Trial Junkies

— 43 -

It wasn't a slam dunk, Hutch thought, but it was close.

Waverly had succeeded in sowing the seeds of doubt about who had made those phone calls, and had even introduced the possibility that Ronnie had somehow been set up. It didn't quite play into the theme of police corruption-they couldn't have framed her beforehand, after all-but that didn't matter. Anything that raised red flags in the minds of the jurors was good for the defense.

Waverly and Harding went back and forth a while longer, Harding theorizing that something in her voice must have tipped the caller to her ethnicity. But that wouldn't wash. All during her testimony, she had spoken in a flat, colorless accent that might be classified as business neutral or "General American," as Hutch's old dialect coach would call it. And he saw more than one juror closing her eyes to test out Harding's theory.

All and all, it had been a good day for Ronnie so far, but the biggest hurdle was yet to come: dealing with that damn bloody sweatshirt. And Tom had been right. People had been convicted with far less evidence.

If you talked to the folks at the Innocence Project-a non-profit devoted to disputing wrongful convictions-they'd tell you that such convictions aren't all that rare. Right here in Illinois, for example, three men had been sentenced to at least eighty years in prison each for the rape and murder of a fourteen year old girl, even after DNA evidence-recovered by the Illinois State Crime Lab-had clearly shown that none of them were guilty.

So Ronnie was far from being out of the proverbial woods. And to Hutch's mind, it all came down to the man across the aisle from him.

Frederick Langer.

Was he, as Hutch had suggested earlier, the one who made those phone calls to Jenny's office? Not to frame Ronnie, but in a twisted, misguided effort to help her with her custody case?

Was it possible for a man to convincingly disguise his voice as a woman's?

Hutch knew very well that it was. Especially over the phone. One of his friends in L.A. was so good at it that he'd spent the months between his acting gigs working for a sex call hotline.

"A gig's a gig," he'd told Hutch, then slipped into a sultry falsetto that would fool just about anyone who wasn't staring him straight in the face. "These poor idiots already have a picture in their mind of what I look like, honey, so it's an easy sale. And the money's fantastic."

Hutch had never actually heard Langer speak, other than those weird, high-pitched mewling sounds, but for his money, anything was possible. And it took everything he had to keep himself from crossing the aisle and…

And what?

Considering what the bastard had done to Jenny, making him fully understand her pain seemed like a reasonable conclusion to this saga.

One that Hutch would relish for the rest of his life.