Madison put her head down and made quick progress on the first research assignment. The judge was old-fashioned. She still liked her information on paper. Madison printed the most important case precedents off Westlaw, highlighted the holdings in yellow, three-hole-punched them and put them in a binder for the judge, just like Imani showed her. Then she got to work on a memo summarizing the key points. Shortly after five, Sean returned from court. He and Imani were both mired in work, behind on draft opinions. All three of them sat at their desks in silence for the next couple of hours, the only sounds the clacking of keyboards and occasional sighs.
At seven, Sean got up, stretched, and yawned.
“I think I’ll head out.”
Imani raised an eyebrow. “Hot date?”
“Yeah, with my sofa and a carton of noodles.”
Imani started gathering her things. “It is Friday night, and it’s been a long week. We should go home. You too, Madison.”
“I’m close to done with this memo, and I really want to finish. Is it okay if I stay another hour? That way you’ll have the memo on your desk first thing Monday morning.”
The clerks exchanged glances.
“It would be good to get it to Judge Conroy,” Imani said.
“If we leave her alone, and there’s a problem, we’ll get blamed for not supervising. And we’re not supposed to give out the code to the door.”
“She’s an intern. It’s not like we’re giving it to DoorDash.”
“I know. But just—Olivia.”
“Who freaked out after Olivia? Nancy. Who’s breathing down our necks to speed up draft opinions? Nancy. She can’t have it both ways. Madison’s just trying to help out.”
“True.” He sighed. “Okay, Madison, we’ll give you the access code, but you can’t let anyone into chambers, understand? Whether you know them or not, no matter what they say. You’re not authorized to admit people.”
“I know that. I would never.”
“When you leave, turn off the lights, enter the code in the keypad on the door to the reception room, then you have sixty seconds to exit.”
“By the way,” Imani said, “once you have the code, you can get into the building after hours through the employee entrance. Just FYI if you need to work this weekend to get the memo done by Monday. Have a good night.”
The clerks left. Madison kept working. Her phone buzzed intermittently, but she knew it was Mom, wanting to talk about Danny. This wasn’t the time or place. Only after she finished the memo and emailed it to Imani did she check her messages. There were numerous missed calls and two voicemails from Mom. She listened to the older one first.
“Hey, honey, give me a call. It’s important. I need to know if you talked to that judge and what you found out about Danny’s case. Love you.”
She never said she’d speak to Judge Conroy. In fact, she said she wouldn’t. The most she promised was to get a copy of the plea agreement or other documents, so they could make a plan. Which, granted, she hadn’t done yet, but it had not been long, and she’d been busy.
The tone of the second voicemail upset her.
“Madison, I left you a message before. Please call me back. I need to know what you found out. Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’m going to visiting hours. I want you to come with me. We need a game plan for how we’re getting him out of jail. I’m counting on you. Don’t let me down.”
A game plan for getting Danny out of jail? That was asking for the moon. No way could she deliver. She couldn’t even get the documents from his case before visiting hours tomorrow because the Clerk’s Office had closed at five and wouldn’t reopen until Monday morning. Of course, she could just pull them up on this computer she was sitting in front of right now. Danny’s case was in there. It would be easy enough to find his plea agreement, print it, and bring it to the visit.
She wouldn’t be hurting anybody.
Except herself.
She’d been explicitly told not to use the work computer for personal purposes. Not only that—if she got caught, they’d figure out that Danny was her brother. That she’d lied to the judge in the interview. And didn’t write his name on the form. It wouldn’t matter that she never signed the damn thing, or if she put a Post-it on it. She’d be fired faster than you could say Olivia.
Why should she risk that for him?
She could hear her mother’s voice. Because he’s your brother.
But what if she got caught?
If. She might not. She probably wouldn’t. How would they find out?
Mom expected her to help Danny. He needed her legal expertise, which she couldn’t deliver without looking at the case file.
Ugh.
Heaving a sigh, she got up to take a reconnaissance stroll. The lights were on in the break room. She flipped them off. In the reception area, they were also on, though Kelsey had left hours ago. The door to Judge Conroy’s office was closed, a bar of light visible beneath it. Did that mean the judge was still here, or just that she wasn’t good about conserving electricity? No way to know. There was no sign of Nancy, whose office Madison had been told was way on the other side of the floor, next to the courtroom. Though she wouldn’t put it past Nancy to stay late just to spring a surprise inspection.
If she accessed the files, she’d have to be very, very careful.
She could handle that. Just keep her ears open for footsteps. It was a long hallway. Nobody could sneak up on her unless she got sloppy and let them. And she wasn’t sloppy.
It was just a few documents that were publicly available anyway.
Back at her desk, she tilted the computer screen away from the door and typed Danny’s case number into the database. Pages and pages of documents loaded, putting a scare into her. What? How guilty was Danny to have so many court filings? Oh, wait a minute … Thank God. It turned out that case number wasn’t just for Danny’s case, but for all sixteen men charged in that conspiracy to sell heroin. The lead defendant was a guy named Ricky Pe?a. She remembered Danny mentioning him. Ricky was who he met with about bankrolling the auto body shop. He was a major drug kingpin, the boss of the organization, which meant that the case was named after him—United States v. Pe?a. He was also, according to an indictment that had the word “FUGITIVE” stamped next to his name in bright red letters, long gone. So Pe?a got away. As did most of the other named defendants. Danny said that. They all ran. Her hapless brother was one of the few who got caught, and he was the innocent one.
She found an affidavit summarizing all the evidence in the case. It had been sworn out by a Detective Charles Wallace on the night of Danny’s arrest.
Wallace. He must be the dirty cop who Danny had talked about.
The affidavit went on for fifteen pages about Pe?a and his crew. It gave detailed descriptions of surveillances, meetings with informants, hand-to-hand sales of heroin. Wallace had the goods on the lot of them. Too bad most of them escaped justice. Of the three who’d actually been apprehended, one was Danny, who was barely mentioned. She found one paltry sentence about him on the very last page of the fifteen-page affidavit.
Upon entering the premises, Det. Wallace observed defendant DANNY RIVERA with a black duffel bag, which was subsequently opened, searched, and found to contain one hundred bundles of heroin of the brand ‘Rocket’ commonly sold by the Pe?a organization and indicated by a stamp of a rocket ship printed on the plastic bag in red.
In the visiting room, Danny had told her that he was in the bar, talking to Ricky, when the phone call came in from Wallace, and everybody ran. Everybody except him, because he didn’t know any better. He got left holding the bag—literally.
Jesus. Was he telling the truth?
He claimed he was framed. Up until that moment, if she was honest with herself, she’d had her doubts. But there it was in black and white, just like he said.
Mom needed to see this affidavit. It backed Danny up a hundred percent. Of course, Mom had believed him from the beginning. It was only Madison who’d doubted him.
Doubted her own brother.
What was wrong with her?