He Defended My Mother's Killer, Now He Pays with His Life novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Page One

Samson shows her the defense filing with Brice's signature and Tierney's name under it, and the warrant with the one wrong digit he has blamed himself for. She plays him the recording, and Tierney texts that she will tell everything.

I took the chain off the door.

Samson Briggs walked into my mother's kitchen and stood next to the table without sitting down.

"Give me ten minutes," he said. "Then throw me out if you want."

He went back to his car and came in again with a cardboard box under his arm.

He set it on the table and took the lid off.

"I'm not supposed to have this," he said. "It's a copy of your mother's file. I made it the day the case closed."

"Why?"

"Because it should never have closed."

He took out a thick stack of paper, clipped at the corner, and turned it to face me.

The first page was a defense filing.

Under the case number, at the bottom of the page, was the lead attorney's signature.

Brice Wynn.

I knew every loop of that signature.

He had signed my birthday cards with it.

Under it was a smaller line. Paralegal: P. Sutherland.

I put my finger on it.

"Tierney typed this."

"Tierney typed all of it," Samson said. "Your friend was in the room for the entire trial."

I pressed my hand flat on the table, because I had started to shake.

"He told me a hotshot from another firm," I said.

"There was no other firm."

"He told me he sat in the gallery behind the prosecutor."

"He sat at the defense table, Victoria. Eight feet from me when I testified."

I stared at the page.

"I told you he was lying," Samson said. "I'm sorry. I should have found a better way to say it."

"There isn't one."

He pulled a second sheet from the stack.

It was a warrant, with a stamp from the county court.

"This is the warrant to search Tull's truck. Look at the address."

I read the line. 1482 Alder Road.

"Tull lives at 1428," Samson said. "One wrong digit. The truck was in his yard. The judge ruled the warrant covered the wrong house and threw out the search, and everything we found in that truck went with it."

"The dent. The blood."

"All of it."

He did not look at me.

"I wrote that warrant," he said. "I typed that address. I have read my own report a hundred times since, and I've never found where I made the mistake. I only know it's my name at the bottom."

His voice did not shake.

He said it flatly, and I could tell he had said it to himself every night.

"For nineteen months," he said, "I believed I let your mother's killer walk out of that courtroom on my own typo."

I looked up at him.

In my mother's kitchen, three years ago, he had stood in the same place and promised me, "We're going to get him."

I had waited for his call for months.

It never came.

"You said you'd call me," I said.

"I know."

"You said we."

"I know what I said."

I should have thrown him out right then.

But the file was on the table, and so were my mother's last photographs.

The road at night, a bent guardrail, the streetlight over the crossing, dark.

"I want you to hear something," I said.

I took my phone out and played the closet recording, from the place where Tierney said, Do you ever feel sick about the Tull thing?

Samson listened without moving.

When Brice's voice said, I told her not to read a word of the coverage, and she didn't, Samson's hand closed on the corner of the table.

He kept it closed until the recording stopped.

Then he went to the kitchen window and stood with his back to me.

"I sat in that courthouse hallway for nine days," he said. "My brother walked past me every morning in a good suit. He nodded."

"You didn't know about me."

"I didn't know he had anyone. He never said a name." He turned around. "I never saw you in that courtroom. Not once."

"I was on a research ship at sea, and Brice told me the trial was months away."

He flinched.

"Then it was moved up," I said. "Or he said it was."

"Victoria."

"I want him to say it out loud, in front of people. I don't want a complaint or a hearing, I want his face when he does."

"That could take time."

"I have nothing else to do. I don't have a boyfriend or a best friend, and I don't have a job until I decide to go back."

"I can help."

"A detective who lost," I said, "is not what I came home for."

He took that without arguing.

He nodded once and picked up his keys.

"The card I gave you has my cell," he said. "Use it at three in the morning, if you have to."

"Don't wait by the phone."

"I know how that goes," he said quietly.

He had his hand on the door when my phone lit up on the table.

Tierney.

Please. Ten a.m. at the pier. I'll tell you everything. He's going to hurt you if you go to the police. I've seen what he does.

Samson read it over my shoulder and went still.

"Don't go alone," he said.

I looked at the message.

She was the only person in Los Angeles who still thought I knew nothing.

"I'll be there at nine-thirty," I said.

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