Page 54 of Legal Passion
“I will.”
“You already rested your case,” he reminded her.
She chuckled. “But I can submit that photo as a rebuttal to your client’s claim that he didn’t know his wife was having an affair.”
“My client hasn’t testified on his own behalf,” Stone said. “And he won’t have to now.”
“No, he won’t have to testify,” she agreed. “But he will have to give up the details of his crime in his allocution when he accepts the plea I offer him.”
Stone snorted now. “Fuck your plea. He hasn’t committed any crime, and you know it. How can you not drop the charges?”
“How can you be so delusional?” she demanded. But then, she’d been delusional like that when she used to fantasize about him. Sure, some of those things had happened. They’d had sex. But they had no future. “That photo goes to your client’s motive. He’s guilty!”
“Tell her,” Stone prodded Mueller, nudging one of the older man’s stooped shoulders. The guy looked like he’d aged a lot in jail and that he hadn’t been eating well, if at all. The orange jumpsuit hung on a frame that had once been pudgy. “Tell her that your son did it.”
She let her mouth drop open in shock as she looked from the attorney to the client. She addressed Stone first. “I knew you were desperate to win this case. But you’re going to make the man throw his own son under the bus?”
Then she turned toward Mueller. “And you’re going to do it? You’re going to point the finger of blame at your own son? What? Out of revenge?”
“You’re wrong,” Mueller said, “about me. I’m not going to blame my son. You’re right about my lawyer. He will do anything to win. He now has a two-million-dollar bonus riding on the jury deciding I’m not guilty.”
She sucked in a breath.
And Mueller added, “He would do anything to win this trial.”
Even her? Was that the only reason he’d had sex with her? He’d hoped to distract her enough that she would lose the case. Or had he hoped she would fall in love with him and just drop the charges like he’d requested?
Yes, she was right. Stone didn’t know her at all.
And he never would.
