It had been three years since his fall from grace, but it had been two years before that when Leo had first heard the name Frank Guaraldi.
Prosecuting bad guys was all he’d ever wanted to do. When he was a boy, countless television programs had instilled in him the ideal of fighting for justice as a worthy pursuit, but it wasn’t until after his mother had been taken in by a scam artist that he knew for sure he wanted to be a prosecutor. A man had come by the house one day shortly after Leo’s father had been taken out by a massive heart attack while cutting the lawn. The man who came to the door that day had been smartly dressed and neatly groomed. He introduced himself as Samuel Abdul, investment counselor. Mr. Abdul had ended up talking Mrs. Hewitt into investing her dead husband’s insurance money in an overseas petroleum company. Mr. Abdul had shown her conclusively, using charts and projected fuel prices, that she could easily triple her money, or more. Dorothy Hewitt had vivid memories of the 1970s oil crisis. She could remember a time when the idea of gasoline selling for as much as a dollar a gallon was laughable. But it had happened. And then some. But what had ultimately swayed Leo’s usually levelheaded mother was Samuel Abdul’s insistence that this was her golden opportunity to secure for her son’s future, for his education. She had signed over the entire insurance premium and was given a piece of paper entitling her to a thousand shares of an oil company that had never existed. Abdul, who apparently couldn’t leave well enough alone, kept pulling the same scam all over town, always targeting recent widows. Once he was caught, Leo’s mother had promptly filed charges along with eighteen other people the man had cheated. Using the money he had scammed from his mostly poor victims (who besides the poor would believe in such easy money?), Abdul had hired the best lawyer dirty money could buy. It was at this time that Leo, only twelve and wanting revenge for his mother, had decided that he wanted to be a prosecutor. To defend the defenseless. The prosecutor who handled the case had been a dedicated, intelligent, resourceful man who systematically dismantled every defense strategy the scam artist’s well-paid lawyer tried to mount. Leo sat with his mother in the courtroom every day of the trial, completely entranced with the legal battle that was waged there on his mother’s behalf. Even after the trial, Leo would sometimes skip school and spend his days in the county courthouse watching small legal dramas played out. Abdul’s trial lasted less than a week, and although others might have given up or simply gone through the motions, this public prosecutor had persevered and ultimately won back his mother’s money and sent Samuel Abdul to jail for eight years. The prosecutor had even helped Mrs. Hewitt figure out a more conservative way to invest her inheritance, and seven months before she died, Leo’s mother saw him graduate cum laude from law school.
As a deputy prosecutor Leo had been assigned to the team handling the Guaraldi case, although, at that time, no one had yet heard the name Frank Guaraldi. The case was simply known as the torso murders. It was already one of the longest and costliest unsolved cases in the county’s history. Certainly it was the highest-profile case any of them had ever been involved with, and a legitimate suspect had not even been named yet. Leo’s work on the case eventually earned him the position of prosecutor, then lead prosecutor, and, once Guaraldi had been fingered as the most likely suspect, Bob Fox had appointed Leo to the post of assistant district attorney. It was rumored that if he could bring the Guaraldi matter to a successful conclusion, he was an odds-on favorite to go on to become the youngest district attorney to ever hold the seat.
The whole thing started with an arm. A severed arm found in a drainage ditch on a rural road outside Atlanta. The arm had been eaten at by animals and was badly decayed but obviously that of a child. Decomposition had robbed the forensics team of any hope of a print ID. Only one clue offered any chance for identification. A toy ring had been found on the middle finger of the severed arm. It was a cheap plastic thing that only a child would wear. The type of toy that could only be bought out of a bubble gum machine, with cheap gold lamination that was chipping away from the pale plastic base. Investigators tracked down the Chinese manufacturer of the ring, and then the importer, and from there the distributor. The distributor’s records listed several vendors in the Atlanta area. The ring went in a seventy-five-cent machine of which there was one vendor who maintained only one such machine. That machine was located in an arcade in the Little Five Points area of downtown Atlanta. This was a definite starting point, the first real lead they had had to follow up on. All missing-persons reports from the city police department were culled for the previous two years, and from those reports investigators pulled the names of children between ages four and twelve, and from this list was pulled only those missing children who had lived within a twenty-mile radius of the Little Five Points neighborhood. A group of officers was dispatched to interview family members of the missing children.
The temperature had peaked at a record-breaking one hundred one degrees that July day, and Officer Lyle Davis was thinking only of a cold beer when he knocked on the door of the last address on his list. Donny Easton, missing for three months. He showed the photo of the plastic gold ring to Mrs. Easton, a huge and solidly built woman. Her eyes widened and hope bloomed on her face. Donny had worn one just like it. Never took it off. Officer Davis explained the circumstances of the ring’s discovery and watched Mrs. Easton crumple to the floor. He’d forgotten all about the dreamed upon beer. More body parts were found. Arms, legs, sometimes just a finger, twice an ear, and one time a severed head. Always children. Never an entire body. Some of the body parts led to identification, but many did not. Each time a piece was found, the national media descended on the city like vultures following the scent of carrion. The police department, and in particular the mayor, were singled out for criticism for allowing the slaughter of children to continue. Gestures such as a hotline number for tips and a dusk-till-dawn curfew were made to appease the frightened population, but no real progress was made.
The death count stood at nine. Possibly nine, because not a single complete body had thus far been recovered. The city lived in fear; parents existed in a constant state of maniacal paranoia. Neighbors reported neighbors for eccentric behavior. An anonymous caller to the tip line gave the name of a man, James Nice, a bachelor with no children, who was seen purchasing dolls and hacksaw blades in a local K-Mart. Nice was investigated and found to be blameless (the blades were to cut a section of burst water pipe in his garage, the dolls for his niece’s birthday), but his name was leaked to the media. They called him a person of interest. News crews set up mobile studios outside his house. His face was seen on television and in newspaper photos with captions that capitalized on his ironic name. Within a week of the tip line call, the chief of police declared him no longer a suspect, and the media pulled away. By then, Nice, a recovering alcoholic, had turned to bouts of heavy drinking and antisocial behavior. He yelled at strangers in the street and took to shoplifting. He lost his job. Lost his house. Three months after being cleared as a suspect, he was found dead in a homeless shelter lying facedown in a pool of his own vomit. Nice’s family sued the city and were eventually awarded four point seven million dollars.
Frank Guaraldi. He and his wife, Janice, ran the Little Wonders day care and after-school center in College Park. When the ninth victim of the Torso Killer was identified as Gwendolyn Peters, Leo Hewitt, as the district attorney’s liaison to the police department, was the one who made the connection. Donny Easton, the first identified victim, and Gwendolyn Peters, the last, had both attended the same day care. Little Wonders.
Suddenly, the case now had something it had never had before, a legitimate suspect-Frank Guaraldi. And, at the exact same time that Leo was making the connection with the preschool, almost as if by divine intervention, Carolyn Conners, a housewife from College Park, called the tip line and reported a smell like rotting meat coming from the Guaraldis’ house. Two detectives interviewed the Conners woman, and she stated to them that she had observed Frank Guaraldi unloading bags of quicklime from the trunk of his car at three o’clock in the morning. She also claimed to have seen Guaraldi remove from his trunk an object wrapped in a plastic tarp. Yes, she had said, although she could not say so definitively, the object wrapped in the tarp could very well have been the body of a child. A search warrant was issued, and Guaraldi and his wife were brought in for questioning. The search of Guaraldi’s home yielded a cache of pornographic photographs hidden in a trunk in the attic. The photos depicted, among other things, women in bondage costumes being urinated on by men. Guaraldi’s vehicle was impounded. Every print, fiber, and microscopic speck was analyzed in record time. A strand of hair was recovered that matched the DNA of Gwendolyn Peters. Mitigating this was the concurrent discovery of DNA evidence that matched up with nine other (unharmed) attendees of Little Wonders. The Guaraldis denied any knowledge of the missing children. Janice Guaraldi was released from custody and asked to remain available for future questioning. Frank Guaraldi remained behind bars and was held pending formal charges.
In the heat of the media maelstrom that enveloped the city, attorney Monty Lee visited Guaraldi in his cell and offered to take his case pro bono. Guaraldi accepted gratefully and Monty Lee stepped into the limelight for the first time. He called the allegations against his client preposterous and nothing more than just that, allegations. He told the press that his client would sue the county for being held without just cause and being denied due process. The media ignited, and Montgomery Lee became a star.
Letters were drafted by the DA’s office and sent out to the parents of children who attended the Little Wonders preschool. The letters asked about any unusual occurrences, inappropriate touching, evidence of violence, and unusual bruising. The children said nothing happened.
At the bail hearing, Leo sat at the prosecution table with Paula, who had been handpicked by the district attorney, Bob Fox, to co-chair the case with Leo. Fox was carefully orchestrating every nuance of the trial. He and everyone else in the city government knew exactly how much was riding on the outcome of this case, and he was leaving nothing to chance. It was fuck or walk, Fox was fond of saying. Fox had told Leo that the positioning of Paula as second chair was a political as well as a practical move. It never hurt to have a pretty woman in court. He firmly believed that having a man and woman sitting at the prosecution table was the only way to go. You had to cover all the bases, after all. And that was certainly true, but it was also true that there was just something about Paula Manning that he simply liked. There was just something about her, something hard underneath.
Fox had entrusted the actual prosecution to Leo because Leo was, after all, the assistant DA and had shepherded all of the evidence thus far to reach this critical point. He believed in Leo. He believed Leo could win the case. He had, after all, given Leo the assistant DA position, hadn’t he? Of course he trusted him. Of course he believed in him. Then why did he still have a nagging doubt somewhere in the back of his mind? Leo was one of the best trial lawyers Fox had ever seen, and he was damn glad to have him as his assistant DA, but Leo had yet to show clearly and demonstratively where his loyalties lay. He had not sacrificed. Fox knew that it sometimes took a baptism of fire before some men would totally and completely pledge their loyalties to another man. This would be that time. If the case was won, Fox was sure to go on to become the state attorney general, and the DA’s chair would be a fait accompli for Leo.
If the case was lost, all would be lost.
At the bail hearing, Leo addressed the judge in his best tone of placid reason. “Your Honor, in light of the cruel and sadistic nature of the crimes of which Mr. Guaraldi is accused, the People move to deny bail for the defendant,” Leo said, and sat back down. Paula, who was sitting to his left, betrayed no emotion.
Guaraldi sat to Monty’s left at the defense table. Behind them, Janice Guaraldi waited expectantly. She held a ragged ball of Kleenex in her clenched fist. Behind her, the courtroom was packed with press and the merely curious who wished to know firsthand what sort of bail would be set for the country’s most notorious and diabolical child murderer. Monty stood up and nodded imperceptibly to Leo. This was the first time these two men had ever met in or out of court. To Leo, Monty Lee was the high-priced defense attorney who had tried to get Samuel Abdul off the hook. He held Monty Lee in the same contempt as the shiftless lawyer who would have set free the man who had swindled his mother out of her dead husband’s inheritance.
“Your Honor, this is outrageous,” Monty said with the utmost calm. “My client has committed no crime. He is merely a suspect. And not a very good one at that. We all know that the people of this city live in fear. They demand that the child killer be caught, and rightfully so. The police department, in its clamor to find the killer, to meet the people’s demand, has accused the wrong man. In short, the prosecution has yet to offer up one piece of hard evidence. To deny my client bail would be, as I have said, outrageous.”
Judge Elizabeth Duran lifted a thick folder and waved it at Monty. Decades of smoking and marinating her vocal cords in single malt scotch had left her voice as deep as a man’s. “Mr. Lee, did you read the same police report I did? Two of the missing children were enrolled in his preschool. Did you read the affidavit of the eyewitness who saw your client removing a tarp wrapped in the shape of a body from the trunk of his car? Did you see the same pornographic photographs depicting women being tortured and degraded?”
“Women, Your Honor, not children. A taste for a little S amp;M isn’t a crime.”
“No, it’s not. However, there’s also the matter of the DNA evidence.”
“Found along with DNA from nine other children who attend the day care. The Guaraldis often transport the children in that vehicle.”
Duran cleared phlegm from her throat and shuffled through the papers one final time.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lee, but I’m inclined to agree with the prosecution on this one. I feel that Mr. Guaraldi is a serious threat to the safety of this community, and I would be derelict in my duty to protect this community if I allowed bail.”
“But, Your Honor, Mr. Guaraldi has lived in this community for over thirty years, he has no police record, he’s never even-”
“I’ve made my ruling.”
“Are you sure Your Honor isn’t giving in to the power of the press?”
“That will cost you five hundred dollars. Hope it was worth it. Good day.”
A forensics team was brought in to excavate around Guaraldi’s house. They dug extensive burrows and tunnels in and around the house. Nothing was found. A backhoe was brought in to excavate the entire property. The same process was carried out at the day care center. Nothing was ever found. Bob Fox was outraged. He set an inhuman pace for his prosecutors. He stormed through offices, demanding results. And Leo didn’t blame Fox for demanding results; he knew it was due in large part to the almost daily attacks made on him by the media. In fact, the media were starting to focus some of their attention on Leo, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Two days after the excavation at Guaraldi’s home was abandoned, one of Leo’s clerks had buzzed his office and told him he had a call on line two.
“Who is it?” he asked the clerk.
“Anne Hunter.”
“Christ. Tell her I’m out of town.”
“She says to tell you that she knows you’re here and this is going to be your only opportunity to confirm or deny.”
“Confirm or deny what?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“Christ,” he grumbled and punched line two. He had met Anne Hunter shortly after he became a prosecutor. He’d been working on a case involving a minor figure of the community who was suspected in a nonfatal hit-and-run. After court one day, Anne had approached him for comments on the case. He had known that sooner or later he would work on a case that generated some public interest, but he wasn’t prepared for the rush he got the first time a reporter actually asked him questions. He felt like a celebrity after the fact. It was ludicrous to feel that way, he knew, but, nonetheless, he got off on it in a big way. It fed his ego. And Anne Hunter had clued in to that right away. She called on him almost daily to get his comments on current cases, cases that he knew were not particularly newsworthy. But it was no big leap for him to talk himself into believing that they were important cases. After all, why would a real reporter want his views on them if they weren’t important? But Anne knew what she was doing. They had ultimately ended up seeing each other socially, but once the initial excitement of seeing his name in the paper had worn off, Leo began to dislike her. It had been a bit like going out with a psychiatrist. The conversation always seemed to have a subtext. There was always the feeling that every offhand remark was being neatly filed away and marked for later use. That she was grooming him for her future benefit. And that instinct had been right. Even after the relationship cooled (it had consisted of four sexual encounters and little else), he always called Anne first when he had a story he wanted leaked to the press. And now that he was the ADA on a murder case that had captured the nation’s attention, Anne Hunter had the ultimate in. She was reaping the benefits of all the hard work she had put into stroking his ego. Only lately, Anne didn’t seem too terribly interested in keeping Leo’s ego stroked. Her articles were becoming more and more critical of his performance on the case. Whereas she had once singled out Bob Fox as her whipping boy, she was now targeting Leo. Singling out mistakes he had made. Her last article had used the motif that time was getting short for the children of the city and what were our city’s leaders doing about it? The piece had ended with the ominous rejoinder that unless they did something soon, for Bob Fox and Leo Hewitt, as for the children, time was getting short.
“Anne. I’d love to help you with your story, but I’m kinda busy right now. We’ve got a murder case we’re working on. You might have read about it.”
“I hear Guaraldi’s gonna walk.”
“You heard wrong.”
“I hear you’ve got nothing on him. I hear it’s gonna be James Nice all over again. You’ve got what? Two issues of Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage?”
“We’ve got plenty on Guaraldi.”
“We’ve got plenty on Guaraldi.”
“That’s not what I hear. Come on, Leo, it’s only me. Level. Wouldn’t you rather I broke the story? I’ll do it gently. Like always.”
“‘Time is getting short for Leo Hewitt.’ That gently?”
“My sources are very reliable.”
“I’m your only source. Look, Anne, it was a nice try. And on the chance that you’re not making this up just to trick me into commenting on it, did it ever occur to you that Monty Lee might be generating this rumor to make his client look better? Take it from me, Frank Guaraldi is not going to walk.”
“Well I’m running the piece whether you confirm or deny.”
“Anne, I just denied it.”
“And if it turns out to be true, you’ll look-”
“Good-bye, Anne,” he said, and hung up on her. She was right about one thing, though. Well, actually, she was right about two things. It was looking more and more like Guaraldi might walk. And, worst of all, time was getting short.
Eventually, even the prosecutors began to lose faith in the case, as did Leo. A roundtable discussion was called by the entire prosecution team, after-hours and without Bob Fox’s knowledge. The prosecutors demanded that Leo go to Bob with the suggestion that the charges against Guaraldi be dropped. There was simply no hard evidence against the man. Leo agreed, but first he met with Paula, alone. He had to make one last effort at getting something going before he asked Bob to drop the case and essentially throw away his career. He decided to start at the beginning with the Conners woman and her statements.
“Look, one of the big reasons we kept after Guaraldi was because of the Conners woman. I want to go see her before I ask Bob to drop the charges, which he will never do anyway.”
“Do you want me to come?” Paula asked.
“No, I want you to dig up her original call to the tip line. I wanna hear the tape.”
Carolyn Conners lived in College Park in an upscale home directly across from the Guaraldi residence. From her front porch, Leo could see the mass of yellow police tape and open craters and what was left of the Guaraldis’ once-beautiful home. If we did this to an innocent man, he thought, who was going to take responsibility? Who was going to make it right? He rang the bell. When no one answered, he rang again. A lace curtain hanging in a window off to the side of the house inched open. Leo saw an eye peering out from behind the curtain. The curtain dropped closed, and seconds later a woman opened the front door. She was wearing a hat crudely fashioned from aluminum foil on her head.
“Ms. Conners?”
“Who wants to know?”
Then the smell of her body odor hit him. Rank and foul, the smell of a body months unwashed. He took a step back.
“My name is Leo Hewitt. I’m with the district attorney’s office. I’m the assistant DA. I wanted to ask you about what you saw.”
“I see a lot. Are you a Democrat?
“Uh, no, I’m not.” Behind the woman, Leo could see masses of cats. Hordes of them crawling over tables and chairs. He saw what could only be feces smeared on the walls. And the smell of the shit and the cats wafted out to him.
“Well, that’s good at least, ’cause they been sending agents out here to spy on me. They been sending out transmissions. They put a transmitter in my head, but I block it with the hat.”
“Really,” Leo said, and began to wish for a cigar.
The prosecution team sat around the conference table. The silence was uncomfortable, and no one would look Leo in the eye.
“You mean to tell me that no one ever just sat down and talked to this woman?”
Paula looked up. “We had her initial statement. The affidavit. We didn’t need anything else. She must have seemed lucid at the-”
“Lucid!” Leo growled. “She’s fucking Boo Radley on acid! I have to go into Bob’s office and tell him that we practically bulldozed this guy’s house into the ground-into the ground -based on the accusations of a lunatic!”
“It gets worse,” Paula said, and opened her briefcase.
She laid a series of audiocassettes on the table.
“What are those?”
“Remember you wanted her original call? Well, they fed her name into the system and pulled every call she ever made to the hotline. There were over fifty.”
“What? You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I haven’t had time to listen to all the tapes, but in each call she accuses another suspect.”
“I just don’t understand why this was ever taken seriously.”
“It was just an unlucky coincidence. If you remember, Bob demanded that every call be followed up on, no matter what. It was just a coincidence that the call in which she names Guaraldi came in at the same time we started looking at Guaraldi because of the Peters and Easton children. Any other time, the call would have been tagged as a nutcase, but because Guaraldi was being investigated by us at the time, someone took the call seriously. It was just a coincidence.”
“Just a coincidence. Christ.”
Bob stared at the stack of tapes on his desk.
“Has defense heard them?”
“No. Not yet.” Leo stood in front of Bob, felt the rage coming off the man like a fever. Paula stood off to the left.
“Not yet? What do you mean, not yet?”
“I figured you’d want to hear them first.”
“You’re goddamn right I do. But we are not, let me repeat that, we are not giving these tapes to the defense.”
“It’s discovery. We have no choice.”
“Sure we do. Bury the tapes. Lose them. Erase them. I never heard of these tapes. Paula lost them before she got a chance to listen to them. Right, Paula?”
“Yeah. Sure, Bob.”
“We’ll put the woman on the stand,” Bob said.
“Look, I’m telling you, she’s a basket case. She wears a hat made out of Reynolds Wrap!”
“We’ll shoot her full of Thorazine! One way or another, she’s going on the stand.”
“Bob, think about what you’re saying. We’ve got nothing on Guaraldi. Nothing.”
“We’ve got one of the dead girls’ DNA in the man’s car. DNA. You call that nothing?”
“It’s diluted. It has no value. There’s blood, spit, prints, and hair from nine of the day-care kids in that car. All alive.”
“All but one.”
“This is ludicrous.”
“No, Leo, this is critical mass. It’s fuck or walk. Where do your loyalties lie?”
The two men stared at each other like tyrants on a playground. Leo looked to Paula for some backup, but she was of no help. She had, quite clearly, shown where her loyalties lay.
Leo picked up the tapes off Bob’s desk. “Bob, the case is over. It’s over.”
Bob jumped to his feet so quickly and violently that Leo had been sure the man was going to hit him. His face had gone from an angry red color to an apoplectic purple. “Like hell it is. Put those goddamn tapes back on my desk.”
“Look, you’re not thinking clearly. We can’t put a man who’s obviously innocent in prison just so your resume will remain unblemished.”
“You had best think about what you’re doing here, Leo. I would hate to see you ruin what could be a brilliant career. Think about it. You know he’s innocent? You know?”
“It doesn’t matter. We don’t have a case against the man. I’m turning these tapes over to the defense team. They’re discovery. We’re legally obligated.”
“No, we’re not. They have the same access to the hotline tapes as we do. We are not legally obligated to give them something that they in fact already have.”
“It’s wrong and you know it.”
“We are not legally obligated.”
“We’re morally obligated.”
“Fuck morally! Fuck you! Give me those tapes!” Bob lunged across his desk and grabbed at Leo. He got hold of the cuff of Leo’s suit jacket, and Leo jerked away, tearing the jacket. Leo backed slowly away from Bob, who was sprawled out across his desk, a thin thread of saliva dangling from his chin. “If you walk out of this office, that’s it! I never want to see you again!”
“You won’t. I quit.”
After listening to the tapes, Judge Duran ordered the charges dropped. Frank Guaraldi was set free and Monty filed a seventy-million-dollar civil action lawsuit on Guaraldi’s behalf for wrongful imprisonment. Bob Fox held a press conference that culminated with his stating that in the wake of his monumental mishandling of the Guaraldi case, Assistant District Attorney Leo Hewitt had voluntarily resigned his position. This statement was interpreted, as Fox knew it would be, that Leo was forced to leave. The media, and more important, the voters, accepted Leo as the scapegoat and Fox was ultimately reelected for another term as district attorney and named Paula Manning as his assistant DA.
Leo lived well with his decision to turn over the Conners tapes. He knew his actions were appropriate.
Two months after being acquitted of all charges, Frank Guaraldi was stopped late at night for a routine traffic violation. The patrolman deemed Guaraldi’s behavior suspicious. As the neighborhood in which he had stopped Guaraldi was notorious for high drug trafficking, the patrolman searched Guaraldi’s car. He found nothing in the interior of the car and asked Guaraldi to pop the trunk. Guaraldi ran. The officer caught him easily and restrained him with handcuffs. He opened the trunk of Guaraldi’s car. Inside he found the limbless, headless torso of a seven-year-old girl.
Guaraldi was taken into custody and retried. Paula headed the prosecution team, and there was no doubt that Guaraldi would be convicted, but he never was.
Late one night in his jail cell, Guaraldi tore open his wrists with his own teeth, biting and tearing the flesh until he reached the artery and severed it. He jammed his wrists into an open toilet and quietly bled to death in his cell in the middle of the night, and thus saved the taxpayers of the city the cost of another trial.
Leo succumbed to depression and felt that he was responsible for the death of the last child. He could not find a job anywhere in the country (much less Fulton County), and a brief attempt at a private practice proved to be a folly. Even the most desperate of clients felt that they could do better than the man who had set a child murderer free. He grew poor and found that he missed having money. He took a low-rent apartment in a bad neighborhood. When the lease expired on his Lexus, he purchased a used Nissan pickup truck. He fell into the habit of driving through tony neighborhoods and dreaming of the prosperity that being a successful trial lawyer might have brought him. He imagined what might have happened had he destroyed the Conners tapes as Bob had suggested. He could see himself as the district attorney. He could see himself resigning the position to accept a full partnership in a prestigious law firm. The reality was that he took a job as a data entry clerk. He showed up every day and pushed buttons on a keyboard and dreamed his dreams. The job was functional and paid the rent, but the law was all he knew, all he had ever cared to know.
One day, he went to the criminal courts building and hid out in the parking garage. When Paula spotted him waiting near her car, her eyes widened and she reached into her purse. Leo was sure she was reaching for a can of mace, but she only pulled out her keys. She opened the car door and told Leo to get in. Without shame, he begged her to help him get back. To go to Bob and somehow get him back in. She agreed.
Two weeks later Paula contacted him. She had talked to Bob. He would take Leo back. As a junior deputy prosecutor. Traffic cases only. Take it or leave it.
He took it.