Free A Verdict for Love by Monica Conti Page A

do.” Weinstein said.
    “Has that investigator come up with
anything we can use yet?” Brooks queried.
    “He says he has located a couple of
love interests from the girl’s college years. He’s looking for
more. And there was some woman living with Bianchi for awhile but
she is out of the picture now. As soon as he gets all the names and
addresses I’ll get subpoenas delivered.”
    No one had anything else. On the way to
the door Smith had his arm around Clay’s shoulder.
    “We need you to bring your A game to
court, Adam.”
    “Relax hoss. I don’t even have a B
game.”
    Peter Smith was satisfied. He liked
arrogant lawyers. They tried harder than the humble ones because
they couldn’t stand having to eat their own words.

    T he
docket was crowded and the discovery process would be lengthy. It
would take a few months for pretrial to start. In the meantime,
Chiara felt she and Grace should not just wait and worry. They
needed to keep busy
    They worked very hard to maintain a
surface calm but inside they were anything but blasé about what was
happening. Then small things began occurring that added tension to
the situation. They started receiving ‘hang-up’ phone calls and one
afternoon at the Piggly Wiggly, Grace was sure someone was
following her. Paranoia began to grow.
    Then one night, when they were coming
home from a dinner party with friends in Ansley Park, Chiara
noticed that a car followed them all the way back to their house on
E. Paces Ferry.
    She’d watched closely and became
certain the same headlights were behind them all the way. Not
wanting to upset Grace unnecessarily, she invented a sudden thirst
for making an unplanned stop just to see if she was being paranoid
or if they were truly being followed. Sure enough as she pulled
into the Speedy Shop to buy a Coke the car slid to a stop across
the way. When she got out of the car to go inside she gave a look
in that general direction. It was a dark blue Mercedes with tinted
windows. She couldn’t see who was driving but she knew that this
had something to do with the case.
    She didn’t mention the matter to Grace.
Instead, she just quietly drove them home, popping the Coke can and
sipping the sweet carbonated confection as though nothing were
wrong.

    G race had been caught up in her own thoughts anyway. She’d had
a difficult conversation on the phone with her Momma the night
before. It was over her decision to move in with Chiara. Mrs.
Butrell couldn’t understand why Grace would have moved in with her
boss, an older woman, and she certainly wouldn’t have understood
the full truth if Grace tried to explain it.
    Though she had never been entirely
upfront with her parents about her personal life, Grace had also
never been outright deceitful. At this juncture though, she felt it
necessary to keep this huge development in her life private. And
she was worried about what her family was going to think when they
saw this lawsuit business going public and when they realized she
didn’t have a job. Questions would come and Grace wasn’t sure how
she would answer them. She had been putting on a brave face for
Chiara but she was feeling insecure and more than a little afraid
of what the future might hold.
    At home and undressing for bed, both
women were caught up in their own thoughts. Grace decided to have a
hot shower and Chiara took the chance to make a quick phone call to
Tamika to tell her about them being tailed after the party. As she
picked up the phone to call Tamika, she heard an odd clicking
noise. She was quite familiar with the sound, having heard it many
times on tapes being played during depositions. Tapes
surreptitiously gotten from wire-tapping.
    She returned the phone to its cradle,
grabbed her cell-phone and walked out back to make her call. She
knew that the cell wouldn’t be tapped.
    “Tamika?”
    “Chiara…what’s going on? It’s late,
girl.”
    “I’m sorry. I just thought you might
want to know that we’re being