But then, you plummet down.
The shooter smiled. A terrible, reptile smile. Wren realized she did not have the upper hand after all.
“Well,” the shooter said. “It’s my lucky day.”
—
HUGH LET THE PHONE RING five more times and then slammed it down. He was electric with frustration. The hostages had not come out. George was not answering. Hugh’s decision an hour ago to cut the Wi-Fi and block all phone signals except the landline had cost him the ability to text Wren to see if she was all right—or if she had been the one who was shot.
It seemed like yesterday that he had driven Wren to kindergarten in his truck. As they turned in to the half-moon driveway of the school, he would tell her to put on her jet pack, and Wren would wriggle into her oversize knapsack. He’d slow to a stop. Launching Wren, he would announce, and she would leap out of the car, as if she were setting foot on a new and unexplored planet.
After Annabelle had left them, for several months, Wren had asked when she was coming home. She’s not, Hugh had told her. It’s just you and me now.
Then one night, Hugh had gotten called to a domestic that was spiraling out of control. Bex had come to stay with Wren, who was inconsolable. When he got home at 3:30 A.M., his daughter was still awake and sobbing: I thought you were gone.
Hugh had pulled her into his arms. I will never leave you, he promised. Never.
Who would have guessed it might be the other way around?
He felt a shadow fall over him, and looked up to see the SWAT team commander standing shoulder to shoulder with the chief of police. “You should have told me about your daughter,” Chief Monroe said.
Hugh nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“You know I can’t keep you in charge, son.”
Hugh felt heat spread beneath his collar and he rubbed his hand on the back of his neck. His cellphone—the one he had been using to communicate with George Goddard—started to buzz on the card table he was using as a desk. He glanced at the incoming number. “It’s him.”
Quandt looked at the chief and then cursed underneath his breath. Chief Monroe picked up the phone and handed it to Hugh.
—
IN 2006, IN THE STATE of Mississippi, sixteen-year-old Rennie Gibbs was charged with “depraved heart” murder when she delivered a stillborn at thirty-six weeks. Although the umbilical cord had been wrapped around the baby’s neck, the prosecutor claimed the stillbirth was caused by Gibbs’s cocaine use, due to trace elements of illegal drugs in the baby’s bloodstream.
The prosecutor was Willie Cork, the same showboat who had been in Beth’s hospital room, charging her with murder.
Beth glanced up from the article she was reading over her public defender’s shoulder. “Is it true?” she asked. “The prosecutor did this before to someone else?”
“Don’t read this,” Mandy said, closing her laptop.
“Why not?”
“Because looking up prior cases when you’re in legal trouble is like going to WebMD when you have a cold. You’ll wind up convinced it’s cancer.” She sighed. “Willie has major aspirations for the next election. He wants to paint himself as someone who’s tough on crime—even for the pre-born.”
Beth swallowed. “Did she go to jail? Rennie Gibbs, I mean?”
“No. She was indicted by a grand jury, but the evidence was questionable. In 2014 the case was dismissed.”
“That means mine could be, too, right?”
Mandy looked at her. “That means Willie Cork needs a win.”
Beth was scared and overwhelmed. She had a hundred questions, and the answer to all of them was probably something she didn’t want to hear. She felt tears climb the ladder of her throat, and she turned on her side, closing her eyes, hoping that Mandy wouldn’t notice.
She may have fallen asleep. When she heard Willie Cork’s voice, she thought at first she was having a nightmare. “What the hell are you doing out here?” he said, and Beth looked out from beneath her lashes to see that the door was open, and he was chewing out the cop who Mandy had convinced to stand outside, so that they could have privacy. “You left them in there alone? Get out. I’m having you reassigned,” the prosecutor swore, “and I’m waiting until your replacement gets here.”
She heard his voice in a one-sided phone conversation with, she guessed, someone at the police station. Mandy got up and stood in the open doorway, waiting for him to hang up. Was it weird that her public defender had sat there the whole time Beth was asleep? Had it been to avoid leaving Beth alone in a room with some male cop she didn’t know?
“What are you doing here?” Mandy hissed at Willie Cork.
“I could ask you the same, since I’m guessing that cop didn’t wander outside by himself.” He crossed past Beth’s bed and picked up a silver pen that was sitting on top of the radiator, something she hadn’t noticed. “To answer your question, I left this behind by accident.” He turned it over in his hand. “Montblanc. My daddy gave it to me when I graduated from law school.”
Mandy rolled her eyes. “Keep your voice down. She’s sleeping. And you left it behind by accident? Come on. You planted that so you could come back and interrogate my client without her lawyer present.”
“Now, now, Mandy. You’re soundin’ like a conspiracy theorist.”
“Says the slick son-of-a-bitch who plans to climb to the district attorney’s office by trampling on a frightened, innocent girl.”
If Beth had had any thoughts of revealing she wasn’t sleeping, they vanished. She concentrated on making her breathing even, on not rattling the handcuff against the bed rail.
“Dismiss the charges,” Mandy said quietly. “I’m doing you a favor, Willie. Don’t ruin a girl’s life because you want to get ahead in yours. You’re only going to wind up embarrassed, like you did before.”
Rennie Gibbs, Beth thought.
“You’re trying to elevate the status of a fetus to personhood,” Mandy continued, “and we don’t have that law in Mississippi.”
“Yet,” the prosecutor answered.
Beth had been too nervous to really look at him during the arraignment, but now she did, peeking through the seams of her lids. Willie Cork wasn’t much older than her public defender, but he already had threads of silver at the temples of his black hair. He probably dyed them that way, just to look the part.
“Mississippi has a long history of violence against people who’ve been silenced,” he said.
Mandy laughed. “Willie, surely even you aren’t dumb enough to try to play the race card on a Black woman.”
“Unborn children are already part of the fabric of legal documents. Why, my granddaddy made sure I had a trust before I was even a glimmer in my daddy’s eye.”
“You know there’s a world of difference between the legal rights of an unborn child and the constitutional rights of a living human being,” Mandy whispered, heatedly. “The Constitution may protect liberty and privacy interests, but the Supreme Court has determined that those protections don’t take effect until birth, and that prior to birth, a fetus is not a person. States may give a fetus legal rights, but that doesn’t make it a person.”
Beth’s head was spinning. These were a lot of words, and most of them she didn’t really understand. What she didn’t get was why, if this was all about a fetus, she was the one who was handcuffed. She stifled the hysterical laugh bubbling: after all she had gone through to not be responsible for a baby, it turned out she still was.
“I’m merely elaborating on a time-honored legal tradition of allowing those who don’t have a voice to have one in court. You see it every day, when a guardian ad litem is appointed to speak for children, or people with disabilities. We have laws to protect the vulnerable in this country who can’t protect themselves. Like, for example, your client’s baby.”