Juror Number Ten

By Caroline Taylor

Forgive their trespasses? One has committed murder. Two have committed adultery, and the third has stopped to petty spying.

 

When Sophie Dickson becomes the reluctant tenth juror in a DC murder trial, she encounters the man whose marriage she destroyed through a drunken act of adultery. The prosecutor knows that his boss wants him to lose the case, and that's why he's trying to dig up dirt on the man. The defendant, Nona Pierce, refuses to plead guilty, even while owning up to the murder. She just wants her day in court. Instead, she's kidnapped before the trial begins.

 

Meanwhile, a lot of bad people—from one of DC's biggest crime bosses to the Russian mafia—think that Nona and her lawyer Gordon Abercrombie have information they desperately want. When Nona escapes, they turn to firebombing, fire, vandalism, and yet another kidnapping, this time of Juror Number Ten, who finds herself in the middle of a situation far less appealing than jury duty—and much more dangerous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caroline Taylor
• Release date: Jul 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988585251

Caroline Taylor

About the Author Formerly from Washington, D.C., Caroline Taylor is an award-winning author and editor living in North Carolina. She is the author of a number of mysteries, and her short stories and essays have appeared in several online and print magazines. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. Visit her at www.carolinestories.com.

Book preview

June 2018

Down to her last thin dime. All the jewelry gone. The house. The car and whatever items she could sell on consignment. All of it gone. And all because of her stratospheric legal fees in a shakedown lawsuit brought by a woman who made her living peddling other women for sex. If Nona ever got her hands on that bitch, she’d—

Whoa.

There she was. Sitting outside Café du Parc with a younger man. She was drinking wine as though she didn’t have a care in the world. In a flash, Nona was across the street. Before she could approach, the woman got up and headed inside, probably to the restroom. Tapping away on his phone, the young man didn’t even look up.

Reaching into her purse, Nona pulled out the baggy full of Alan’s pills and spilled them into the bitch’s half-full glass, thinking somebody was bound to catch her. She was half a block away when she realized what she’d done.

August 2018

(Text exchange)

Is it done?

Yes.

No witnesses?

None.

Good. 27 months to go.

[Thumb-up emoji]

1

CALL OF DUTY

Why me? Sophie couldn’t help asking the question over and over as she entered DC Superior Court on Indiana Avenue and rode the escalator to the second floor. Here it was, May 20, 2019, with Donald Trump well into his third year of a presidency unlike any other and the sun shining on a day balmy enough for the pool, and what was she faced with? Jury fucking duty. Every two years she got a summons to fulfill her civic responsibilities, and every fucking time she’d asked herself the same question. Being self-employed meant she needed to be available to potential clients. Available meant visiting them in their homes. Why was that so hard for the DC judicial system to understand?

Very, apparently.

DC had a one-day, one-trial rule for jury service, which meant those summoned to the courthouse would serve for just one day unless they were seated in an actual trial. With any luck, they’d never call Sophie’s number. It would still be a wasted day, especially if a potential client needed her services right away. Turning away business was not advisable for someone whose availability was her strongest selling point.

Last time, she’d been lucky. The whole jury pool had been dismissed at 11:00 a.m. after it became evident there would be no jury trials that day. She could always hope she’d be lucky again today, but how likely was it?

A G-rated movie was showing on the TV in the jury room, so Sophie chose a chair in the hallway at a distance where she could ignore the sound and concentrate on her book, a romance by Nora Roberts. But fifteen minutes into the book, the clerk began to call out juror numbers. Not a good sign.

She and her fellow inmates (jury duty was a foretaste of what must lie in store for lawbreakers: no freedom of movement, always having to obey orders) shuffled down the hall and into a courtroom where they were seated in numerical order.

Why me?

This was a criminal case, they were told. Murder in the first degree. It caused a buzz of whispered conversation among the pool of potential jurors. Sophie supposed most of them were whining because they suspected the trial would take a long time—or maybe some of them took literally the admonition judge not lest ye be judged. Today, at least, she counted herself as being of both persuasions.

Let’s hope they don’t call our numbers. The man next to her was a wiry African American with thinning hair, bloodshot eyes, and a dusting of tiny black freckles all over his face.

Sophie crossed her fingers. Yes. Let’s.

I own a hardware store, and I can’t afford not to be there for my customers.

Me too. I mean, I don’t own a hardware store, but I can’t afford to be unavailable to my clients.

You an accountant or something?

Yeah. No. But people who specialize in decluttering or space management, as Sophie preferred to call it, are, in fact, accounting for other people’s stuff. So it wasn’t exactly a lie. Anyway, she’d never see the guy again.

They were given a questionnaire to fill out. Sometimes you could get excused if the answer applied. Did she know the defendant or anyone on the defendant’s legal team? No. Same question for the prosecution. Same answer. Was she in law enforcement? No. Was she related to anyone in law enforcement? Unfortunately, she was not. Because this was a trial involving murder, could she be impartial in rendering her verdict? No, she answered, hoping she’d get a chance to tell somebody she didn’t believe in the death penalty. It was true, and it could also be her only ticket out of here.

Aha, said her seatmate. I am outta here.

You think so?

My nephew’s a security guard at Nordstrom.

Did it qualify as law enforcement? I wish you well. She smiled at him, and they handed over their questionnaires.

A door at the back of the courtroom opened, and that’s when she saw him.

Why me?

This case sucked. When you prosecuted murder, you had to believe the defendant was a vile scumbag who’d upset the moral order and devastated the victim’s family. Only it wasn’t the case here. The victim had deserved every bit of what she got, in Drew Jakande’s humble opinion. The victim’s son apparently shared his view, having expressed relief more than grief. And the perp? An elderly widow on a fixed income.

Of course, he kept reminding himself, you don’t go out and commit murder just because you’re being bled to death in a clusterfuck civil suit involving real estate and the protection (or lack thereof) of the tenant’s rights. Still, it would be hard to seat a jury willing to convict the defendant. They’d be thinking, aw, poor thing. She lost her husband and then her house (to cover legal expenses), and now she’s on Medicaid and living in a Section 8 apartment in Cheverly, all because this asshole tenant—who, by the way, was an A-rab from Syria, perhaps under deep cover for ISIS—sues her for not giving him his statutory rights under DC’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act to buy the apartment he’d been renting from her, an efficiency apartment he couldn’t possibly afford on a window washer’s salary. Then, to fuck everything up, the murder victim, who happened to be the one who bought the defendant’s apartment, suffers a case of buyer’s remorse (she probably wanted to flip the property and couldn’t do it with the tenant still living there) and joins the lawsuit, seeking obscenely high damages for constructive fraud, claiming the defendant and the realtor conspired to hide information about the tenant and the condition of the property when all the documents the victim had signed made it clear the property was to be sold as is. Even the most intellectually challenged juror would be wondering who the victim was here. Oh sure. Murder trumps greed any time, but still.

Drew didn’t want to be the one prosecuting the poor woman. His heart wasn’t in it. His mind was elsewhere. Joyce was about to deliver their firstborn, a long-awaited son. It had not been an easy pregnancy. She’d been in and out of the hospital for dangerously high blood pressure and suspicious bleeding. Drew had just come off a losing drug case where they’d caught the dealer red-handed, and the jury had hung in the usual fashion, not along racial lines but economic, with the well-off jurors voting guilty and the less-advantaged jurors saying, He’s just doing what everybody else does, trying to make it. He’s too young for prison.

The prospect of going over to the dark side and practicing corporate law (a thinly disguised cover for lobbying) loomed ever closer. Joyce thought it would make things easier with Drew Junior about to stake his claim on their already shaky finances. Little did she know how bad things were.

Drew examined the rows of prospective jurors, wishing he could accede to all the defense requests and get this poor woman acquitted now. But no. It would be highly unethical. He would have to gird his loins to fight a battle he had no stomach for.

The door at the back of the courtroom opened, and Drew emerged from his funk. Oh fuck. Not him.

2

EXIT STRATEGY

Alife sentence. Well, wasn’t it already the case? Yes, she’d die in prison, but would it be any worse there than where she’d ended up? In Cheverly, elderly women were prey. So what would make prison any different? Just a different form of misery. What Nona needed to do was gin up the courage to take things into her own hands.

End it.

She’d wanted to do it in 2016 when Alan had died suddenly. They’d never had a chance to exchange last words, to take comfort in their love for each other, to say the things they’d always known: I love you. I can’t bear the thought of life without you. You are my joy and happiness. Why state the obvious? Because it would have provided solace when the hammer fell, and she realized: He. Was. Gone.

And she’d never told him any of it. She’d just assumed he’d be around forever.

She’d thought about it for years, mostly at the beginning (or the end, depending on your perspective) when the prospect of going on without Alan was inconceivable.

Swallow every single pill he’d been prescribed, meds intended to prevent his fatal stroke. But what if they didn’t do the trick?

Shoot herself. She’d read that in the mouth was the best way. But what a mess. And again, what if she survived, only brain-damaged or paralyzed?

Drive across the center line into oncoming traffic. No. She wasn’t a killer.

Actually, she was. Poisoning the bitch was, indeed, an impulsive act, but the woman deserved to die. Nona did regret it, though. She’d never thought of herself as capable of doing such an awful thing. But the deed was done. Too late for a do-over. She often wondered what Alan would think of her were he still around to think.

At least she wasn’t in custody. Out on bail, pending trial. Not a flight risk, considering her reduced circumstances. But she couldn’t help wondering if jail would turn out to be a little bit cleaner and a little less scary than her efficiency in Cheverly.

Talk about ironic. The whole mess had begun with the sale of an apartment the same size, albeit in a far better neighborhood. Alan was not functioning well at the time, and Nona had thought they should simplify things by selling the efficiency. They’d once imagined it would be their Washington pied-à-terre while they spent most of the time in the dream house they owned on Hilton Head. It was before the crash of ’08, soon after which they discovered they were underwater on the Hilton Head mortgage. It had taken a while to sell the house, after which they’d downsized their dreams into making a much more affordable Fenwick Island beach house suitable for year-round living, telling themselves that it was still a beach and that there was still a golf course for Alan to enjoy. Not as upscale, but as the British were wont to say, needs must. And then she’d been forced to sell the place to cover her legal expenses, thanks to that bitch, Tatiana Orlovsky.

This trial was going to be the most—and last—interesting event in Nona’s life. She should make the most of it. The drama. The people. The story unfolding before a rapt audience of her so-called peers. It was why she’d decided to plead not guilty when, in fact, she was.

Anger had been her downfall. A person can only stand so much. Then the impotent rage becomes overwhelming, and you have to take action. All their lives, she and Alan had been more or less in control of things. Sure, they’d hit bumps in the road. First, her getting fired, then Alan’s brother running off with a gold-digging waitress, leaving behind a wife and three kids, and last but most important, her husband’s declining health and sudden, shocking death. Until then, they’d always managed to deal with things. When the summons arrived, they soon discovered just how powerless they were.

The door at the back of the courtroom opened, and a man with a cane walked in. A long, tall drink, with wheat-colored hair and a tennis player’s body, he caught everyone’s attention, including several women among the jury pool. The prosecutor’s expression told Nona he thought an already fucked-up day had just headed south. Only her own lawyer and a couple of the female jurors seemed pleased to see Cody Fletcher.

When he came through the door—shit, he was only ten minutes late—it was as though he’d walked on stage, not that Cody had ever been on stage, not even in grade school. A silence fell over the chamber, and everyone was looking at him. Two of them weren’t at all happy, but he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with the cane.

Drew Jakande, he could understand. The prosecutor had challenged Cody’s investigatory results at several trials in the past. So far, the score was Fletcher 5, Jakande 1. The one down to Jakande was because the jury had chosen to overlook the exculpatory evidence Cody had discovered. The defendant was a real sleaze with a record filling up more paper than a Tom Clancy novel. He wasn’t guilty of the crime for which he was on trial, Cody was sure, but the honest citizens of Washington, DC, wanted the asshole locked up so he wouldn’t bother them again. Fair enough—unless, like Cody and the lawyers who employed him, you bought into the idea of not doing the time if you didn’t commit the crime, even if you were a grade-one, lifelong criminal.

Jakande was reading the papers on the table in front of him. A careful prosecutor, he must be searching for any chinks in his case that Cody could breach. The man had to know this one was already lost, no matter who was seated on the jury.

Speaking of which, the blonde in the fifth row didn’t yet know it, but unless she was one of those jury junkies, this was her lucky day. Who’d a thought? None other than the delectable Sophie Dickson had been called up for jury duty today. Her face was scarlet, which was no surprise.

They’d met on January 20, 2017, at an inauguration party in Abercrombie’s law offices overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a wake, not a party, since Gordon’s clientele tended to vote blue, along with nearly the entire District of Columbia. Sophie had been standing next to him as they watched the new president deliver his inaugural address.

I don’t get the white dresses, she’d said. And why is Melania wearing blue? Isn’t it the Democrats’ color?

Excuse me?

Look at them. She pointed at the television. Except for Melania, all the Trump women are wearing white. They did it throughout the campaign too. They remind me of Stepford wives.

Trust a woman to notice fashion details. Not having a clue how to respond, Cody offered to get her a refill of her drink.

Thank you. A vodka martini. I don’t particularly care for the taste, but it’s too late to switch.

She was a brown-eyed blonde with the kind of low-pitched voice that makes you want to get naked in a dark room somewhere. She was about his age and not, apparently, put off by his missing earlobe. Inane fashion comments notwithstanding, he remembered thinking she was a hottie. Didn’t notice if she was married either. But her wearing cobalt blue from the collar of her fine wool suit to the tips of her matching pumps at least told him where her political sympathies lay.

When the parade made the turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Cody should have left. He’d had a huge fight with Audrey earlier, which had ended with his wife running off to mommy, per usual. And yet Audrey was the one who’d wanted to attend the goddamn inauguration bash. As an employee, Cody was expected to be there, but he’d been planning for them to make a brief appearance, long enough to ensure they’d be noticed. Then he’d take Audrey home, change his clothes, and head down to the Hains Point tennis bubble for a couple of sets with Max Crowell. But Audrey put a monkey wrench in his plan, and Cody had wound up drowning his sorrows, both personal and political, in the company of the charming young woman he’d just met.

They’d enjoyed more than a few of those wicked martinis, ditched the parade, and headed for the fourth-floor conference room where, as luck would have it, Audrey showed up just in time to catch them practically naked. Why she’d changed her mind and decided to show up, Cody still didn’t know. But he bet her mother had encouraged her to go to the party. He could just hear her telling Audrey, Don’t let the asshole ruin your day, precious.

Well, he’d managed to ruin more than one woman’s day. Poor Sophie. There’s nothing you can do or say when you’re caught in flagrante delicto. She couldn’t even cover herself because he’d flung her dress way across the room where it had wound up draped over a bronze Frederic Remington sculpture of a cowboy on horseback.

When Audrey made up her mind, she moved fast. Six months later, the divorce was final. It was then that Cody realized he should have seen it coming, that Audrey had given up on him long before catching him with his trousers literally down around his ankles. Sophie Dickson was just the excuse she’d been looking for.

The same Sophie Dickson apparently was a prospective juror for this fucked-up excuse for a trial. As was the case for most people summoned for jury duty, Sophie probably didn’t want to be here, although she’d never thank him for being the reason she’d be excused. Didn’t matter. It would be over in a flash, given the defendant’s enormously high pity quotient. Even when murder wasn’t justified, sometimes it should be.

3

WHEN YOUR NUMBER’S UP

Wasn’t being excused just what she’d been hoping for? Sophie peeked at her watch. Ten minutes too late. She could have checked yes on the question about knowing anyone involved in defending the case at issue, but she’d already handed in her questionnaire. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Cody Fucking Fletcher. Adulterer (although it made Sophie one too) and liar. No. At the time they’d met, she was pretty sure he wasn’t wearing a ring, so she’d never asked him the one basic question. Still, he should have told her he was a married man.

The cane he was using made for painfully slow progress as he moved slowly down into the well of the courtroom and began talking to the lawyer for the defense. Oh God. Looking at him reminded her of every embarrassing detail of the day that would forever live in shame. He was looking at her as if he could read her mind. No. He was focused past her shoulder on someone seated about two rows behind Sophie. She turned to see a stunning red-haired woman talking to the person sitting next to her. Sophie reached for her phone and then stopped. Photographing prospective jurors could be a big no-no. Dammit, the woman’s face just begged to be captured on film and stored in the folder she’d labeled Faces.

Her seatmate let out a sigh of relief. We’re gonna be all right. I just know it.

I wish I did. Sophie’s gaze followed Fletcher as he sat behind the lawyer he’d been talking to. The clerk began to read out the numbers of jurors to be seated. By the time he finished, Sophie noticed there was still one row of potential jurors separating her from doom.

See? The hardware store owner was jubilant. Told ya.

They broke for lunch. Sophie wasn’t hungry, so she found a bench on a nearby street. She checked her phone. No new business. No reason for her not to serve on this jury. But still. There had to be a way she could change the answers to her questionnaire because, yes, she did know someone on the defense team. Of course, Fletcher could have been talking to the defense lawyer about something entirely different. If he was involved in this case, and if she did get a chance to amend her questionnaire, what if they double-checked with Fletcher? He’d tell them she was responsible for wrecking his marriage, which would involve him revealing all the sordid details of that drunken day back in 2017.

On the other hand, there was still a chance she would escape being seated during voir dire. Sophie checked her emails and text messages. Although her bank balance would disagree, it seemed that nobody needed her services right now. She called her mother, who wasn’t answering. She texted Tom to remind him she’d be late for their session, offering to reschedule, knowing it would piss him off.

Why me?

The redhead she’d noticed sitting behind her in the courtroom approached and joined her on the bench. I hope they call my number. She turned to Sophie. My name’s Jenna, by the way.

Sophie. Could we trade places? Is this your first trial?

A pair of sky-blue eyes crinkled as Jenna smiled. "Yes, and it’s murder. All my friends told me it would be a drug trial and that I’d spend days arguing about guilt or innocence over him maybe dealing or maybe not. Big waste of time."

Before she could stop herself, Sophie said, Could I take your picture? I promise I won’t put it online. It’s just, you have an interesting face.

Sure. Why not? Jenna smiled, revealing a set of blinding-white teeth not normally found in nature. Well, the photo could be edited. Sophie showed the image to her companion. The man who was talking to the defense lawyer. Does he know you?

The blond hunk with the cane and the missing earlobe? Nope. Wish he did, though.

I saw him staring at you.

Really? Jenna’s face became a becoming shade of pink. Awesome. He’s gorgeous.

And so are you. So you don’t know him?

The girl smiled, shaking her head. Unfortunately. Then she nodded. I’ll just have to hope he’s part of the trial.

I think he’s a private investigator. Did she know it for a fact? Had Fletcher told her what he did for a living? She couldn’t remember a whole lot from their meeting, other than the damning part of it all.

"Ah. So you know him. What’s his name? I hope he’s not ... you know. Spoken for."

I have no idea. It was a lie. I only met him once, at an inaugural party back in 2017, and I don’t remember his name. Two lies.

It would be nice if he is in this trial, just in case things get boring. You know. All that legal wherefore and whatsoever stuff, not to mention Latin.

Sophie wanted boring. Of course, there was still a chance they wouldn’t call her number, but she had a bad feeling they would. Looking at the man for days on end, knowing he’d remember what they’d done, was mortifying.

Well, no point in getting all hot and bothered by it. For all she knew, Fletcher was arranging a tee time for the weekend.

She wondered if she could amend her questionnaire.

Juror number one had to go. The young man was wearing rubber sandals, a clear sign of a tree-hugger and thus a person who would sympathize with the oh-so sympathetic defendant. He’d vote for acquittal before the