The Immortal Read online

  The prosecutor finished his remarks and took his seat. I edged toward the end of the wooden bench and leaned forward, studying the jurors’ faces as the judge gave them his parting instructions. A quick appraisal of the twelve jurors and two alternates confirmed my earlier evaluation—it might take a few days for them to convince Laurie Dorset, but this panel would acquit Senator Mitchell.

  I had staked my career on it.

  As the jury stood and turned toward their exit, I rose from my seat and moved toward the double doors at the back of the courtroom, eager to get away before Colby caught me and demanded another dose of reassurance.

  I slipped through the crowd of reporters outside the courtroom and wound through the marble hallways, finally ducking into a ladies’ room. After a quick peek beneath each stall door to make certain I had the space to myself, I leaned against the wall in a corner, fished my cell phone from my purse, and punched in my office number.

  Rory Metcalf, my secretary, answered on the first ring. “Fischer Consulting.”

  “Hi, it’s me. You beeped?”

  Rory knew better than to make idle conversation when I was involved in a trial. I’d called him from rest rooms before, and though a ladies’ lounge was often one of the quietest rooms in a public building, I never knew when one of the enemy camp might decide to pop in and eavesdrop.

  “Nothing urgent, but I thought you’d appreciate your messages,” Rory said, his voice clipped. “Floyd Wilkerson called this morning. He said it’s urgent that he speak to you as soon as possible.”

  I groaned. Wilkerson was an officer at the bank where two years ago I’d taken out a short-term loan to establish my own litigation consulting office. The balloon payment on that loan was now six months past due.

  Shoving the matter aside, I decided Wilkerson would have to wait. If this jury found Senator Mitchell guilty, I’d probably have to initiate bankruptcy proceedings.

  “Hold Wilkerson. What’s next?”

  “Your sister called and wanted to know if you’re still coming up this weekend.”

  “Call her back and tell her yes—unless we lose this case. If that happens, I’m locking myself in my apartment and sewing a sackcloth robe.”

  Rory ignored my melodramatic moment. “Kurt called—are you two still on for dinner tonight?”

  I held up my free hand and idly inspected the diamond in the center of my platinum engagement ring. “Sure. Call his office and leave word that I’ll see him at the Rainbow Room at eight.”

  The plastic chatter of Rory’s keyboard echoed over the phone line. “Got it. There’s just one more thing.” His voice took on a coolly disapproving tone. “Elaine Dawson called right before I paged you. She was watching the summation on TV and says you’ve got it all wrapped up.”

  A warm rush flowed through me, and for an instant I forgot that Elaine and I had gone from being best friends to archrivals in the last two years. Because she had been my mentor and employer, her opinion still mattered a great deal to me. It was nice of her to call . . . as long as her call wasn’t designed to give me false confidence. If we lost this case, I knew she’d phone again and offer condolences, but she’d be secretly delighted that her position as America’s foremost jury consultant was secure.

  “Nice of her to notice us.” I pulled myself off the wall, then turned and studied the empty stalls. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing. I’ll return these calls to Kurt and your sister.” He paused a moment, and I could almost see him smile. “I saw the summation too, and I’ve got to agree with Elaine. That jury was eating out of Colby’s hand.”

  “Let’s hope so.” The door from the hallway opened, and a short woman with frowsy blonde hair entered and headed straight for the stall closest to me. I didn’t recognize her, but one could never be too careful about security. “Gotta go. Speak to you soon.”

  I snapped the phone shut, dropped it into my purse, and moved to the sink. As I splashed water over my hands and checked my reflection in the mirror, I listened for sounds from the occupied stall. The district attorney had pulled some sneaky stunts in the past six months, and sending a secretary in to eavesdrop wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility . . . even though there was probably no point in such shenanigans at this point. Senator Mitchell’s fate now lay in the hands of twelve well-chosen jurors.

  I dried my hands on a paper towel, tossed it into the waste can, and moved toward the door without seeing the frowsy woman again. The hallway outside appeared deserted, but as I moved down the marble-tiled corridor, I noticed that my footsteps seemed to have picked up an odd echo.

  Disconcerted, I stepped to the wall, leaning against it as if I’d decided to wait for someone. A man stood about ten feet behind me, and his brows lifted as I turned. With one glance I registered his baldness, a certain thickness through his torso and shoulders, and his age—about fifty. An odd smile flicked across his face as my gaze crossed his, then he shrugged slightly and moved to the opposite wall, clasping his hands as if he, too, had decided to wait for the Mitchell jury in this deserted hallway.

  I looked away as my survival instincts started clanging like a fire alarm. You can’t live a week in Manhattan without becoming a little careful about strangers, and this fellow was obviously no New Yorker, any one of whom would have ignored my deliberate diversion and kept walking.

  Without meeting his gaze again, I thrust my hands into my suit pockets and walked briskly back to the pack of paparazzi loitering outside the courtroom. Safety lay in numbers.

  Two hours later I was perched on a stool in Pravda, a Russian-themed lounge on Lafayette Street, the watering hole closest to the Manhattan courthouse. The place bustled with trench-coated reporters, and I enjoyed being among them. Years ago I discovered that media people were a secret weapon in the war against failure—like me, they made a living out of observing others, and their comments often confirmed or rattled my judgments about each day’s proceedings. While any one of the press people could have identified me, few of them expected to find a member of Mitchell’s defense team slumming with the press corps. So, perched near the end of the bar, I could sip my Diet Coke, quietly listen to passing comments, and measure my perceptions against prevailing conventional wisdom.

  The couple seated to my right was proving particularly interesting. “The senator will be dining in his own apartment by the weekend,” the man said, a swatch of wavy brown hair falling casually on his forehead. He wore a suit and tie—television reporter. Newspaper people didn’t usually dress to impress, particularly if they were destined for a day of dodging traffic and scrambling for quotes amid the rabble.

  The woman at his side, a blonde whose hair had gone coarse from too many chemical treatments, stirred her drink with her fingertip, then lazily brought her finger to her lips.

  I rolled my eyes and looked away, embarrassed for the female species. Her blonde hair, tiny hair clips, and lace collar signaled femininity, but her gestures were about as demure as an oncoming train.

  “I’m not so sure about the senator going free,” she answered, her voice deep and husky. “Care to bet on it?”

  I closed my eyes. Ten to one she was about to mention dinner someplace, and I’d bet my last cookie she wanted to lose that particular wager. She liked this guy, whoever he was, and her interest wasn’t exactly focused on his intellectual qualities.

  I could understand the interest. He was handsome and charmingly bewildered, and thick enough not to have picked up on her flagrant flirting. “You don’t believe he’ll get off?” The newsman turned the full wattage of his blinding smile upon the blonde. “Though the evidence clearly shows the senator is guilty, you can’t forget who he is. He’s a powerful man.”

  He had taken the bait; his smile said it all. Smiles come in three basic varieties—simple smiles, where the corners of the mouth lift without showing teeth; upper smiles, where just the top teeth are visible; and broad smiles, where you can practically count a person’s molars. Of course, each smile comes
in high and low intensities, and there are about as many variations as there are people, but you don’t send a broad smile winging across the room unless you’re expressing great pleasure and delight. No doubt about it, Mr. Newsman wanted the blonde, but he had no idea she wanted him almost as badly.

  I shifted on my stool, suddenly bored with the tableau at my right hand. The man was an idiot, probably one of those cardboard suits who was paid to read the news and look good doing it. The blonde was welcome to him.

  I picked up my glass and leaned one elbow on the bar, swiveling to look back at the crowd that had filled the room. A group of men at a table near the door erupted in laughter at a companion’s punch line; a more discreet table of women buzzed in the corner, their eyes narrowed in concern and sympathy—for whom? The murdered woman or the scheming senator?

  I took a sip from my glass and glanced toward the opposite corner, then felt an instinctive stab of fear as I recognized the bulky form propped against the wall. The bald man from the courthouse hallway stood there, his hands hidden in the pockets of his camel-colored overcoat, his gaze fastened to my face. As an icy finger touched the base of my spine, I broke the stare and glanced downward, then chastised myself for behaving so instinctively. When involved in a nonverbal power play, you should look up and away or to the side, but never down. Now he would know he had intimidated me.

  I clenched my fist in annoyance at my own stupidity. Here I was, behaving like a submissive and helpless female, when the man probably had nothing to do with me. He could be anyone—a resident in my apartment building, a friend of Kurt’s I’d met at a party, or someone who had read the People interview and thought I looked familiar. He hadn’t looked away when I caught his eye in the courthouse, so for some reason he felt he knew me . . .

  “Excuse me, Miss Fischer?”

  I glanced up, surprised as much by the respectful tone as by the fact that someone had bothered to look at my face. The slim man standing beside me wore a white shirt, navy trousers, a tan trench coat, and a coffee-stained tie—the uniform of a newspaper reporter.

  Grateful to be distracted from the man at the back of the room, I gave the reporter a tentative smile. “Do I know you?”

  He pulled a business card from his pocket and expertly flicked it onto the polished bar. “Tom Brown of the Times.”

  I glanced at the card, then tilted my head and looked up. “What can I do for you, Mr. Brown?”

  A steno pad and tape recorder magically appeared. “Would you care to predict the jury’s verdict?”

  “No comment.”

  The set of his chin suggested a stubborn streak. “Will you confirm that you are working for Ross Colby’s law firm?”

  “No comment.”

  “Come on, Claudia.” He gave me a lopsided smile, no teeth showing. Friendly, but unsure. “We all know what you were doing in that courtroom every day. Just confirm it for me.”

  I parked my elbow on the bar and dropped my chin to my palm. “I never talk about my clients.”

  Brown shoved the steno pad and recorder back into his pocket, then gestured toward the bartender, his face screwing up in a conspiratorial grin. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  I tapped a fingernail to the edge of my glass. “I have one, thanks.”

  “Can we talk off the record?”

  “Not about my client.”

  “OK, then. I’d really like to talk about you and your work. I saw the People piece. Fascinating.”

  I sipped the watery liquid collecting among the ice cubes at the bottom of my glass as Brown placed his order. Just last week Rory and I had looked at our empty calendar and wondered if lawyers even read People, but here stood a reporter for the respected New York Times. An article might help, but timing mattered immensely. If Senator Mitchell was found guilty and a Times article came out immediately afterward, I’d become known as the jury consultant least likely to help a client win his case.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt to hear what Mr. Brown had in mind.

  “Why would you be interested in me?” I took pains to keep my voice light. “I’m just an ordinary person, trying hard to meet a need and make a living.”

  “I should hardly think life as a jury consultant is ordinary.” Tom Brown accepted a scotch and soda from the bartender, then shifted to look at me. “I’ve spent every free moment of the last three weeks learning as much as I could about you, Claudia Fischer. And what I’ve learned is quite intriguing.”

  I forced a laugh. “Don’t waste your breath, Brown. I don’t flatter easily.”

  He took a quick gulp from his glass, then leaned against the bar and gave me a bright-eyed glance, full of shrewdness. “Flattery’s not my style. I’m more of a researcher, and I always double-check my facts.”

  “Like what?”

  He set his glass on the counter and pulled the steno pad from his pocket. He flipped a couple of pages, then lifted a brow. “You received your M.A. in communications with an emphasis in legal communication from San Diego State. You began your career six years ago working in Los Angeles with Elaine Dawson. You assisted her with several celebrity cases and left her firm just after the Hernandez brothers’ trial resulted in two convictions for first-degree murder.” He lifted his head and looked at me with a question in his eyes. “Her secretary intimated that your shoddy work lost that case.”

  I took a deep breath and flexed my fingers, waiting until the urge to strangle a certain secretary had passed. “I thought you double-checked your sources. If you had, you’d know that’s not what happened.”

  I stood, ready to leave, but he caught my arm. “Then tell me your side of the story. I promise I’ll get it right.”

  “I don’t need this.”

  “Claudia”—his voice dropped to a deeper, more persuasive level— “in a matter of days, Senator Mitchell’s trial will pass into history, and everyone on earth will want to know about the jury consultant who picked the panel. Do you want the world to know the full story? Or would you rather have them read your curriculum vitae as presented in a press release from Elaine Dawson’s office?”

  I gritted my teeth. Reporters could be as annoying as a whiny child, but Brown had a point. I had done very little work on the Hernandez brothers’ case, but since I chose to leave soon afterward, I made a convenient scapegoat for the blot on Elaine’s record.

  Reluctantly, I lowered myself back to the stool. “Why did you call Elaine Dawson’s office in the first place?”

  Brown grinned as he pulled out the tape recorder. “Everyone knows she won the Marvin Maxwell case.”

  “I thought that was Tommy Coachman. I seem to remember hearing, ‘If his prints don’t show, you must let him go.’”

  “Yeah, but it took a genius to pick twelve people who would buy into that poppycock.” Brown flipped a switch on the tiny recorder. “So tell me what happened between you and Elaine Dawson.”

  I sighed heavily, then caught the bartender’s eye and pointed toward my empty glass. He scooped it up. “You owe me a Diet Coke,” I told Brown.

  “The Times can afford it.”

  A fresh glass appeared before me. I took a sip, then turned to face the reporter. “I hate to disappoint you, but there was no big scandal. I wanted to start handling some of the actual casework. After six years, I knew I had learned enough to manage it. But Elaine is—well, she’s one of those administrators who has to keep her finger in every pie. She always had to be—make that she always liked being—in the courtroom. She was happy to let her people do the background work, but she would never let any of us fly solo. So I finally resigned and told her I was moving east. Most of her clients are in California; I’m happy to work in New York.”

  “Are you still friendly?”

  “Of course. Elaine phoned me just this morning, in fact.”

  Brown set the tape recorder on the bar and nonchalantly lifted his glass. “Did she call about the Mitchell trial?”

  “No comment.”

  Brown smiled, acknowledging hi
s sneak attack. “OK. So tell me— what’s involved in the work of a jury consultant? You don’t go to college and major in intuition.”

  “Intuition has nothing to do with it.” I paused to frame my thoughts. Litigation consulting companies like mine assisted attorneys in witness preparation, credibility assessment, nonverbal communication analysis, venue analysis, and voir dire strategies. Boiled down to bare bones, the job largely depended upon demographic studies and body language. Most of my work relied upon a thousand little visual and audible clues I’d learned to recognize and interpret through experience. But I couldn’t just rattle off a disconnected list of signals; they rarely made sense out of context.

  “There’s nothing magical about it,” I finally said. “Anyone who likes to interpret statistics and watch people could probably be trained to do what I do. It’s a matter of learning about individuals, of knowing what makes them tick. It’s just a matter of reading and understanding them.”

  “So how do you read people? Through body language?”

  “That’s only part of it.” I took a deep breath. “First, through demographic studies we gather as much data as possible about the venue, so we’ll know what sort of people we’re likely to encounter in a jury pool. Then we gather information about each prospective juror—all from public records, of course; it’s perfectly legal. While the lawyers for both sides conduct their questioning during voir dire, we take notes. We pay attention to what the jurors say as well as what they don’t say. And we’re not afraid to take chances—after all, many times our client’s life depends upon our decisions. It’s better to challenge a questionable juror than say nothing and have that juror convince the others your client is guilty.”

  A gleam of resentment entered the reporter’s eyes. “Do you ever feel guilty about what you do? After all, Elaine Dawson’s work resulted in Marvin Maxwell’s freedom, and nine out of ten Americans today would tell you he murdered his wife and that other poor guy.”