“That would be cool.” He winced; God, how many times was he going to use the word cool? He probably sounded like a total retard.
“So, maybe you could start by telling me how often it used to happen. The bullying, I mean.”
“Every day, I guess.”
“What sorts of things did they do?”
“The usual,” Peter said. “Stuffing me into a locker, throwing my books out the bus window.” He gave her a litany he’d already given Jordan a thousand times: memories of being elbowed on his way up a staircase, moments where his glasses were ripped off and crushed, slurs pitched like fastballs.
Elena’s eyes melted. “That must have been so hard for you.”
Peter didn’t know what to say. He wanted her to stay interested in his story, but not if it meant that she thought he was a total wimp. He shrugged, hoping that was a good enough response.
She stopped writing. “Peter, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Even if it’s kind of off topic?”
Peter nodded.
“Did you plan to kill them?”
She was leaning forward again, her lips parted, as if whatever Peter was about to say was some wafer, a communion host that she’d been waiting for her whole life. Peter could hear the footsteps of a guard walking past the doorway behind him, could practically taste Elena’s breath through the receiver. He wanted to give her the right answer-sound dangerous enough for her to be intrigued, to want to come back.
He smiled, in a way that he hoped was sort of seductive. “Let’s just say it needed to stop,” Peter answered.
The magazines in Jordan’s dentist’s office had the shelf life of plutonium. They were so old that the celebrity bride on the cover now had two babies named for biblical characters, or pieces of fruit; that the president listed as Man of the Year had already left office. To that end, when he stumbled upon the latest issue of Time while awaiting his appointment for a filling, Jordan felt like he’d hit the mother lode.
HIGH SCHOOL: THE NEWEST FRONT LINE FOR BATTLE? the cover read, and there was a still image of Sterling High from a chopper, kids still streaming out of all the building’s orifices. He absently leafed toward the article and its subsections, not expecting to see anything he didn’t already know or hadn’t already seen in the papers, but one piece caught his eye. “Inside the Mind of a Killer,” he read, and he saw the much-used school picture of Peter from his eighth-grade yearbook.
Then he started to read.
“Goddamn,” he said, and he got to his feet, starting for the door.
“Mr. McAfee,” the secretary said, “the dentist is ready for you.”
“I’ll have to reschedule-”
“Well, you can’t take our magazine…”
“Add it to my bill,” Jordan snapped, and he hurried downstairs to his car. His cell phone rang just as he turned the key in the ignition-he completely expected it to be Diana Leven, gloating over her good fortune-but instead, it was Selena.
“Hey, are you done at the dentist? I need you to swing by CVS and grab some diapers on the way home. I ran out.”
“I’m not coming home. I’ve got bigger problems right now.”
“Honey,” Selena said, “there are no bigger problems.”
“I’ll explain later,” Jordan said, and he turned off his phone, so that even if Diana called, she wouldn’t be able to reach him.
He got to the jail in twenty-six minutes-a personal record-and stormed into the entryway. There, he plastered the magazine up to the plastic that separated him from the CO who was signing him in. “I need to bring this in when I see my client,” Jordan said.
“Well, I’m sorry,” the officer said, “but you can’t take in anything that’s got staples.”
Frustrated, Jordan balanced the magazine against his leg and ripped out the binding staples. “Fine. Can I see my client now?”
He was brought to the same conference room he always used at the jail, and he paced while he waited for Peter to arrive. When he did, Jordan slammed the magazine down on the table, open to the article. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
Peter’s mouth dropped open. “She…she never mentioned that she wrote for Time!” He scanned the pages. “I can’t believe it,” he murmured.
Jordan could feel all the blood in his body rushing to his head. Surely, this was how people had strokes. “Do you have any idea how serious the charges against you are? How awful your case is? How much evidence there is against you?” He smacked an open hand on the article. “Do you really think that this makes you look at all sympathetic?”
Peter scowled. “Well, thanks for the lecture. Maybe if you’d been here to deliver it a few weeks ago we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.”
“Oh, that’s priceless,” Jordan said. “I don’t come by often enough, so you decide to get back at me by talking to the media?”
“She wasn’t the media. She was my friend.”
“Guess what,” Jordan said. “You don’t get to have any friends.”
“So what else is new?” Peter shot back.
Jordan opened his mouth to yell at Peter again, but couldn’t. The truth of the statement struck him, as he remembered Selena’s interview earlier this week with Derek Markowitz. Peter’s buddies deserted him, or betrayed him, or spilled his secrets for a circulation of millions.
If he really wanted to do his job right, he couldn’t just be an attorney to Peter. He had to be his confidant, and to date, all he’d done was string the kid along, just like everyone else in his life.
Jordan sat down next to Peter. “Look,” he said quietly. “You can’t do anything like this again. If anyone contacts you at all, for any reason, you need to tell me. And in return, I’ll come to see you more often than I have been. Okay?”
Peter shrugged his agreement. For a long moment they both sat beside each other, silent, unsure of what came next.
“So now what?” Peter asked. “Do I have to talk about Joey again? Or prep for that psychiatric interview?”
Jordan hesitated. The only reason he’d come to see Peter was to tear into him for talking to a reporter; if not for that, he wouldn’t have come to the jail at all. And he supposed he could ask Peter to recount his childhood or his school history or his feelings about being bullied, but somehow, that didn’t seem right either. “Actually, I need some advice,” he said. “My wife got me this computer game last Christmas, Agents of Stealth? The thing is, I can’t make it past the first level without getting wiped out.”
Peter glanced at him sideways. “Well, are you registering as a Droid or a Regal?”
Who the hell knew? He hadn’t taken the CD out of its box. “A Droid.”
“That’s your first mistake. See, you can’t enlist in the Pyrhphorus Legion-you need to get appointed to serve. The way to do that is by starting off in the Educationary instead of the Mines. Understand?”
Jordan glanced down at the article, still spread on the table. His case had just grown immeasurably more difficult, but maybe that was offset by the fact that his relationship with his client had gotten easier. “Yeah,” Jordan said. “I’m starting to.”
“You’re not going to like this,” Eleanor said, handing a document to Alex.
“Why not?”
“It’s a motion to recuse yourself from the Houghton case. The prosecution strongly requests a hearing.”
A hearing meant that press would be present, the victims would be present, the families would be present. It meant that Alex would be under public scrutiny before this case could go any further. “Well, she’s not getting one,” Alex said dismissively.
The clerk hesitated. “I’d think twice about that.”
Alex met her eyes. “You can leave now.”
She waited for Eleanor to close the door behind herself, and then she closed her eyes. She didn’t know what to do. It was true that she’d been more rattled during the arraignment than she’d anticipated. It was true, too, that the distance between herself and Josie could be measured by the very parameters of her role as judge. Yet because Alex had steadfastly assumed that she was infallible-because she’d been so sure that she could be a fair justice on this case-she’d gotten herself into a catch-22. It was one thing to recuse yourself before the proceedings started. But if she backed out now, it would make her seem flighty (at best) or inept (at worst). Neither one of those was an adjective she wanted associated with her judicial career.