“This was a civil suit?”
She nodded. “The girl was a runaway from New Mexico. Her parents were drug cases who hadn’t even bothered to look for her when she left. But she had a brother. His name was Billy. He was five years older. He had been in jail when she left home, but she’d kept writing to him. He was still in jail when she got killed. When he got out, he got a good lawyer on a pro bono basis. Carl Hayward got me. Everybody expected us to settle. Hayward had clearly not checked anybody, least of all Tara, for age, or asked to see identification. She looked, if anything, younger than sixteen, and Hayward made no secret of the fact that he always had one of the girls carry the money because he didn’t want to get robbed. Three or four of them would get off at once, and it might be a different one that had the money each time. But he knew that he was putting them in danger, because at least once before, men had stopped the wrong girl and ended up with nothing but a purse full of tips. I let them go to court, and I won.”
“How?”
“A combination of things. I had a feeling about the jury. They weren’t all old ladies with pearls, but I could tell they were conservative. The brother’s record might be enough for some of them. I used it. I portrayed him as a creep who was happy to use his own young sister’s death to ruin an honest businessman and get rich. I said he was a vulture. I used the letters she sent him in prison, and said that if it was a dangerous situation, he knew it. I said he was like a pimp, who had encouraged her to work a dangerous, illegal job so she would send him money, and then tried to cash in, to sell her even after she had died.”
“Go on,” he said.
She frowned. “I was young, and I wanted so badly to win. I thought it was my job to use everything I could find or invent to get my client off. The opposing lawyer was Reynolds Phelan. You probably don’t know who that is, but every lawyer in the state does. He was president of the bar association when I was in law school. When the case was over, he waited for me outside the building. I actually thought he was going to congratulate me. He said that what I had done was disgusting. I’ll remember that forever.” She lapsed into silence.
“I’m waiting,” he prompted.
She sighed. “That was my first indication that things were going wrong. I started to get other indications right after the trial. Billy was not going to forget either. He had been in for manslaughter. Billy was very tough. In jail he got meaner and smarter. He started threatening me right after the trial. He had been in jail with men who were experts at intimidating people. They had taught him to do it without getting caught. There were calls late at night, always from pay phones. I would leave home for the office in the morning, and there would be a scary man across the street, staring at me with a smirk. The same when I left work for home. But it was never Billy. Not once. And each one was replaced by another after a couple of times. I told the cops. But the cops can’t charge somebody under the stalking law if he’s standing across the street once or twice. I told friends, I told colleagues, but nobody could help. Finally I was at a party.”
“A party?”
“Yes. It had gone on and on, and I started to hate being alone. I started working more, going out a lot more, just being with people so I wasn’t alone. A woman I met at a party told me that a mutual friend had told her about my problem and she had a suggestion.”
“What was it?”
“Her boyfriend had talked her into going to this self-defense camp, kind of for laughs, really. They had gone together, and she was hooked. It had changed her life. She had been afraid all the time, and now she wasn’t. I had noticed her earlier in the evening and wondered about her, and I think it was because of that. She always had a serene look on her face, but she carried herself with a kind of swagger. She walked straight up to people she had never met and was comfortable talking with them-very easy, very friendly, just as she was with me. I knew she was telling the truth. I let her write down the name and phone number on a slip of paper for me. Overnight I thought about it, and called the next day.”
“Was the camp what she said it was?”
“It was. I learned to use a gun. I don’t mean just how to aim it and hit something consistently. I mean how to care for it, how to carry it concealed, how and when to take it out and fire it, how to move during a firefight. None of that stuff is obvious, and some of it is even counterintuitive intentionally, so your opponent can’t anticipate it. I went to classes in hand-to-hand combat. I know it doesn’t look as though I learned much-”
“Yes, it does,” he interjected.
“Well, I did. I’m pretty rusty now, and I couldn’t do what I was supposed to, which was to surprise the opponent. It also works best if you really want to hurt the other person, or at least don’t care if you do. I care about you.”
“Go on.” There was a warning in his voice.
“I went for a month-long course. It was a rule that you had to go for a whole month the first time, and take an all-around basic self-defense course. After that, you could go for two-week intensive courses, even one-week brush-up sessions. The month was terribly expensive for me, but it seemed worth it. I was out of sight for all that time, safe from Billy. I knew nothing to begin with, so every hour I was there made a terrific difference. When the month was over, I had made a lot of progress. I found I didn’t want to leave. I asked if I could take a two-week advanced course. That was even more extreme. It was urban combat: shotguns, things you could do with a car, even some booby traps. When that was nearly done, I went to one of the instructors and tried to sign up for another two weeks. She talked to me for a while, said she could tell that I was scared to go home, where I would be alone again. It wasn’t that, exactly.”
“What was it?”
“It wasn’t that I had become fearful of being alone. I had convinced myself that what I was going home to was a fight to the death against Billy-it was that specific-and I wasn’t ready. Do you see? I was easily good enough to not be afraid of living a normal life. I wasn’t good enough yet to go head-to-head against a man who wanted me dead, a convict who had killed somebody before. I told the instructor. A day later, she brought me in to speak with Michael Parish.”
“The one I met? The owner of the camp?”
“He’s more than that. Owning something is just money. It’s his, in a different way. The place is him. It’s a reflection of his ideas. All the people who work there look up to him and some of them seem to imitate him-his expressions, his mannerisms. He asked me to talk about what had been bothering me, to tell him everything. So I told him. I started to talk in brief, general terms, but the other instructor, whose name was Mary, kept prompting me. And I spilled all of it. He listened patiently and asked me all the right questions-the ones that convinced me that he cared about me, and was really hearing what I said-and I told him more. Finally, he said, ‘You seem convinced that at some point, you’re going to have to kill him.’ I said no, of course not. Then I said, ‘I hadn’t actually been thinking about it that way. I had only been learning to defend myself just in case. Shouldn’t everyone?’ All the time, he was watching me, not judging me or smiling or looking skeptical or anything, just waiting. And after a while, I said, ‘Well, yes. I suppose I really do think that at some point he is going to either try to get me himself or have one of his prison friends do it. What I’ve been doing here for the past six weeks is get myself ready to survive it. Now that I know more about what that means, I guess I would have to say yes, I have been preparing myself to kill him.’ ”
“And what did he say?”
“We had been in the main lodge, sitting on those hard, straight-backed wooden chairs like they have in some bars. That’s how he talks to you: sitting almost knee to knee in that empty room with nothing to look at but his eyes. What he did was kind of lean forward with his hands on his thighs and stand up. It brought his face close to mine, and in that second, he said, ‘Then let’s get it done.’ It was so quick, so quiet that I said, ‘What? I didn’t quite catch that.’ Then he called in Debbie, my martial arts instructor, and he said, “Tell Debbie everything about this man Billy-everything you know. If you need to go to your office to consult some file about him or something, bring her with you. Then come back. After we’ve got the information, it will take another week to prepare. Then we’ll take you back so you can kill him.’ ”