Abused Read online

  Abused

  A Casey Cort Legal Thriller

  Aime Ausin

  Also by Aime Ausin

  The Casey Cort Series

  * * *

  Judged

  Ransomed

  Caged

  Disgraced

  Unarmed

  Kidnapped

  Reunited

  Contained

  Poisoned

  Abused

  To tell a story is inescapably to take a moral stance.

  —Jerome Bruner

  There, but for the grace of God, go I.

  One

  Nicole Long

  September 11, 2007

  I thumbed at the edges of the cheap manila folder on my desk. Inside, there were sure to be gruesome crime scene photos. Maybe bruising, maybe blood, possibly worse. I hated this part of my job because looking at those pictures almost assured there were going to be nightmares in my future.

  There had always been.

  There always would be.

  On the one hand, I hated the missed sleep and waking up in the middle of the night, my body gripped by sheer terror.

  On the other hand, that terror drove me to put the bad men who did the bad things in jail where they belonged. Ninety-eight percent of the time, at least.

  That other two percent who escaped justice kept me up at night for an entirely different reason.

  My mouth watered. A taste of Maker’s Mark would make this whole thing a lot easier. The one coping mechanism that I used to get me over the hump and back to sleep was the one thing that could end my career. The terms of my probation required that I refrain from alcohol. I’d been mostly good.

  Pushing that thought aside, I took a swig of Diet Coke. That bitter aftertaste was the closest I was going to get to whiskey. It was a poor substitute.

  With a sigh, I turned the file over so the back cover of the folder was facing me. Police detectives loved to tell the story of a murder investigation in chronological order. The crime scene photos would be in the front. Their investigative conclusion along with copies of the search warrant for the suspect’s house and finally that doer’s arrest warrant would be in the back.

  Mind you, I didn’t read the end of a hardcover mystery before I knew who the victim was. But I always read the end of a detective’s murder book first.

  The cops kept the order.

  They’d come to me for the law.

  I rolled my chair back so anyone casually passing wouldn’t be able to see me. It was a move I’d perfected for adjusting my hose or fixing my bra strap. Our office culture equated a closed door with corruption. Mine was always three-quarters of the way open.

  Sure I was out of sight, I slipped a key from my pencil tray to the lock of the bottom right-hand drawer where I stored my purse. The lock turned smoothly. Some WD-40 had made the glides soundless as I pulled. Tucked in a dark corner was a small bottle. On the outside, the tan and brown label read Madagascar Vanilla. I twisted off the tiny metal cap and lifted the bottle, poured the contents into my soda can. That next sip of Diet Coke was far better than the first. I was sure I could handle the pictures now.

  Despite the fortification, hesitation kept me frozen for countless seconds before I was ready. Carefully, so as not to disturb the glossy photos sure to slide out with their shiny surfaces offering little purchase, I lifted the back cover, laid it on my desk blotter. Took in the information I’d need first and foremost when I drafted the indictment for consideration by the grand jury.

  A tiny jolt of surprise shook me in my office chair. The bad man I was going to have to put in prison was in fact a woman. Digital mug shots were so very sharp compared to their decades-old film counterparts I’d seen in older files.

  My soon-to-be defendant was an unassuming woman who, with her light brown hair and clear blue eyes, could have been the woman who raised me, albeit a decade and a half younger. This middle-aged person was an anomaly among Cleveland’s usual defendants.

  She was white.

  She was a woman.

  She was a mother.

  I would have to push all that aside because she was still a murderer.

  The victim? Her estranged husband, Kendrick Walker.

  I looked at the slim watch I only took off to shower. It was three in the afternoon. For once I was grateful that it wasn’t near quitting time. Though cases lingered in my thoughts, I tried not to take actual paperwork home with me. Even if the tiny hands staring back at me from my vintage diamond-and-gold watch, the red crocodile band the only color I ever wore, had read five o’clock in the afternoon, I’d have stashed this folder in my briefcase and carried it home.

  Because there was a story here. Not the usual one-dimensional tales that filled courts and jails: a drunken one-punch homicide or drug dealer revenge scenario. Something told me it was going to be an interesting one.

  I hunched forward and peered closer at the paper. The defendant was forty-three, from Cleveland Heights or Shaker Square—there were two different addresses listed. Her name was Juliana Rose Clarke. Her profession?

  Painter.

  I flicked my eyes toward the defendant’s mug shot.

  Obviously not a house painter, but the kind with a light-filled studio in the Heights and canvases and oils and drop cloths.

  So much didn’t add up that I closed the folder and carefully turned it again so that the front was facing me. I was ready now for the pictures that would surely transport me to the scene of the crime.

  The first photo was of a kitchen. Half of my not-small condo could have fit in this room of stark white cabinets, stainless-steel built-in appliances, and pickled wood flooring.

  In the center of the photo, there he was, Kendrick Walker, splayed out on the floor, a pool of blood surrounding his head. I had to wonder if the wood was permanently ruined by the stain. I’d left a similar blemish on my family’s precious floors years ago. It had never come out.

  Refocusing, I leaned over the glossy picture. There was no dignity in death. What human animals could do to one another had stopped astounding me right after college.

  In this instance, his wife had bludgeoned him. Where the front of his head would have been, a high forehead meeting a short curly afro, was instead a crater of blood, skin, and gray stuff I knew had to be brain matter. I flipped to the second picture. In that one, the forensic photographer had zoomed in on Walker’s head.

  I’d read the crime scene report and coroner’s report to get the full picture, but right now, I wanted to absorb the details I’d live with, wake up, and go to sleep with for the next few months. Next to Walker, there was something white. Probably the murder weapon. I had to squint and turn the picture this way and that before I could put it in context.

  The weapon was a cheese board. The marble kind that came with decorative handles and probably a set of matching stone-handled knives and slicers.

  A cheese board?

  I tried to picture how the whole thing could have unfolded. Juliana Clarke had probably come to her family home, the one she no longer occupied but had lovingly bought and furnished and renovated and tended for a decade or more.

  Clarke and Walker had probably argued or even physically tangled. She’d picked up the board from the granite counter, then what?

  Thrown it?

  Beaned him in the head?

  From what I could see, he was a big guy, but hitting even the strongest person upside the head with solid stone would take them down. No matter a person’s size, their head weighed about eleven pounds, their skull…a quarter of an inch thick.

  I pushed the pictures to the side and skimmed to the end of the autopsy.

  Five wallops.

  That’s what it had taken to end his life. One whack, then another, then another, then another, then one last on the
back of his head.

  Clarke had pounded the cheese board against his skull not once, not twice, but four separate times until the blood and life had left him. One dent came from his fall against the stone counter. I looked at the pictures of Walker’s body and the mug shot of Clarke. Flipped between the two a few times.

  I tried to reconcile two conflicting ideas in my head.

  Marriage.

  Murder.

  Their marriage had to have started out like anyone’s. Her in a white dress. Him in a tuxedo. Smiling and joyful family and friends surrounding them. I’d never been at a wedding where I imagined the marriage ending in murder.

  Divorce, maybe.

  Death from illness or accident, possibly.

  But murder?

  Never.

  That was a completely different interpretation of “until death us do part” that the sixteenth-century authors of the Book of Common Prayer didn’t see coming.

  Proof of motive wasn’t a legal requirement for a jury to decide the defendant did it. Before twelve of Juliana Clarke’s peers would return a guilty verdict, they’d surely want to know why though. By law, the jury couldn’t ask. But I’d have to give them an answer anyway.

  Adrenaline and anger were a combustible mix that spared few who experienced its wrath. I took a deep breath and sat back in my rolling chair.

  I could feel the shift in my bones. I was about to step into my first, possibly headline-making, murder trial. This case could be the one that cemented my shaky career. Juliana Clarke was about to change my life at the same time I was about to change hers.

  Two

  Casey Cort

  September 18, 2007

  “If you hear nothing else I say today, Casey, hear this. Your life is going to fundamentally change. I know that you like to chase newspaper headlines, but a baby will be your main story. Got it?”

  When I didn’t move or respond, Dr. Fowler closed her eyes as if gathering strength, opened them, then asked, “Do you have any questions?”

  Somehow I’d blinked and my life had become an episode of Maury Povich. If I hadn’t been pregnant, I’d have gotten off the exam table and thrown a chair.

  Questions?

  I had so many damned questions. The most important of which the good doctor wouldn’t be able to answer. I hesitated a moment longer. Maybe she could?

  I wondered if it was possible to spare myself an appearance on the confessional stage. What did I know about the state of modern scientific progress?

  “How…”

  How? How could I push past my shame to ask how to find out what I wanted to know? I came to a realization that answered my own question.

  Alexis Fowler was my primary care physician. Our conversation was covered by the same kind of privilege I had with my clients. The sacrosanct kind that meant she had to keep all my secrets. Despite that rationalization, my stomach still went slightly queasy at the idea of admitting the mistake I’d made—sleeping with two different men back-to-back without any contraceptive barrier between any of us. I didn’t fear the telling as much as I feared the humiliation the question would bring.

  Awash with mortification that was heating my face, I sucked in air and tried to slow the beating of my heart. No good Catholic woman past thirty should be in my predicament. At least that’s what my parents would have said if I had the guts to tell them. That revelatory conversation was a can I was kicking all the way down the road to the next county.

  “I’ve heard it all, Casey,” she soothed. “We share the same duty of confidentiality,” she said as if reading my mind. “You understand that more than most.”

  Though she was ten years older, Fowler’s face was unlined. It held such compassion that I relaxed my vigilance. I was done protecting my shame like it was a small animal in need of shelter. I plowed ahead before I lost my nerve.

  “Is there any way I can find out who my baby’s father is before he or she is born?”

  I waited a beat, ready to be scolded for successively having unprotected sex with not one but two men. It didn’t come. Her tone, when she spoke, was matter-of-fact. Gasping and pearl clutching weren’t hallmarks of a good bedside manner.

  “Depends. When you check out with reception, you’ll get my list of OB-GYN referrals. In about two or three weeks…” Fowler’s wiggling hand indicated the vagaries of human fetal development. “…maybe four, you can schedule your first ultrasound. When they get in there, the radiologist will be able to measure the fetus. From there, the date of conception and the due date will be a lot clearer. Does that help?”

  I wondered if my face was more tomato red or beet red. Either way, I imagined this is how my mother felt when a sudden hot flash came upon her. Humiliation wasn’t menopause. I took another deep breath and spoke the truth while shaking my head.

  “It was two days apart. Friday and Sunday.”

  To Dr. Fowler’s credit, she didn’t even blink. Instead she shifted my paper file from the crook of one arm to the other.

  “That narrows things, of course. The other option to get an answer before birth is far more invasive, unfortunately. The OB can insert a needle to either extract amniotic fluid or blood from the placenta, then compare that to the fathers’ DNA.”

  “The fathers?”

  “It’s just a cheek swab, so not invasive for them.”

  “But I’d have to tell them.”

  Dr. Fowler rewarded me with a tiny smirk.

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re aware that medical exams without consent are illegal.”

  I wanted to tell her to preach that one to arresting officers in emergency rooms or to jail doctors, but decided a criminal defense attorney soapbox rant wasn’t appropriate right about now. Instead I tucked that little conundrum—of how to get Justin’s or Ron’s cheek cells—away for later consideration. I’d only need it from one of them, which in a way made the idea of asking easier.

  “My due date again?” It was a question that Dr. Alexis Fowler could answer. One that I’d have to factor into not only my court calendar, but…my life.

  “Probably April. But that will be confirmed at your first ultrasound appointment. You don’t need a referral. We’ll call in some prenatal vitamins as well. Do you have a preferred pharmacy?”

  Obstetrician? Gynecologist? Pharmacy? The first time I’d been here, it had taken me three tries to even find my doctor’s office on a block of quintuplet medical office buildings, none of which seemed to have any visible address numbers.

  “Can I just have a paper prescription? I’ll figure that part out later.”

  “Casey, I know that you’re a busy lawyer, but babies are not like moles. You can’t just wait until later to figure all this out. You have to do it now. Maybe the father part you can put off…maybe even indefinitely, but the baby-growing-inside-you part? No.”

  I wondered if I’d been too honest earlier. It had been two and a half weeks between the pee-on-a-stick test and finally coming in to have a doctor confirm it with…another pee-on-a-stick test. Dr. Fowler had been quick to tell me that blood draws were a thing of the past.

  “I…uh…”

  “Oh gosh, I’m…I need to backtrack.” That came out in an embarrassed rush from Dr. Fowler. “I just assumed you’d keep the baby. But you have down on your forms that you’re single, and earlier you said… Do you need a different kind of referral? One for termination?”

  My heart sped up again, but for an entirely different reason.

  “No, no. I’m going to keep the baby,” rushed from my mouth. Not for a single moment in the last seventeen days had I thought of an abortion, not that I had a religious or moral objection. But first I’d had to mourn the idea that anything in my life was going to happen the traditional way. “I’ve always wanted a family. Not in this order, but I’m going to take it as a blessing, nevertheless.”

  Dr. Fowler’s shoulders came down from around her ears.

  “Well then, my first recommendation stands. You’ll need to get in to see an obste
trician sooner rather than later.”

  My phone rang, giving me a jolt of adrenaline I didn’t need. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it in my hand the entire time. I’d hated that habit in Miles, my ex-fiancé. I made a mental note after months with him to not become “that” person who needs a doctor’s scalpel to surgically extract their phone.

  I silenced it with a single button push. From my glance up at Dr. Fowler, it didn’t seem like a good time to joke about surgical removal. Kept that to myself. But I could feel myself relax into the humor with a smile.

  “I’ll do it today. Thanks,” I promised, already distracted by the real world crowding in on me.

  My doctor was out the door before I could get out a proper goodbye. I was about to stand up when my forgotten phone chirped again. This time I didn’t silence it but looked to see who could be calling me. The number was local, but wholly unfamiliar. That was my life though. Strange people calling me—soon to become clients—a person whose secrets I would know and keep.

  “Casey Cort,” I answered after I accepted the call.

  “Peyton Bennett.”

  The name sounded both familiar and not. In case it was a client who was going to soon put cold hard cash in my hands, I made my voice as helpful and solicitous as possible.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Bennett?”

  “I’m a partner at Bennett Friehof and Baker. You may have heard of us?”

  May have heard of them? That’s like asking if I’d heard of the Cleveland Browns. Of course, I’d heard of Bennett Friehof and Baker. It was one of the firms that had turned me down for a job when I was desperate for gainful employment. I put a hand to my chest. The usual constriction wasn’t there. Ten years and I was just beginning to shake the bitterness.

  Bennett…I wanted to ask him if he was a founding partner. He couldn’t be, of course, he’d have to be like a hundred years old. I patted the paper gown down around my legs, as if he could see me through the little gadget, then, realizing I’d been quiet far too long, spoke.