Black River Read Free

successful organized crime prosecutions down in Miami propelled him from relative obscurity to the lead position in what figured to be the most public trial sinceO. J. Simpson. Off the record, his colleagues found him cold and conniving and, behind his back, whispered that his appointment as lead counsel had surely put him in over his head. Corso’s sources thought otherwise. Word on the street was that Klein had something up his sleeve. Rumor had it that he’d turned a witness, somebody who could tie Nicholas Balagula directly to the Fairmont Hospital collapse. If it was true, rough edges or not, Warren Klein was about to enjoy the lifestyle of the rich and famous.
    On the inside, closest to the narrow boxwood hedge, was Renee Rogers, lead prosecutor in the last trial. Once the best and brightest, her star had dimmed considerably when, last year in Seattle, Balagula’s second trial had ended in a hung jury. That the trial had been held amid the tightest security in state history, and had also been among its most costly, had further fueled the fire of public outrage when an anonymous sequestered jury had failed to agree on what every legal pundit in the country had assumed to be an open-and-shut case. The likelihood of jury tampering and persistent whispers of a drinking problem had carried away any chance for Rogers’s further advancement with the AG’s office. This time around, she was in the second chair and rumored to be shopping the private sector.
    Lost in thought, Corso watched the paparazzi move along the sidewalk like a meal going down a python. A sudden click of heels pulled his attention to his side. The name tag said Sunny Kerrigan. The logo on the camera and the hand-held microphone read KING 5 News. He’d seen her before. She was the second-banana weekend anchor.
    “Mr. Corso,” she said, “could we have a few minutes of your time?” The cameraman took a step forward. She pushed the mike up at Corso’s face. He stepped around her and started across the street. She trotted along at his heels like a terrier.
    “Is it true, Mr. Corso, that you’re acting as a consultant to the prosecution, and this is why you’re the only spectator allowed in the courtroom?”
    Corso lengthened his stride and veered off to the left. He was halfway across the street when she hustled around him and tried to block his path. “Could you tell us, Mr. Corso, whether or not—”
    He sidestepped her again, slapped the camera out of his face, and kept moving. “Hey,” the cameraman whined, as he fought to balance the camera on his shoulder. “No need for that.”
    “Mr. Corso…” she began.
    Whatever she had to say was drowned out by a roar from the crowd. At the south end of the block, the police lines parted, allowing a black Lincoln Town Car to roll along the face of the building. The air was suddenly filled with the click of lenses and the whir of automatic winders. The crowd surged along with the car, creeping down the block as the Lincoln moved slowly along. Kerrigan shot him a disgusted look before she and the cameraman hurried off and disappeared into the melee. Corso breathed a sigh of relief.
    He picked up his pace, moving the opposite way, toward the area just deserted by the crowd. He walked along the helmeted line of cops until he spotted a sergeant standing behind a barrier. He held up the laminated ID card. The sergeant stepped up, reached between a pair of officers, and plucked the card from Corso’s fingers. He looked from Corso to the card and back. “Okay,” he said, after a moment.
    The barrier was pulled aside and Corso stepped through.
    “Quite the spectacle,” Corso offered.
    “It’s crap,” the sergeant said. “California ought to clean up its own mess instead of sending it up north to us.”
    He had a point. This had all started three years ago when, following a minor seismic tremor, the west wall of the newly completed Fairmont Hospital in Hayward, California, had collapsed, killing