The Pact Read online

  They had been going over the discovery from the attorney general's office for three hours. It was the longest continuous stretch that Chris had ever spent away from his cell. He waited for Jordan to ask him another question, absently reading the names on the spines of the New Hampshire statute books arranged on a metal cart for the convenience of the visiting counselors.

  Jordan had told him, almost immediately after arriving this morning, that his defense strategy would be based on a double suicide that had not been carried through to its end. He had also told Chris that he would not be taking the stand in his own defense. It was the only way, Jordan insisted, to win the case. "How come," Chris said for the second time, "on TV, the defendant always takes the stand?"

  "Oh, holy Christ," Jordan muttered. "Are we back to that again? Because on TV the jury says whatever the hell the script tells it to. Real life is considerably less certain."

  Chris's lips thinned. "I told you that I wasn't suicidal."

  "Exactly. That's why you won't be on the stand. I can say whatever I want to at the trial to get you acquitted, but you can't. If I put you on the stand, you have to tell the jury that you were never going to kill yourself, and that weakens the defense."

  "But it's the truth," Chris said.

  Jordan pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's not the truth, Chris. There is no one truth. There's only what happened, based on how you perceive it. If I don't put you on the stand, all I'm doing is giving my idea of how I perceive what happened. I'm just not asking for yours."

  "It's a lie of omission," Chris pointed out.

  Jordan snorted. "Since when did you become a good Catholic?" he asked. He leaned back in his chair. "I'm not going to go around and around on this," he said. "You want to go on the stand and do it your way? Fine. First thing the prosecutor's going to do is hold up the police interviews and show the jury how you've already changed your story once. Then she'll ask you how come, if you were going to save Emily, you brought a gun with bullets in it, instead of an empty revolver for show. And then the jury will hand back a guilty verdict and I'll be the first one to wish you well at the State Pen."

  Chris muttered something under his breath and stood up, facing the rear wall of the conference room. "According to the ballistics report," Jordan said, ignoring him, "the shell of the one bullet that was fired was still in the revolver chamber, along with that second bullet. Your fingerprints were on both, which is a good piece of evidence for us: Why put two bullets in the chamber unless you were planning on one for yourself? I also like the fact that her fingerprints are on the gun, along with yours."

  "Yeah. But they only found her fingerprints on the barrel," Chris said, reading over Jordan's shoulder.

  "Doesn't matter. All we have to do is cast a reasonable doubt. Emily's fingerprints are somewhere on that gun. Therefore, she held it at some point." He spread his hands.

  "You sound confident," Chris said.

  "Would you rather I wasn't?"

  Chris sank down in his chair. "It's just that there's an awful lot of evidence there to explain away."

  "There is," Jordan briskly agreed. "And all it does is place you at the scene of the crime--something you've never denied. It does not, however, prove what you were doing there." He smiled at Chris. "Relax. I've won cases with far less to go on than this one."

  Jordan opened up the medical examiner's report with the details of Emily's autopsy. Entranced, Chris reached out and twisted the folder, reading the distinguishing marks of her body that he could have cataloged himself, the measure of her lungs, the color of her brain. He did not have to read the careful number to know the weight of Emily's heart; he'd held it for years.

  "Are you left-handed or right-handed?" Jordan asked.

  "Left," Chris said. "Why?"

  Jordan shook his head. "Trajectory of the bullet," he said. "What about Emily?"

  "Right-handed."

  Jordan sighed. "Well, that's consistent with the evidence," he said. He continued to leaf through the records that had been sent by the prosecutor's office. "You had sex before she killed herself," Jordan stated.

  Chris reddened. "Um, yes," he said.

  "Once?"

  He felt his cheeks burning even hotter. "Yeah."

  "Straight intercourse? Or did she go down on you?"

  Chris ducked his head. "Do you really need to know this?"

  "Yes," Jordan said evenly. "I do."

  Chris picked at a nick in the table. "Just straight," he murmured. He watched his attorney flip through the autopsy report. "What else does it say?"

  Jordan exhaled through his nose. "Not enough of what we need." He stared at Chris. "Is there any physical condition you know of that could have accounted for Emily's depression?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like some kind of hormonal imbalance? Cancer?" Chris shook his head twice. "What about the pregnancy?"

  For a moment, all the air in the room thickened. "The what?" Chris said.

  He was aware of Jordan watching his face carefully. "Pregnancy," Jordan said, turning the autopsy report toward Chris again. "Eleven weeks."

  Chris's mouth opened and closed. "She was ... oh, God. Oh, God. I didn't know." He thought of Emily as he had last seen her: lying on her side, her blood spreading beneath her hair, her hand draped over her abdomen. And then the room went black, and he imagined that he was falling into place beside her.

  USUALLY A VISIT TO the jail's nurse cost three dollars, but apparently fainting in the middle of a meeting with one's attorney won an inmate high triage status and a free trip to the small room used for medical treatment. Chris awakened to the feeling of cool hands on his brow. "Are you all right?" a voice said, high-pitched and muted, as if through a tunnel. He tried to sit up, but the hands were surprisingly strong. After a moment, he took deep breaths and tried to focus, and his eyes seized upon the face of an angel.

  The nurses rotated, on loan from the old folks' home next door. Chris knew of certain inmates who'd fill out the request for a medical visit and pay the three bucks just to see whether they'd get Nurse Carlisle, hands down the hottest of the three women. "You passed out," Nurse Carlisle said to him now. "Just keep your feet up, yes, like that, and you'll be fine in a few minutes."

  He kept his feet up, but turned his head on the scratchy pillow so that he could watch Nurse Carlisle move with economical grace around the small closet that passed for a sickroom. She returned with a glass of water--filled with, oh, God, precious ice. "Drink this slowly," she said, and he did, slipping the small cubes into his mouth the moment she turned away.

  "Have you fainted before?" Nurse Carlisle asked, her back to him, and he almost said no, until he remembered the night that Emily had died.

  "Once," he said.

  "Well, I've been in those little conference rooms," the nurse confided. "I'm surprised anyone makes it through without fainting, given the heat."

  "Yeah," Chris said. "That must have been it." But now that she had mentioned the conference room, it was all coming back. The discovery he'd been going over with Jordan. The small black letters that made up Emily's autopsy report. The baby.

  He felt himself sinking back down on the table, and almost immediately the nurse was at his side. "Are you feeling sick again?" she asked, propping his feet up again and covering him with a blanket.

  "Do you have kids?" Chris asked thickly.

  "No," the nurse laughed. "Why? Am I acting like a mother?" She tucked the blanket in at his sides. "Do you?"

  "No," Chris answered. "No, I don't." His hands fisted on the fabric.

  "You stay here as long as you want," Nurse Carlisle said. "Don't worry about the officers; I'll let them know what's happened."

  What had happened? Chris wasn't even certain he knew anymore. Emily ... pregnant? He had no doubt that the baby was his; he knew this in the way he knew that the sun would go down that night and that the sky would be blue the next morning--a fact that had always been that way and would always continue to be. He squinched s