“I don’t,” he said. “But if you’d been there for a while, something specific must have happened. Something bad. And I’m guessing it concerned a case, right?”
She stopped walking, turning to face the water. The moonlit shadows accentuated her expression – a mixture of sadness and guilt that brought with it a fleeting ache he hadn’t expected.
“You’re very intuitive.” She closed her eyes, holding them that way for a moment. “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this.”
Colin said nothing. By then, they’d almost reached the spot where they’d entered the beach, a cacophony of music audible now above the sound of the waves. She gestured toward the dune. “Do you mind if we sit?”
“Not at all.”
Slipping off her purse and setting her sandals aside, she lowered herself to the sand. Colin made himself comfortable beside her.
“Cassie Manning,” Maria offered. “That was her name… I hardly ever talk about her. It’s not something that I like reliving.” Her voice was tight and controlled. “The case came to me maybe three or four months after I’d begun working at the DA’s office. On paper, it struck me as a fairly typical case. Cassie is dating a guy and they get into an argument, it escalates, and the guy ends up getting violent. Cassie ends up in the hospital with a black eye and a split lip, bruising, a cracked cheekbone. In other words, it wasn’t just one punch; it was a beating. His name was Gerald Laws.”
“Laws?”
“I’ve tried to find the irony, but I’ve never found any. And nothing about the case ended up being typical in the slightest. It turns out that they’d been dating for six months or so, and in the beginning of the relationship, Cassie found Laws utterly charming. He listened well, opened doors for her – a gentleman – but after a while, she began to notice aspects of his personality that concerned her. The longer they dated, the more jealous and possessive he started to become. Cassie told me that he began to get angry if she didn’t answer immediately when he called her; he started showing up at her office when she was getting off work – she was a nurse at a pediatric office – and once, when she was having lunch with her brother, she spotted Laws on the other side of the restaurant, all by himself, just watching her. She knew that he’d followed her there and it bothered her.