They Called Me Copy Girl. I Wrote the Law. Chapter 04

They Called Me Copy Girl. I Wrote the Law. Chapter 04: The Woman Who Wasn’t Supposed to Speak

I’m nobody,” I said. “But your sister is innocent, and I can prove it with two pages this room has been staring

at for a week.”

Nobody breathed.

“Page four. The blood was drawn into a red-top tube. Red-top means no preservative. No sodium fluoride Blood without fluoride ferments – yeast in the sample manufactures alcohol on its own, sometimes

point-oh-five or more, sitting in a hospital fridge. The lab didn’t test a drunk girl. It tested a bad tube.”

I set down the carafe. My hands were perfectly still.

That’s the thing about my hands. They have never once shaken when it mattered. Only after.

“Page nine. The seatbelt bruise. Right shoulder to left hip.” I looked straight at Crane. “In an American car, the driver’s belt crosses left shoulder to right hip. Your sister’s bruise is a mirror image. She was in the passenger seat. Her boyfriend was driving. He’s dead, so the People picked the one who was still breathing.”

Sebastian Crane walked back to the table.

“Sit down,” he said. To me.

“Mr. Crane, Pruitt began, “she is not an attorney-”

“Then it should take her two minutes to embarrass herself.” He pulled out the chair beside him. “Sit.”

I sat. In the lawyers’ chairs. In a building where I hadn’t sat in a lawyer’s chair in three years.

“Show me,” he said.

I pulled the photos up. My fingers found the shortcuts without asking me first, like coming home to a house

in the dark.

“Enlarge the shoulder. There the strap abrasion angles down-left. Now the airbag. Driver’s side deployed,

passenger’s didn’t. If she’d been driving she’d have powder burns and a broken nose. She has a bruised collarbone from a shoulder belt on the wrong side.”

The consultant on the screen said, slowly, “…She’s right.”

Dana’s voice cracked. “This is absurd. She makes copies.”

“Then how does she know?” Crane said.

Nobody answered.

“So what’s the play,” he said to me. “Assume I understand nothing. Assume I only care about one thing.”

You only care about one thing,” I agreed. “Fine. You don’t plead. You move to suppress the toxicology – chain oncustody and sample integrity. You retain a biomechanics expert on the belt pattern. You subpoena the hospital’s tube inventory for that night. And you put the People to trial, because the second the tox’goes out, their case is a dead boy and a bruise pointing the wrong way.”

“Six lawyers said plead.”

“Six lawyers said they couldn’t win. That’s a different sentence.”

“And you can?”

The room went absolutely silent.

Three years of silence. A basement. Fluorescent lights. My mother turning around in the well of a courtroom

looking for me.

“There was one lawyer who could,” I said. “Her method is published.”

“Marlowe,” Crane said.

“Marlowe.”

“Chicago says Marlowe disappeared.”

“Chicago’s right.”

He watched me for a long moment.

“Miss Rowe. Look at me and tell me you’ve never stood up in a courtroom.”

I looked at him.

I opened my mouth.

And I couldn’t do it.

Three years of lying, and I could not make that particular lie come out of my body.

Dana saw it. God, she saw it – I watched the calculation slide behind her eyes like a knife going back in a

drawer.

“Mr. Crane,” she said sweetly, “I think what we’re witnessing is a very impressive amount of Google. Ms. Rowe has a personnel file. It says high school diploma, community college, eleven months at a dental billing

company. Would you like me to have HR bring it up?”

Yes,” Crane said. “I would.”

That’s when Crane’s general counsel’s phone rang.

He listened for four seconds and went gray.

“Sebastian. The DA just filed an emergency motion to revoke Lily’s bail. Ankle monitor put her at the victim’s family’s address Sunday night. Judge Hargrove wants everyone in Part 40 in thirty minutes.”

Dana was already reaching for her bag. “I’ll handle-”

“You’re in a deposition at eleven you can’t move,” Pruitt said. “Send Feldman.”

Feldman was a second-year associate who looked like he might faint.

Crane stood.

“If they revoke,” his general counsel said quietly, “she goes to Rikers tonight. With a murder count on her

sheet.”

And Sebastian Crane looked at me.