Page 46 of The System

“Same thing. Now, I have an obligation to bring this deal with a ticking clock to my client. Whether she chooses to take it or not, it’s up to her. I will tell her that I’ll look into the other bus, but even if I find her on that, there’s nothing to stop Carina Whitlock from saying she just had someone do it for her and used the bus as her own alibi. So, I might still be back with a deal to propose.”

“Can I go in with you? I just want to tell her to wait to take it until we know if she’s on the video.”

“I need to talk to her first, but I’ll ask her if she wants you to join us, okay?”

“Diego, just don’t let her take this without us knowing if she has a probable alibi,” Kieran said.

“I can’t tell her what to do. My job is to advise her. Besides, she’s been insisting on her innocence this whole time. I doubt she’ll even consider taking a deal. She seems hell-bent on having her story heard whether I tell her that’s a terrible idea or not. She even wants to testify at the trial. I don’t like to have the defendants testify, and she’s quick to temper at times, so that worries me. Anyway, let me go do my job, and I’ll see if she wants to talk to you after, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” she replied, feeling a little stuck between wanting to help her sister and not knowing how.

Thirty minutes later, after she’d put the money into Marin’s account and was back in the waiting room, working on her phone, Diego came out with his briefcase. Kieran looked up and then locked her phone and tucked it away.

“She said no.”

“To the deal?”

“And to seeing you right now. She said she was hungry and wanted to go eat.”

“But she turned it down?”

“I got her to at least tell me that she’ll think about it, but she said no first, and I don’t see that thinking changing her mind. She insisted that she was innocent and told me the concussion story and about the other bus. I’m going to call my investigator now to get that footage. Let’s just both hope that she’s on it. Unfortunately, Carina can still claim that she paid someone. Marin has no real financial records, so I have no way of showing that a large sum of money didn’t leave her bank account. Nick ran a criminal cash business. She could’ve offered them his money, for all I know. She also didn’t have to pay someone at all. Nick was a bad guy. Maybe she just asked someone to do it for her, and they did it. I don’t know who, but I’ll keep looking for someone else who could have done this.” His phone rang, and he looked down at it in his hand. “Now, I have to go because I’m behind on three other cases and about to get my ass handed to me by a senior partner for costing the firm money on a probably unwinnable case that gets us nothing.”

Diego walked out of the room after saying hello into the phone and not saying goodbye to her. Kieran sat back down for a moment, trying to get her bearings a bit before going home.

“Visiting hours are over,” the guard behind the plexiglass told her. “You need to go.”

“Right. Sorry,” she said, standing up and walking out with nowhere to go to.

CHAPTER 15

“Okay. I’ve got it,” Dylan said. “They only had paper records going back that far; haven’t digitized the old stuff yet.” She dropped file folders onto Carina’s desk.

“Well, hello, Dylan. How are you? It’s nice to see you. I’m doing well. Thanks for asking.”

“Your assistant said I could come on in.”

“Did she tell you that you had to rush in and toss paperwork on my desk, too?”

“No, I did that all on my own. But you’re going to want to read through those file folders because they’re on Marin May.”

“Marin? What did you find?” Carina closed her laptop and picked up the file folder on top.

“Oh, just an old juvie record I’m not supposed to know about because it was expunged.”

“What?” Carina flipped the folder open and saw an old mug shot of a teenage Marin May pinned to the inside. “How did you find this?”

“I asked for all of her foster care records, and they had this, too. I don’t know if they realized they gave it to me or not, but they’re not the most organized in the world over there,” Dylan explained as she sat down across from her. “Ada’s on the way with lunch, by the way. I told her I was coming over to talk to you about this, so she’s grabbing us sandwiches from downstairs.”

“Oh, great. I’m starving,” Carina said as she scanned the pages. “I can’t get this admitted into evidence unless I can prove pattern, and even then, it’s a long shot. I’d need a very friendly judge.”

“I’m not sure it fits an exact pattern, but it’s still good information for you to have,” Dylan said.

“She really did this?” Carina looked up at Dylan.

“She didn’t do any real time. It was her first offense, and she was only sixteen, but according to that, there was a foster brother, and she burned him with a cigarette twice. He reported it to their foster parents the second time. He said he woke up to her standing there, smoking, and when he didn’t give her the money that she asked for to buy more cigarettes, she burned him again. Something else in there about her hitting on him, too.”

“Does she have a history of violence other than this?”

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