Newman caressed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “You didn’t make that choice, Abby,” he said. “You just got handed the bag to hold. The problem is that your client, Foster, had the bad luck to be serving under a psychopath who happened to be the son of a powerful man. Sometimes, no matter how unfair it is, there’s just no way to win.”
“And how am I supposed to live with that? Can you tell me how I’m supposed to sleep at night, knowing that a good and innocent man went to death row because he did the right thing? Sergeant Foster shouldn’t be standing court-martial, he should be given a medal.” She sat forward suddenly, and spun to look him in the eye. “What if I went to the press? What if I leaked the story of how a congressman can railroad the man who stopped his son from committing even more horrible crimes in the future? Maybe I can get just enough public pressure to at least keep Foster out of the execution chamber.”
Newman was shaking his head. “Abby, it won’t work,” he said. “First of all, Congressman Gibson stands a fair chance of being the next president, if he does decide to run. He’s popular, and from what I’ve heard so far, all the speculation polls are finding him to be a very viable and likely candidate. The press is not going to go up against a man like that, not anybody who could get you serious attention, anyway. But even more than that, they would trace the leak back to you and you could be facing a court-martial of your own. If you decide to keep fighting for the Sergeant and end up losing your own career, well, you can console yourself by remembering that it’s better to sacrifice your career than your soul.” He pulled her hand up to his lips and kissed it. “Besides, you might decide you like being a stay-at-home mom, and I’ve never been all that excited about having a wife who works.”
“Art, be serious! I’ve got to think this through, I can’t just lay down on this.”
“Abby, sweetheart, I’m being completely serious,” Newman said. “You cannot win, that much is just true. No matter what you do, your Sergeant Foster is going to end up dead over this. Your CO knows it, Sergeant Foster knows it, and you know it. What you have got to do, if you’re going to survive this at all, is detach yourself from it. Stop thinking of Foster as a client, and just think of him as a casualty of war.”
Mathers leaned back against him again, and he could tell that she was crying softly. He had often wondered if she really had the hardness of heart that it took to be a good lawyer, and it seemed this case was going to be the one that broke her. Of that, he was absolutely certain, so he simply put his arms around her and let her cry.
Sometimes, that’s just all a man can do. The following morning, she would be walking into that court-martial, and he wasn’t sure whether she would even be the same person when she came back out. They ended up falling asleep right there on the couch, huddled together in Mathers’ desperate need for human contact, and only woke when the sun came through the window to tell them that it was time, once more, to face the future.
The court-martial was a joke. The prosecution paraded its entire line of witnesses before the judge and members of the court, while Mathers had only Foster, himself, to put on the stand. She had done her best, cross-examining each witness and watching them squirm on the stand as she piled on all the pressure she could to try to break their stories, but they had obviously been well rehearsed. She could make them nervous, but she couldn’t make them crack.
When it came time for the defense to make its case, she put Foster on the stand and simply let him tell the story in his own words. To her, they were the first words that sounded even slightly believable in the entire proceeding, but the prosecution turned his cross-examination into one of the most vitriolic attacks she had ever seen in a court.
Still, Foster could not be rattled. He kept his cool, never once becoming upset or angry, calmly answering every question. Some of them he answered over and over, always with the same response, until at last even the judge and panel got tired of hearing it all repeated. After, she rested her case, knowing she had done all of the little she could do, and knowing full well that it wasn’t going to be enough.
“Sergeant Foster,” she began, as the members of the court filed out to begin their deliberations. “I’ve been thinking, and—well, I want you to know that you won’t be forgotten. We may still have a chance to save you on appeal, but no matter what happens, I want you to know that I’m not going to let this be swept under the rug. I’ve copied all of my notes in your case; I’ve got hours and hours of recordings from where you and I talked it over, so I know the whole story. We might not have a chance to win here in this court, but there’s another court. I’m going to write a book about you and this case, so that people learn what really happened, and just how corrupt our system really is.”