As one of the top litigators in the South, she developed a reputation as the most ruthless and hard-hearted prosecutor to have ever walked the courthouse halls. And she didn’t mind it a single bit.
But a part of her was sealed off forever. That part of her was her heart.
After nearly twenty minutes of waiting, the swinging doors in the courtroom opened and in walked a fleet of state lawyers, most of them carrying binders, files, and law books. The two men took seats at the state’s counsel table, closest to the jury. The two women, dressed in austere gray and navy blue, sat behind them.
No female lead counsel, Hailey thought. Not unusual. Any further thoughts as to gender bias evaporated into thin air when a side door of the courtroom opened from inside.
Out strode two huge, muscled Chatham County Sheriff’s officers, shoulder to shoulder. Behind them came two white, male attorneys. By the look of them, she assumed they were part of the defense team. The cut of their suits and the shine on their Italian leather loafers indicated a far bigger paycheck than a state prosecutor could ever pull in. The two were followed by a gaggle of underlings—paralegals, an investigator, a jury consultant by the looks of her, and two skinny law student types, apparently “interning” under the tutelage of famed defense attorney Michael P. “Mikey” DelVecchio.
Their hair was slicked back with some sort of gel that glistened in hard spikes under the courtroom lighting. They spoke quietly to each other, their heads slightly turned inward, DelVecchio with a smile on his lips. And then, at the end of the defense procession, with his head up, shoulders thrown back, muscled chest puffed forward, and looking like he was walking onto a football field to run a touchdown, came the defendant. Todd Adams.
His dark hair was smooth and shiny and clearly just trimmed for the big day. His suit was blue and tailored, fit him perfectly, and contrasted subtly against the light blue of a crisp, starched Oxford button-down shirt and crimson red silk tie. Adams flashed a perfectly aligned, bright white smile at his family, who settled in to take over the entire first row behind the defense counsel table.
Hailey watched and absorbed the interaction between Adams and his parents, his mom in particular. The two held a long gaze. Looking at Mrs. Adams, it was clear: She adored him, loved him, and, most important, believed him.
A rush of papers and sudden movement at the front of the courtroom was followed by a half a dozen minions rushing in. Then, in came the judge. Sharp-faced and gray-headed, Luther Alverson insisted on presiding over more jury trials than any other judge in the courthouse.
At eighty-four, he was also the oldest judge in the courthouse. So old in fact, he predated the state regulations on mandatory retirement. In order to prove himself still up to the task, he demanded that any and all Chatham assistant district attorneys and public defenders assigned to his court must go on trial every other week. His calendar was rarely backed up, and when a case went on his trial calendar, there would be no last-minute haggling, no eleventh-hour guilty pleas, no cheap deals.
Everyone stood as the judge seated himself with the simultaneous pounding of his gavel with three loud strikes. “Court’s in session. The Honorable Luther Alverson presiding.”
Like in a church at the end of a hymn, everyone sat back down in their seats in unison. The calendar clerk’s seat was positioned directly beside the judge’s bench. The clerk stood to read directly from the grand jury indictment, calling out the indictment number, a series of letters and numbers that had significance only to court employees, followed by the announcement “State v. Todd Adams.”
As her son’s name was read out loud, Tish Adams burst into tears, drawing every eye in the courtroom off her son and onto herself. Hailey immediately checked Julie Love’s mother, also seated in the front row but on the other side of the courtroom.
The look Dana Love shot at Adams’s mother could have cut stone. It was a look of pure hatred. It was clearly borne of resentment at the long years Adams was coddled by his mom, at the numerous excuses for Adams’s bad behavior she made, culminating in a final act of violence.
Adams’s defense team made a big stir at their table, scrambling among themselves, as it turned out, for a handkerchief the lead defense lawyer dramatically pulled from his lapel and handed back to Tish Adams. Immediately, prosecutors stood, and striding quickly toward the judge’s bench, barked out the word “Sidebar!”
“Counsel, approach the bench! Including you, Mr. DelVecchio.”
Hailey knew enough from all her years prosecuting in court that Alverson was already on to the defense ploy of having the jury focus on the grieving mother of the defendant, not the grieving mother of the victim, Julie Love. Thankfully, the prosecutor was on to it too, but Hailey hoped he could cut off DelVecchio next time before the play was made.
As it was, all twelve jurors were still staring sympathetically at Tish Adams, who was now breathing deeply into a clear plastic breathing mask attached to a portable cylinder of pure oxygen.
Ugh. This was going to be a long trial.
Hailey couldn’t stop staring either, even though she suspected all the sobbing was a preplanned charade, the defense and Tish Adams clearly in cahoots. As Hailey watched the judge’s stern face framed by the suited backs of all the attorneys, they turned and strode back to their counsel table.
To see DelVecchio’s face, smiling and preening toward the jury, you’d think he had just won an argument in the U.S. Supreme Court when, in fact, he’d just gotten his first dressing down from the judge. The whole game was new to the jurors, but Hailey knew that soon enough, most of them would catch on to the game Adams’s defense was playing.
After the reading of the indictment in which the accusations and a partial description of the deaths of Julie Love and baby Lily were laid out, the jurors repeatedly glanced at Todd Adams as if trying to reconcile the two brutal murders with the good-looking, athletic young man sitting behind the defense table. His mother was still overtly crying, but now silently into DelVecchio’s hanky, following the judge’s admonition.
The judge turned toward the jurors and launched into a set of typed, pretrial jury instructions to provide somewhat of a road map as to how the trial would go.
The case commenced. The lead prosecutor stood up, pushing his chair back from counsel table, approaching a podium directly centered before the judge. He laid out a stack of paper on which he had handwritten pretrial motions to the judge. He began in a conversational tone, but as the intensity of the story increased, he picked up the pace and pitch. By the time he showed the jury a photo of Julie Love—the one at Christmas time, decked out in her Christmas-red satin pantsuit, her tummy bulging with baby Lily—all twelve jurors plus the alternates were at the edge of their seats. And this was just for motions, openings hadn’t started!
But just before the prosecutor, Herman Grant, punched the slide projector button to proceed to the next image up on a slide screen on the other side of the courtroom, DelVecchio stood and loudly shouted out.
“Objection! The state is trying to poison us all against Todd Adams, and I won’t have it, Judge! This is so cruel and unfair, to use the life of Julie Love in this manner . . . just to get a conviction!”
Hailey cringed as Grant turned, his face in a rage, and then Julie Love’s mother put her head in her hands, leaning on her husband’s shoulder.
“Send out the jury!” Alverson said it calmly but Hailey could tell the judge was angry. He couldn’t afford to show emotion and jeopardize a death penalty case, but there was no way Alverson was going to let DelVecchio run roughshod over the court with his flamboyant behavior.
“Careful, careful . . .” Hailey muttered to herself. If the judge came down too hard on DelVecchio, it could later be argued that he, the judge, was biased against the defense, even at this early stage of the trial.
The judge’s law