Free Primal Fear by William Diehl Page A

her hair back into a tight bun to accent her professionalism. She would slash the air with designer glasses to make her point. Contact lenses would enhance her piercing green eyes. A year of speech school had fine-tuned her voice into a husky, authoritative alto. The men in the jury simply salivated, while the women secretly yearned for just a touch ofher poise and taste. Devastating packaging. Shackleford adored her from afar, hiding his attraction behind sardonic, passionless sarcasm.
    She came back to the office a little before three, collapsed at her desk and peeled off her overshoes, then spent five minutes rooting around one of them in search of a stuck shoe.
    “Charlie!” she yelled. A moment later, the short, chubby, somewhat joyless little paralegal appeared in the doorway.
    “I hate to ask, Charlie, but I can’t walk, my feet are burning up. Will you get me a quick fix?”
    “Sure. How’d the affidavit go?”
    “Three hours with a sixty-nine-year-old woman dying of cancer, she’s wandering in and out of morphine city the whole time, while I’m trying to get a sane statement out of her. Think about the possibilities.”
    “Will the affidavit hold up?”
    “She’ll be dead before we ever get to court. It’ll be okay as a posthumous admission.”
    “I mean, you know, slipping in and out of this narcotic-induced coma …”
    “Don’t put it that way, that’s inflammatory. She was napping and I had to wait until she woke up to talk to her. Don’t be telling people the woman was in a dope-induced stupor.”
    “I was thinking devil’s advocate.”
    “Yeah, sure. You were bugging me, Charlie. Anyway, her doctor was witnessing most of the time, he’ll testify she was lucid—when I needed her to be lucid. It’s all corroborative, no big thing. But it was a bitch.”
    Charlie made her a cup of hot beef bouillon and brought it back to her. “When you finish that, the old man wants to see you.”
    “About what?”
    “I don’t know, Janie, he doesn’t confide in me. He comes down and says to me, ‘Tell Venable to come in to my office the minute she gets back, okay?’ and I say, ‘Yeah, sure.’ That was the total conversation. I figure after being out in that weather you need a bouillon fix before you face the Pillsbury Doughboy.”
    “Thanks, Charlie, what would I do without you?”
    “You’re gonna find out soon enough,” he said, and left the room.
    She slouched over her desk, rubbing one foot with the other,and unwound as she drank the warm soup. Then she smoked a cigarette. And finally she sighed, “Shit,” and taking her shoes in hand, she limped down the hall toward Jack’s office.
    The blinds were pulled down over the windows in the glass-enclosed office, which usually meant Yancey was hard at work perfecting his putt. She knocked and walked in. Surprise. Pillsbury Doughboy was sitting behind his desk, stripped to his shirtsleeves, reading a slender file. He kept reading as he waved her in. Yancey was an unctuous, smooth-talking con man with wavy white hair and a perpetual smile. He had been a dark horse candidate for D.A. eight years before, supported halfheartedly by the Democrats, who didn’t think he could win. But Yancey, who turned out to be the ultimate bureaucrat, had capitalized on his soapy charm and a natural talent for speaking, and overcame a prosaic legal background to win. Once in office he had become the perfect man for the job, pliable as putty in the hands of the kingmakers and shakers of the state.
    Jane Venable had no respect for Yancey as an administrator but liked him personally. What wasn’t to like? His popularity had grown through the years even though he was not a litigator and never had been. He had no stomach for the rigors of courtroom battle, and years of plea-bargaining had left him a talker rather than a fighter. Instead, Yancey had surrounded himself with a small cadre of tough prosecutors who made him look good. And since Venable was the best of the