hadn’t noticed the razor wire and barred windows, and you didn’t know there were violent, depraved rapists and murderers being housed inside, from a distance, in this light, one might think the normally dingy, unimpressive jail building looked inviting. Like Dracula’s castle about twenty minutes before sundown.
She was reaching for the top file in her inbox when the time bomb Manny Alvarez planted in her brain suddenly went off. A barrage of unanswerable questions cut through her stream of consciousness
