A Good Mother by Lara Bazelon (different ereaders txt) 📗

perspectives may differ. So I will end by reminding you of the law that you swore to follow.

“You may not like the law. It may seem unfair, even unjust. You may want to compromise. You can’t. When the only choice is first-degree murder, the only verdict is not guilty.”

Friday, March 23, 2007

3:02 p.m.

Office of the Federal Public Defender

Los Angeles, California

“How’s the waiting?”

Abby looks up. Antoine, standing in the open doorway of her office. “Awful. But I’m thinking—”

“Jury’s coming back Monday, at the earliest.”

She nods, waving him over as she staples another set of documents, stacks it with the others, and puts them inside a large manila envelope. “Dars will send them home in a few hours and then it’ll be the weekend.”

Antoine shuts the door, crosses the room in two strides, and takes a seat in the chair opposite Abby’s desk, his own manila envelope in hand. “Doing some work in the meantime, I see. Catching up with your neglected clients?”

She shakes her head. “Estrada.”

“He alright?”

“As good as can be expected. Thinner. Not in any danger, though. The other guys like him. It’s useful having a jailhouse lawyer.” Abby seals the envelope, puts it in her purse. “And you know, now that the case is over, he’s getting out. Dars doesn’t have any basis to hold him anymore.”

“So what—you’re being a Good Samaritan and helping his lawyer with the release paperwork?”

She shrugs. “Something like that.”

“How’s his family been holding up?”

“There really isn’t any. He and his wife divorced about fifteen years ago. They had one child, a daughter. She was killed in a car accident during her senior year in high school.”

“Huh. Did you ever think Estrada was going to break?” Antoine is looking at her intently.

“Not after—No.” She takes a second look at Antoine. “Why? What is it?” She nods toward the envelope in his hand. “What’s in there?”

“The report on the hard drive. Travis’s emails.”

Abby reaches for the envelope and pulls out a thick pile of papers. Lines and lines of numbers. Charts. “What am I looking at, Antoine?”

“Report’s at the end.”

“Just tell me,” she says impatiently.

“What do you know about read receipts?” he asks.

“Read what?”

“There’s an email tracking system you can use. Shows you when your emails have been opened and read. And if they’ve been opened and read multiple times.”

“Okay.”

“So our expert, he looked at Travis’s emails from Jackie. There’s a couple hundred, dating back from October ’05 to a couple of days before he died.”

“We know that already. Shauna gave us all of them.”

“Yeah.” Antoine leans forward, elbows on his knees, and laces his fingers together under his chin. “Thing is, each email from Jackie was opened twice. First time it was opened, read, then marked as unread, so the second time it showed up in the inbox just like it was new. With each one, it looks like the first read and the second read happened within hours of each other. Or at most, a day.”

Abby stares at him, her impatience replaced by creeping dread.

“Our guy looked at all of Travis’s other emails. Thousands of them. Only Jackie’s have two read receipts.”

“She was his girlfriend. He read them twice.” But even as she says it, Abby knows it isn’t true.

“I checked the time stamps on the read receipts against Travis’s schedule,” Antoine says. “Travis was out on patrol for every first read.”

She shakes her head. “He wouldn’t give Luz his password. Not when he was having an affair.”

“His user name is travishollis. His password is his birthday. I’m thinking she guessed on the first try.”

“No one’s that stupid.”

“Please. Jonathan’s been reading your email for years.”

“No, he—” Her eyes widen. “Oh, God.”

Antoine shakes his head. “All it takes with most people is knowing them well—a few guesses and you’re in.”

She stares at him.

“What I am telling you,” he says patiently, “is that Luz was reading about Travis and Jackie in real time. She always knew. Jackie’s email to Luz wasn’t a surprise at all. She knew about it all—the baby, the affair. For months.”

Abby is shaking her head.

“Almost a year.”

Abby closes her eyes. “What’s the time lapse between the first email from Jackie to Travis and the first call from Luz to Estrada?”

“Two months. Luz’s first call to Estrada was on December 8, 2005.”

She nods. Had it been closer in time, Shauna would have been suspicious, but Luz had waited. “She didn’t call Estrada until—”

“She found out she was pregnant,” Antoine finishes. “Then she called him nine more times. Meanwhile—”

“Meanwhile legal documents were being signed and executed.” No confrontation with Travis until after Cristina was safely delivered from Luz’s body. No confrontation with Travis until after Luz’s name was on the life insurance policy.

She thinks of Mr. Estrada, then again to what Luz had said. He told me to trust you. So if you want to know those things now, I will tell you. But Abby had not wanted to know. She had had another chance to find out, when she had met Luz in her office, ostensibly to talk about Jackie. Abby still had not wanted to know. She had never wanted to know.

“Jackie’s email to Luz,” Abby says slowly. “Luz couldn’t have known about that, much less planned it.”

“No, but she could have planned for it. She’s keeping up with their correspondence, and Jackie’s making threats. Luz knew Travis wasn’t going anywhere, which means she knew Jackie was going to get fed up at some point and tell all.”

“The Facebook posting on October 11.”

Antoine looks at her blankly.

“The memory picture of Luz sitting on Travis’ lap at the picnic when she was pregnant with Cristina.” Abby looks back at Antoine, who is now nodding slightly.

“Oh God. Luz was using Facebook to—”

“Make Jackie crazy-mad.”

“She set this whole thing in motion.”

Abby looks at Antoine for a long moment. “You’ve been sitting on this report for days, haven’t you?”

Antoine looks back at her, expressionless.

She nods. “You didn’t want to pollute my mind with the inconvenient fact that my client is a cold-blooded, premeditated—”

“No, I don’t