Page 7 of The 1 Lawyer

He wore his retirement well. His face was ruddy with sunburn; his frame looked lean, and he sat up straight in the witness chair.

“Let me direct your attention to June fourteenth of last year. What were you doing on that date?”

“I was out in my fishing boat. I’ve been doing a lot of fishing since I retired.”

“Whereabouts were you fishing that day?”

“Just the other side of Popp’s Ferry Bridge. They have some pretty nice big reds there.”

The witness had not violated his oath with that statement. When Mason and I were growing up, his dad often took us fishing for red drum by the bridge. We’d caught some big bull redfish there back in the day.

“While you were fishing by the bridge, what, if anything, did you observe?”

The witness paused as he remembered, shaking his head in disbelief. “A body was floating in the water over by the old pylons.”

Gordon-James’s voice was tight: “What did you do?”

“I steered my fishing boat over there. Shoot, I thought maybe I was just seeing things, a trick of the light on the water. But there it was, kind of bobbing up and down.”

“What did you do then?”

“I pulled it into the boat. Her, I mean. I’ve got a twenty-one-foot aluminum semi-V. It took some doing, but I managed to pull her in over the starboard side.”

His face expressionless, Gordon-James said, “Describe the body, sir.”

The witness cleared his throat. “It was a woman, like I said. She was bloated, looked like maybe the seabirds had got to her. But she was female, I could tell that for certain, because she didn’t have a stitch of clothes on. It was a young woman. A young Black woman.”

“After you pulled the body into the boat, what did you do?”

Oates puffed his cheeks out and exhaled. “I picked up my phone and dialed 911. My hands were shaking so hard, I almost dropped the phone overboard.”

The DA walked over to the counsel table and tapped the keyboard of his laptop. On a large overhead screen adjacent to the witness stand, an image appeared.

Gasps and groans sounded in the courtroom.

I fixed my eyes on the screen and was careful not to wince or grimace at the sight of the corpse of Aurora Gates.

Her skin, wrinkled by exposure to water, was discolored and marbled, the soft tissue bloated. Her hands were clenched into fists. Abrasions bloomed across her body. Portions of her face had been eaten away, presumably by fish, crab, and shrimp in addition to seabirds. One eye socket was empty. Her nose was mostly gone.

A long hush fell.

Gordon-James began to speak, then broke off and stopped to breathe. When he started again, his voice cracked. He turned away from the screen, placing his back to the jury.

I looked at his hands. They were shaking. He made fists and shoved them into his pants pockets.

This was not a neophyte lawyer’s nerves. When Gordon-James had said in chambers that the case was personal, it wasn’t an overstatement or a figure of speech.

The case was personal. Aurora Gates, whose body had been found floating in the water near Popp’s Ferry Bridge, was the district attorney’s niece.

CHAPTER 7

I THOUGHT about the relationship between the DA and the crime victim as I watched Gordon-James.

When he’d revealed it, early on, I’d raised an objection. The judge said he didn’t think there was a direct ethical prohibition, but he required the DA to make a showing that would affirmatively establish that the relationship didn’t create a conflict of interest. After Gordon-James filed a sworn statement, the judge said he wouldn’t require him to hand the case off to another attorney.

I thought they were both nuts, but it was an adverse ruling I could keep in my pocket and use in the event that my client was convicted and I needed grounds for appeal. I hoped, of course, that it wouldn’t come to that. I intended to win the case.

I kept an eye on my opponent. My position at the defense table afforded me a unique view of Gordon-James’s face. Furtively, I watched as he regained his composure: he straightened his shoulders, tightened his jaw, and hardened his expression. Watching the transformation, I believed that I could read his mind—he wanted vengeance and would marshal all his strength to take my client down.

---