Defenseless - Softcover

Marsella, Celeste

 
9780440244660: Defenseless
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0440244668 ISBN 13: 9780440244660
Verlag: Dell, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

They’re overworked, underpaid, and unstoppable: four young women in a big-city attorney general’s office. But when best friends Marianna, Laurie, Shannon, and Beth find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s not just their careers that are in danger—it’s their lives.

It’s after midnight when a young coed’s body is thrown from a car—right before their eyes. When their boss finds out that their presence at the scene might jeopardize the prosecution, Marianna takes the fall, exiled to a job inside an ivy-walled private college—where the murdered girl had been a student. Suddenly Marianna is in the eye of the storm alone as a vicious killer strikes again…and again. With no one to trust on either side of the law except themselves and a secretive ex-cop, Marianna, Laurie, Shannon, and Beth will have to join all their smarts, savvy, and loyalty to stop the killer from taking one of their own.…

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Celeste Marsella received her B.A. from New York University and her J.D. from New York Law School. She is a member of four state bars—New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Florida—and has actively practiced in all except Florida. In Rhode Island, where her daughter was born, she worked in a gritty criminal law firm. Celeste now writes full time and is currently at work on her next novel in this series, forthcoming from Dell.

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Chapter One


The Brethren

THE FIRST TIME I WALKED into an autopsy room I tried to convince myself that my sweaty palms were due to the rubber surgical gloves I was required to wear rather than an irrational fear that death could float across the room like an airborne virus and infect me. Five years ago, still in my twenties, I was not yet immune to the disease of death.

The only bodies I'd ever seen had been waked in Italian funeral homes, where the dead had been preserved, prettied, and then gift—packed like keepsake dolls in silk—lined caskets. Death at the morgue was different. Still warm and pulsating, these freshly bodies had been scooped off the streets only hours before and dropped, rude and bloody, on stainless steel tables. Back then I still believed in souls, resisting the scientific proposition that after a person's last breath his humanity disappeared into thin air like the smoke trailing a cigarette. So I used to think that if I kept still and silent I could tune into those frequencies used by the transitionally dead to communicate. But before long I was asking myself: What would the recently departed, assuming an afterlife, really want to say to us? Greetings, Attorney Melone. Telegram from the hereafter: The transition process was a bit messy but death turned out to be no sweat. Really enjoying myself here. Life on earth is just a —two—minute test drive for the real thing. See you soon!

Right. And postcard to follow.

A Manhattan kindergartner could have told me I was fooling myself. I had to face it. If death was communicating, I wasn't on its mailing list. And after a few years of seeing corpses unzipped from plastic bags and sliced open, their innards scooped out and dissected, reality hit. The dead strangers on those metal tables were only shells ready to be cracked open, cleaned out, then either flame—charred or canned for underground storage.

So there I was, nicely calloused, in my fifth year as an assistant attorney general in Rhode Island, when three of my colleagues and I agreed to meet for an apreswork dinner at the Red Fez. The Fez was number five on a list of ten "Do Not Visit" establishments that RI assistant attorney generals were forbidden to patronize because of the restaurants' alleged "ties to organized crime." And precisely because of its off—limits status to AAGs, the Fez had briskly evolved into our de facto secret clubhouse. With its Middle Eastern fare and Iranian owners, the Fez must have seemed the perfect underworld hangout for dumb Rhode Island mobsters trying to keep a low profile by avoiding all restaurants with capellini on the menu. The "organized crime" prohibition notwithstanding, my friends and I agreed to meet there at 11 p.m. At that hour midweek we were certain no one in our social or work circles would see us.

The Fez was decorated more or less like Hell—a windowless cave, carpeted, wallpapered, and furnished in deep reds, ominously lit from below by table candles and from above by twenty-five-watt pendant bulbs shrouded in burgundy faux—silk shades that hovered like dire crimson vultures in wait. Our male colleagues at the AG's office—those who were aware of our clandestine Sabbats—not so affectionately referred to the Fez as our "little red whorehouse."

The Fez was quartered in a seedy back alley of downtown Providence, a threatening locale even on a bustling workday. Under a moonless, starless, asphalt black sky I headed over the river walk. Halfway there I saw the girls standing at the corner of Pine Street, ready to cross into the alley. The gang. My brethren. Laurie Stein, Shannon Lynch, Beth Earles, and me, Assistant Attorney General Marianna Melone. Beth ran up to kiss me hello on the cheek, walking me back to Laurie and Shannon, neither of whom bothered to turn around. Working together for the past five years, we had long ago settled into sibling-like familiarity. Our hellos consisted of grunts and a few obscenities as I fell into perfect marching order and we continued down the block.

Gun-shy about advertising our patronage of the shady, off—limits dive, we took a circuitous safari around the back of a closed package store named Hanratty's, where we lined up in front of a badly weather—beaten neon display whose bloodred tubes immediately began taunting us, flickering on and off with a grating buzz.

"A smoke before we go in?" Shannon said, leaning her six-foot frame against Hanratty's filthy glass window in front of a glowing Budweiser sign. "These insidious no-smoking laws are going to drive me to drugs. At least heroin I can do inside the bar."

"As if anyone at the Fez ever stops us from smoking," Laurie remarked.

"AAGs," I added. "Membership has its benefits."

Camel filtereds were passed back and forth in the deep brown murk of night, and we smoked them piggishly like floozies on a break. Only Beth, the sole nonlawyer among us, abstained from the nicotine orgy, rattling on about work and whether or not she should chuck the paralegal nonsense and bite the law school bullet.

Laurie counseled Beth. "No brainer, you little pigeon. With all that research under your belt, you've already forgotten more law than you'll ever need to try a case. You might as well be charming jurors with those baby blues and commanding the same dough as us."

"Forget the money," I sputtered halfway through a particularly ferocious drag. "Being able to tell Piganno off is worth the three years' toil at an accredited law school." I was referring disparagingly to our boss, Attorney General Vincent Piganno. "Until you have a JD after your name"—I tapped ash onto the pavement—"you can only give him the finger behind his back."

"Let's eat," Shannon said, tossing her cigarette.

I took a healthy drag of mine and added my butt to hers in the street. We trod half a block farther into the alley and descended the stairs to the Fez, walking straight to the back to set up our usual spot at the bar. Joe, the omnipresent bartender (indeed, he looked as if he never slept), immediately dealt us four sticky coasters and waited, with that embalmed look on his face, for our order.

"Same all around," ordered Shannon, whereupon Joe promptly snapped the tops off four Heinekens and set the bottles onto the soggy coasters.

None of us felt compelled to make idle conversation, or, for that matter, any conversation, especially at eleven o'clock at night after a hard day's work. More often than not I was the one sparking the banter—turning the group's attention to something inanely philosophical, always searching for the deeper meaning of things, trying to get a rise out of my friends, to provoke them or, at the very least, to make them laugh.

"Jurisprudence," I said into the smoke—filled room. "What is it?"

Three pairs of eyes stared into the darkness. The pair shrouded in men's metal—Ray—Bans belonged to Shannon. She leaned away from the bar and whipped off the glasses, pointing them at me like a loaded pistol. "Who gives a crap?"

But I forged ahead. "Four educated women in the legal profession, and not one of us has a clue about the meaning of jurisprudence."

Shannon threw the sunglasses down on the bar and narrowed her bloodshot blue eyes. "Lasso your thongs, girls. Saint Mari is going AWOL again."

"Well, does anyone know?" I insisted.

"I do." Beth lectured, "Jurisprudence is the science of positive laws and their relationship to legal ethics. I had to take a course in it for my paralegal degree. It's the set of...

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Verlag
Dell
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0440244668
ISBN 13 
9780440244660
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Dell GmbH
6997927350
DE.CustomerSupport@dell.com

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