Blood Money Read Free Page A

And what Jack believed as he stood at Sydney’s side and heard those words—“We the jury, find the defendant”—is what he would believe to his dying day: There was more than one person in that courtroom who knew what had happened to Emma. And Jack could have proved it.
    If only Sydney had wanted him to.

Chapter Two
    N ot guilty!”
    The shout from atop the courthouse steps carried across the street and all the way to the jurors’ parking lot, loud enough for most of the sunbaked crowd to hear. Silent and filled with anticipation, many of the onlookers were following a slightly delayed Internet live stream on smartphones and electronic devices, which just a moment later confirmed the verdict. Those not stunned into speechlessness erupted in anger.
    “What?”
    “How?”
    “That jury must be nuts!”
    By default—not a seat to be had in the courtroom—Theo had made himself part of the outdoor vigil, conspicuously taller and darker than the predominantly white, female crowd around him. The shade of an oak cut the glare on his iPhone. BNN was covering the trial live, and their on-screen graphic summarized the verdict. First degree murder: not guilty. Manslaughter: not guilty. Criminal child neglect: not guilty. Sydney was convicted on one count of providing false information to police investigators. Essentially, the jury believed what the defense lawyers had said about their own client: She was a liar, not a murderer. Television cameras captured her fighting back tears of relief, propped up by Hannah Goldsmith. The camera cut to Jack as the court polled the jurors, and Theo was glad to see that Jack wasn’t flashing some cocky lawyer’s grin and slapping high fives with everyone around him. One by one, each juror verbally confirmed that this was his or her verdict.
    “Unbelievable,” was the running commentary from BNN’s anchor. Through his earbuds, Theo heard the judge thank the jurors and dismiss them. Then the BNN anchor said it again, this time with attitude: “Simply un—be—lievable .”
    Theo glanced around him. The crowd was becoming more vocal, their expressions of anger and despair making it hard for him to hear the TV coverage. Theo increased the volume, then lowered it. Faith Corso was on a rant that needed no amplification.
    Corso, a tough former prosecutor turned TV personality, had spotlighted the Sydney Bennett case from the beginning. It had started with a desperate, monthlong search for a missing two-year-old girl—but without the usual sympathy for the mother. Police quickly pegged Sydney as a liar about everything, from her place of employment to her whereabouts on the day of Emma’s death. She’d led her parents to believe that she was holding a steady day job as a bookkeeper at a Key Biscayne resort. In fact, she was a “shot girl” at a popular South Beach nightclub—one of the scantily clad young women who roamed through the crowd with a bottle of tequila in one hand and a tray of shot glasses in the other, cajoling drunk young men into spending ten bucks for a shot and quick squeeze of the shot girl.
    Sydney’s biggest deception, however, was in what she hadn’t said.
    “What mother fails to report the disappearance of her own child if she isn’t covering up a homicide?” asked Corso, her voice laden with disgust. “And what kind of mother goes out partying the night her daughter goes missing, parties again the next night, and the night after that?”
    Corso had been asking those questions for three years. The prosecutor had put them up in bold letters on a projection screen during closing argument. Corso, the prosecution, the crowd outside the courthouse, the millions of viewers on television—all had expected the jury to answer with a verdict of guilty.
    Theo’s iPhone flickered, but the Internet connection remained strong enough for him to hear something about the scheduling of a sentencing hearing on the “false information” conviction. The judge announced that