Cold truth

Chapter 31

Mason met with Jordan the next afternoon. She was anxious to see him, giving him a bear hug when the guard ushered her into the cramped, windowless room where Mason waited.

"Why haven't you been to see me?" she said, letting him go.

"I've been pretty busy working on your case," he answered. "Besides, the guards tell me you've had company."

"Yeah, Abby has been here a couple of times. I still haven't figured out how she got involved in all of this, but I'm glad she did."

"Blame it on me," Mason said, dodging the question. "Are they treating you okay in here?"

Jordan walked around the perimeter of the room, extending her arms like yardsticks, measuring the space. "You know, this room is actually smaller than my cell. I didn't think anything could be smaller than that. The guards haven't bothered me. One woman came on to me and I thought we were going to have a problem, but she backed off."

"Jordan, tell me about the baby you gave up for adoption," Mason said.

She looked at him, her arms drooping at her sides. "It happened the first time my parents put me at Sanctuary. I was pissed at them and my brother. This guy, he wasn't even cute, I just figured, what the hell, it couldn't be worse than my brother. When I missed my period, I got scared and I wanted to get an abortion. Terry talked me out of it."

"What did your parents say?"

"Don't come home until the baby was gone." Sitting down at the table in the middle of the room, she clasped her hands together, laying them out in front of her, her eyes moistening. "Lou, you've got to get me out of here. I want to find my baby."

Mason knew that people often responded to incarceration the same way they did when a doctor told them they had a terminal illness, grinding through denial, anger, and bargaining until they accepted their new reality. Jordan was twenty-one years old. Fifteen years was almost as long as she'd been alive. Mason didn't know how she could ever accept the reality he was about to give her.

"Jordan, it may be a while before you get out."

Jordan's eyes flickered, light draining from her face like a picture morphing from color to black and white. "What are you saying?"

Mason gathered himself, looking at her, not wanting to tell her, not having a choice, giving it to her straight. "I think we should consider a plea bargain, making a deal with the prosecutor."

"What kind of a deal?" she asked, her voice rising an octave, the veins in her arms beginning to bulge as she clamped her hands more tightly together. "What does that mean? That I plead guilty? I'm not guilty! You don't believe me, do you?" she accused him, jumping out of her chair, knocking it over behind her. "I'm not guilty! I can't stay here. You've got to get me out!"

Jordan planted her palms on the table, leaning over Mason, pushing him back with her demand. Mason rose, circled past her, picked up her chair, and put his arm around her. She wrestled away, Mason holding on, pulling her back.

"It's not that simple, Jordan. It should be. It should only be about guilt or innocence, but it isn't. It's about proof, theirs and ours. It's about what a jury might do. It's about the risk you are taking with your life. I need you to know all these things so you can decide. I'm not going to make you do anything."

She wouldn't bend, keeping her frame rigid, fighting his grip and his words. "If you think I'm guilty, what chance do I have?"

Mason patted her on the back. "I don't think you're guilty, Jordan, but I'm not on the jury," Mason said, dispensing the standard lawyer's bromide, not telling her that he wasn't certain of her innocence any longer, but wouldn't let his doubt stand in the way of a vigorous defense.

Mason returned to his seat, Jordan still standing, her head turned to the side, not meeting his gaze. "Your preliminary hearing on Friday will be just like the one last week. The judge will bind you over for trial for Trent's murder. You won't get bail. Your trial on Gina's murder starts in two months. Let me tell you what the jury will hear."

Mason recited the evidence in a flat, neutral monotone, letting his words fall like small hammers on Jordan, beating the resistance out of her until she fell back in her chair, her head on the table, covered by her arms.

"I didn't do it, any of it," she said, her voice muffled with sobs.

Mason said, "You've got two choices. Take your chance with the jury at both trials. If we lose the first case, we can probably make a deal on the second since you'll already be looking at a life term, maybe even the death penalty. If we win the first case, we roll the dice a second time. Your other choice is to make a deal on both cases. I talked to the prosecuting attorney. He'll accept a plea to second-degree murder on both cases with a sentence of fifteen years to life and an agreement that you'll be out in fifteen. You'll only be thirty-six years old. You can still have a life."

Jordan sat up, her face a patchwork of red blotches, her empty eyes a preview of the institutional bleakness of prison. "You really think I should do this, don't you?"

"You're risking the rest of your life and any chance of ever finding your child. The prosecutor may ask for the death penalty. He wants that hanging over your head. You need to think it over and tell me what you want to do."

"When do I have to decide?"

"Friday. The deal is on the table until the preliminary hearing. After that, we go to trial. That's the way Ortiz does business. He squeezes as hard as he can."

"I want to talk to Abby first. Will you ask her to come see me?"

"Sure," Mason said. "She'll come tomorrow. I'll see you Friday morning."

Mason called Roy Bowen in St. Louis as soon as he returned to his office. "Roy, it's Lou Mason. Did you find those records?" Mason asked without saying hello.

"Weather here isn't bad for this time of year. We understand you folks got an early frost, probably catch us tonight," Bowen said.

"Roy, I haven't got time for good manners," Mason said. "I need answers."

"You get older, Lou, you develop more patience, get used to things taking longer than you want them to. I'm navigating my way through a city bureaucracy that's dedicated to getting back to you tomorrow, only tomorrow never comes. It would be a hell of a lot easier if you had a name or two you wanted me to track down. Collecting the employment records on everyone who worked in Vital Records more than twenty years ago is a nightmare for those people. They're giving me every excuse except executive privilege and national security."

"You're right and I'm sorry, Roy," Mason said. "The prosecutor is squeezing us to make a deal by Friday or we go to trial. I've got more loose threads than a cheap suit and nothing to stitch them together with."

"Then give me some names, son, and I'll get you an answer."

Mason gave Bowen the names and Bowen promised to call him back before the preliminary hearing. Mason hung up, opened his dry-erase board, felt his eyes cross at his spaghetti graffiti, and closed it. He leaned against his window overlooking Broadway and tried to imagine making the decision he'd left for Jordan. He couldn't bring it into focus any more than he could the murders. The case had become a black hole, sucking reason and certainty into another dimension.

Blues banged on Mason's office door once, pushing it open without waiting for an invitation. He was dressed in black, a color he chose when working the streets. He once explained to Mason that he chose it because it intimidated most people and hid bloodstains from those who weren't so easily persuaded.

Mason said, "I don't care what you had to do to get it, just tell me you got something I can use."

"You're not as particular as you used to be. When we first started out, if I jaywalked, you'd turn me in. Now, you just want results, is that it?" Blues asked, filling the space between the door and Mason's desk.

"I've done a lot of things I didn't think I would ever do since I met you," Mason said. "I'm not proud of some of them, but I've learned to live with them, mostly because I didn't have a choice at the time."

"You had a choice," Blues said. "There's always a choice. You're just getting used to doing things my way."

"Are you going to tell me where you've been and what you've found out, or do I just write a check for this therapy session and call it a day?"

Blues stretched out on Mason's couch, his feet extending out over the other end. "You told me to poke around into Centurion's business, so I poked."

Mason picked up a rugby ball from the floor next to his desk and rifled it at Blues who deflected it with a flick of his wrists. "I'm not paying you for an information strip tease, Bluestone," Mason told him. "Give."

Blues sat up, grinning. "You are going to like this.

Centurion is still in the trade, cooking up meth in a little cabin in the woods, storing cocaine and heroin there till he moves all that shit to the street. Some of the inmates at Sanctuary mule for him."

"Any ties to Robert Davenport?"

"I found one of the middle men that passed the shit to Davenport. He convinced me that Centurion was his source. Didn't take much convincing. By the time we were done talking, he was begging to tell me."

Mason knew that he should feel guilty about using Blues to extract information this way, but he didn't. He would have screamed to the rafters if the police used the same tactics on a client of his. He accepted the necessity of Blues's tactics, rationalizing them in an ends-justifies-the-means framework that pushed him farther from the principles his Aunt Claire had spent her life protecting.

Each time Mason took advantage of Blues's particular skills, he felt a small piece of him die, just as he had when he'd killed a man who would have killed him, just as he had when he'd pushed a judge to compromise herself to save Blues. Just as he did as Blues made his report, the lights on Broadway illuminating the night, leaving his soul closer to darkness.

"Do you think Centurion put the cocaine in Gina Davenport's office?" Mason asked.

"My source says yes, but he doesn't know why. Tell you what else I found out. Those two boys that snatched you out of your car?"

"Yeah," Mason said.

"They were free-lancers working for Centurion."

"Centurion hired them to find out if I kept a copy of the baby ledger."

"And kill you once they knew you had it. First rule of the streets, Lou. Don't leave anything to chance. You just beat the odds."

"So why is Centurion giving me a pass now? Why hasn't he come after me?"

"Two reasons," Blues said. "First, the cops are all over him, flying helicopters over Sanctuary, following him wherever he goes. Anything happens to you, they'll be on him like stink on shit. You can thank Samantha for that."

"What's the other reason?" Mason asked.

"He's waiting to see what happens with Jordan. Word is already out that she's going to plead. If she does, Centurion figures the heat is off. He'll take you in his own time if he has to. So, is Jordan going to plead?"

"I'll find out Friday morning, along with everyone else."

"Should be a very interesting day," Blues said.