The Cutting Room. Jilliane Hoffman
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get lucky and get to meet the actress live and in person. But I’m personally gonna have a hard time sleeping, wondering whose terrified kid that is on that clip.’
‘How many children do you have?’ Daria asked. ‘No, no, scratch that — how many daughters?’
‘None and none. No little Mannys or Emanuelas running around. At least, none that I know of.’
Daria rolled her eyes. ‘I would’ve pegged you for the dad of a harem of teenage daughters with that last comment.’
‘I may not have kids myself, Counselor, but it doesn’t take much to imagine what it would feel like if my daughter was raped and whacked by a psycho with a camera and a thing for household cleaners. Maybe the dad of the girl in that video has no idea what happened to his kid. Maybe she went out one night and never came home and he has no idea what became of her. Maybe her family’s hoping she had a car accident and bumped her melon and has amnesia, and they wait for the day she walks back through their door.’
‘She’s a little old to be calling a kid. I’m thinking late twenties.’
‘Okay, so she’s not a kid. Then maybe she’s married and her hubby has been scouring every waterway within a ten-mile radius of their house thinking she had a car accident and that’s why she didn’t come home for supper. Or maybe she’s not dead. Maybe she was raped and her assault was caught on camera and the bastard uploaded it to YouTube. Those are just a few of the scenarios that popped into my head. You and I have had to deal with the families of enough murder victims to understand that not knowing is the worst. I don’t have to be a dad or a husband to feel for them.’
‘What if she left home at sixteen to earn a living as an adult entertainer in LA and this shit she does with her boyfriend is mild compared to the other tricks she can perform with a rope? I just thought of that scenario off the top of my head.’
Manny shrugged and moved to the door. ‘It’s a forty-nine second clip, Counselor. Just imagine what we didn’t see, what footage might’ve ended up on the cutting-room floor.’
‘That works both ways, you know. It could be ten minutes of foreplay and cigarette smoking.’
‘Could be.’
‘Ugh.’ She spun her chair around to face the jail. ‘I’m not heartless. I’m being practical, is all.’
‘Okay,’ he answered, but he didn’t sound convinced. He pulled the cigarette from behind his ear. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow after the grand jury, although I’m sure you’ll be on the horn with Guy to find out how I did way before that.’
Daria waited until the door closed before she sank her head into her hands. She wanted to scream. She heard everyone saying hello to Manny as he made his way down the hall and finally out of the unit.
Talbot Lunders definitely had headline potential. If she didn’t see that before, she did now. The rape and murder of a pretty college coed by a privileged, former male model was intriguing enough to attract interest, and without adding yet more salacious detail, could prove a difficult story to control. But throw in a mysterious, lurid email, a homemade bondage sex tape, a secret family hideaway in Switzerland and the distraught, well-dressed, hot, young socialite momma of the defendant alleging lookalike blondes were being hunted and tortured by a real killer who the police weren’t bothering to look for, and you had the potential makings of a national news sensation. A savvy publicist would pitch it to the morning talk shows as ‘the perfect story’. Daria thought it more akin to the perfect storm.
After five years prosecuting everything and anything from shoplifting to homicide, Daria knew that Sex Batt was where she wanted to be. And she didn’t want to settle for being a line prosecutor — she wanted to lead the charge. As the cliché went, she’d paid her dues. She’d spent years in the pits prosecuting crappy cases and winning them, and for the past two years she’d been Division Chief of one of the most congested trial units in the office, supervising three felony attorneys and responsible for a court docket of more than four hundred felonies. The average ASA lasted three years on the state payroll before heading out to greener pastures; anyone who went past five was considered a lifer. And on the lifer scale, there were those bodies that stayed on simply to earn a paycheck and keep the benefits, working their eight-hour shifts from the trenches of the Felony Screening Unit, taking witness testimony and filing cases all day long, or buried under mounds of paperwork, tucked safely away in some dull, specialized unit on the 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,