The Murder of Sara Barton (Atlanta Murder Squad Book 1) by Lance McMillian (primary phonics txt) 📗

she will board a plane later in the week to handle neglected business in Los Angeles. The timing is as good as any. Trials are 24-hour affairs, so I’ll have less time to miss her. The symmetry bites. For two years prosecuting murder has been my sword to ward off the pain of my separation from Amber. Now work will serve the same purpose but with a different woman.

Lara asks, “Are you going to miss me?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know. You’re going to have a lot of late nights with that sexy assistant of yours.”

“Do you sleep with all your co-stars?”

“Of course!”

Her laugh lets me in on the joke. Whether she’s truly concerned about Ella and me is harder to gauge. After seeing Ella on TV arguing at Barton’s bail hearing, Lara quizzed me about whether the two of us were a thing. She need not worry. Sleeping with a witness is already a dance on the live wire. Throwing the dynamite of another woman into the mix exceeds my tolerance for risk.

Later on, we eat Chinese take-out. I am quiet as I work over the Corey Miller case one last time—the pre-trial habit of a man who has always lived too much inside his own head. Lara notices my detachment as I chew mechanically on my food.

“You’re not saying much.”

“I’m mentally preparing myself for battle.”

“You make it sound like a war.”

It is. Law is the price the victors of history impose on the defeated, and a prosecutor’s job is to wage war against those who think the terms of peace somehow do not apply to them. Trials may lack the bloody violence of the battlefield, but they are a species of combat all the same. The trial lawyer who doesn’t go into trial with the mindset of a warrior starts from a position of weakness.

I explain none of these thoughts, don’t give her an answer at all. The conversation dies, and Lara doesn’t try to resuscitate it. She leaves me to myself. I sit on a couch and stare straight ahead at the barren, off-white wall—thinking.

My concentration breaks. Lara says something I don’t quite catch.

“What?”

She asks, “After this trial, then it’s Bernard’s turn?”

“Yes, then it’s Bernard’s turn.”

15

Corey Miller sits across the way in the courtroom—contemptuous, defiant, cocky to the end.

I reckon he was a cute kid once upon a time, but all I see now is a monster. The diminishing Christian inside of me recalls that, according to Jesus, being angry toward someone in your heart is the same thing as murdering that person. The anger in my own heart—enough to strike down a mountain—refuses to accept the rebuke. Actions matter. As a prosecutor, my entire career rests on the certitude that the act itself—the actus reus—possesses a singular moral significance. The law doesn’t punish thoughts. Corey Miller made a choice to kill, and he must reap the consequences.

The bailiff calls the courtroom to order.

***

An uneventful morning of jury selection gives way to the lunch hour. Scott and I share company and some cold sandwiches. Because of security concerns for Belinda and Tasha Favors, Scott plans to stay close for the duration of the trial.

He asks, “Where were you last night?”

“What do you mean?”

“I dropped by your house at midnight, and you weren’t there. You weren’t in your office, either. Do you have some girl on the side I don’t know about?”

An air of ambiguity surrounds the joke, as if the levity is only a subterfuge to fish for information. Proceed with caution, I tell myself. Lara and I use the condo precisely because Scott drops by my house unannounced at all hours. This moment was inevitable. I lie.

“Waffle House. Where else would I be at that time of night?”

“Ugh. I was thinking you might’ve paid Ella a visit. You should, you know.”

Scott often exhorts me to stop keeping Ella at arm’s length. I don’t dare tell him about Lara. He is a man that plays things by the book, and sleeping with a witness ain’t by the book. I make a non-committal noise at the mention of Ella, willing the topic to go away.

Scott says, “You need to start taking better care of yourself. You keep eating at that place you’re going to die of a coronary. Too much grease.”

Me, I love the grease and the atmosphere. Something joyously democratic surrounds the wayward cross-section of humanity that gathers at Waffle House in the dead of night. I look at the witching hour crowd and see in their different stories my own displacement from society. That my first date with Lara took place there seems fitting—realness birthing something new.

***

The first days of the trial contain no surprises. My opening statement promises the jury the goods. An eyewitness will sit in that empty witness chair and identify Corey Miller as the man who killed DeShawn Carter. No name is named. Having made the vow to produce such a witness to the jury, the entire case now rests on the shoulders of a little girl. But that truth has always hovered over this prosecution. Our proof against Corey Miller begins and ends with Tasha Favors.

The design of our case reflects this reality. Tasha will be our last witness, and every witness is a building block to reach her. Ella handles our law enforcement witnesses and uses them to paint an evocative picture of the murder scene—the victim dead on the ground, his brain half-flapped out on the dirty asphalt of the street. She elicits the phrase “execution-style killing” from one of the testifying police officers, who helpfully provides a visual by touching Ella’s temple with his index finger cocked to simulate the nature of an execution-style kill.

As the Coroner for Fulton County, Cecil Magnus takes his turn in the witness box under Ella’s guiding hand. He confirms that DeShawn Carter is dead and that the muzzle of the murder weapon was touching Carter’s head at the time of the fatal shot. He also brings his autopsy photos to