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Puppet

Atria Books

Chapter One

Some of the things Amanda Travis likes: the color black; lunchtime spinning classes at the fitness center on Clematis Street in downtown Palm Beach; her all-white, one-bedroom, oceanfront condo in Jupiter; a compliant jury; men whose wives don't understand them.

Some of the things she doesn't: the color pink; when the temperature outside her condo's floor-to-ceiling windows falls below sixty-five degrees; clients who don't follow her advice; the color gray; being asked to show her ID when she goes to a bar; nicknames of any shape and size.

Something else she doesn't like: bite marks.

Especially bite marks that are deep and clearly defined, even after the passing of several days; bite marks that lie like a bright purple tattoo amidst a puddle of mustard-color bruises; bite marks that are all but smiling at her from the photographs on the defense table in front of her.

Amanda shakes blond, shoulder-length hair away from her thin face and slips the offending photographs beneath a pad of lined, yellow legal paper, then picks up a pencil and pretends to be jotting down something of importance, when what she actually writes is Remember to buy toothpaste. This gesture is for the jury's benefit, in case any of them is watching. Which is doubtful. Already this morning, she's caught one of the jurors, a middle-aged man with thinning Ronald Reagan-red hair, nodding off. She sighs, drops her pencil, sits back in her chair, and pushes her lips into a pout of disapproval. Not big. Just enough to let the jury know what she thinks of the testimony being given. Which she would like them to believe is not much.

"He was yelling about something," the young woman on the witness stand is saying, one hand absently reaching up to tug at her hair. She glances toward the defense table, pulls the platinum curls away from their black roots, and twists them around square, fake fingernails. "He's always yelling about something."

Again Amanda lifts the pencil into her right hand, adds Stouffer's frozen macaroni and cheese to the impromptu list of groceries she is creating. And orange juice, she remembers, scribbling it across the page with exaggerated flourish, as if she has just remembered a key point of law. The action dislodges the pictures beneath the legal pad, so that once again the photographic impressions of her client's teeth against the witness's skin are winking up at her.

It's the bite marks that will do her in.

She might be able to fudge the facts, obfuscate the evidence, overwhelm the jury with irrelevant details and not always reasonable doubt, but there is simply no getting around those awful pictures. They will seal her client's fate and mar her perfect record, like a blemish on an otherwise flawless complexion, detracting from almost a year of sterling performances on behalf of the poor, the unlucky, and the overwhelmingly guilty.

Damn Derek Clemens anyway. Did he have to be so damn obvious?

Amanda reaches over and pats the hand of the man sitting beside her. Another salvo for the jury, although she wonders if any of them is really fooled. Surely they watch enough television to know the various tricks of the trade: the mock outrage, the sympathetic glances, the disbelieving shakes of the head. She withdraws her hand, surreptitiously rubs the touch of her client's skin onto her black linen skirt beneath the table. Idiot, she thinks behind her reassuring smile. You couldn't have exercised even a modicum of self-control. You had to bite her too.

The defendant smiles back at her, although thankfully, his lips remain closed. The jury will soon be seeing more than enough of Derek Clemens's teeth.

At twenty-eight years old and a wiry five feet ten inches tall, Derek Clemens is the same age and height as the woman selected to represent him. Even their hair is the same shade of delicate blond, their eyes variations of the same cool blue, although hers are darker, more opaque, his paler, sliding toward pastel. In other, more pleasant circumstances, Amanda Travis and Derek Clemens might be mistaken for brother and sister, perhaps even fraternal twins.

Amanda shrugs off the unpleasant thought, grateful, as always, for being an only child. She swivels around in her chair, looks toward the long expanse of windows at the back of the courtroom. Beyond those windows is a typical February day in south Florida -- the sky turquoise, the air warm, the beach beckoning. She fights the urge to wander over to the windows, to lean her head against the tinted glass, and stare out past the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean beyond. Only in Palm Beach does one find an ocean view from a courtroom to rival the view from the penthouse suite of a top hotel.

Perversely, Amanda would rather be here, in Courtroom 5C of the Palm Beach County Court House, sitting beside some lowlife accused of assaulting his live-in girlfriend -- five counts, no less, including sexual assault and uttering death threats -- than sunbathing on the cool sand next to some underdressed, overnourished snowbird. More than a few minutes of lying on her back with the surf washing over her bare toes is enough to send Amanda Travis screaming for the hot pavement.

"I'd like to retrace the events of the morning of August sixteenth, Miss Fletcher," the assistant district attorney is saying, the deep baritone of his voice drawing Amanda's attention back to the front of the courtroom as easily as a lover's seductive sigh.

Caroline Fletcher nods and continues playing with her overly bleached hair, her surgically amplified bosom straining against the buttons of her perversely conservative blue blouse. It helps the defendant's case that the woman Derek Clemens is accused of assaulting looks like a stripper, although in fact, she works in a hairdressing salon. Amanda smiles with the knowledge this is less important than the image being projected. In law, as in so much of life, appearance counts far more than substance. It is, after all, the appearance of justice, and not justice itself, that must be seen to be done.

"August the sixteenth?" The young woman uses her tongue to push the gum she's been surreptitiously chewing throughout her testimony to the side of her mouth.

"The day of the attack," the prosecutor reminds her, approaching the stand and hovering over his star witness. Tyrone King is almost six feet six inches tall with chocolate brown skin and a shiny bald head. When Amanda first joined the law firm of Beatty and Rowe just over a year ago, she heard rumors that the handsome assistant district attorney was a nephew of Martin Luther King's, but when she asked him about it, he laughed and said he suspected all black men in the South named King were rumored to be related to the assassinated leader. "You've testified that the accused came home from work in a foul mood."

"He was always in a foul mood."

Amanda rises halfway out of her chair, voices her objection to the generalization. The objection is sustained. The witness tugs harder on her hair.

"How did this mood manifest itself?"

The witness looks confused.

"Did he raise his voice? Was he yelling?"

"His boss yelled at him, so he came home and yelled at me."

"Objection."

"Sustained."

"What was he yelling about, Miss Fletcher?"

The witness rolls her eyes toward the high ceiling. "He said the place was a mess and that there was never anything to eat, and he was sick of working the midnight shift only to come home to a messy...