Judge & Jury Read Free Page A

Bing, Your Honor.” Andie shrugged sheepishly. “I was dancing on one of the poles.”
    “That was you? ” a Latino guy cracked from the first row. Now a lot of people were laughing around the courtroom.
    “Thank you, Ms. DeGrasse.” Judge Seiderman suppressed a smile. “We’ll all be sure to check out the reruns when they come around.”
    The judge moved on to Rosella. Andie was feeling pretty confident she had done her job. She felt a little guilty, but she just couldn’t be on this jury.
    Now, Rosella was perfect. A juror’s dream. She’d cleaned house for the same woman for twenty years. She’d just become an American citizen. She wanted to serve because it was her duty. She was knitting a sweater for her granddaughter. Oh, you’re a lock. Andie grinned to herself. Rosella hit every question out of the park. She was like a juror commercial!
    At last the judge said she had just one question for the jury at large. Andie’s eye checked the clock. One fifteen. If she was lucky, she could still catch the Broadway number 1 and pick Jarrod up at school on time.
    Judge Seiderman leaned toward them. “Do any of you know the name, or have you been associated with in any way, Dominic Cavello?”
    Andie turned toward the stolid, gray-haired man seated in the third row of the courtroom. So that’s who that was. A few people murmured. She glanced at Rosella, a little sympathetic now.
    These people were in for one scary ride.

Chapter 4
    I WAS SITTING in the second row, not far from the judge, during the jury questioning. Security marshals lined the walls, ready to go into action if Cavello so much as scratched his nose. Most of the marshals knew I was the one who had taken Cavello down and that this case was personal for me.
    It was driving me crazy waiting to have the opening arguments begin, to have the first witness take the stand.
    We got Miriam Seiderman as the judge. I’d had her on trials twice before, and she always seemed to bend for the defendants. But she was thorough, fair, ran a tight court. We could have done a lot worse.
    I was thinking this looked like a pretty decent pool of jurors. A couple of them were downright entertaining.
    There was a Verizon guy with a New England accent who said he had three town houses in Brooklyn he’d fixed up and that he was bagging the phone company job anyway, so he could care less how long the trial ran.
    And a crime novelist who someone in the jury pool recognized. In fact, she was actually reading his book.
    Then the woman in the third row. The actress and single mom. She was feisty and cute, with thick brown hair with reddish streaks in it. There was some writing on her T-shirt—D O N OT D ISTURB . Kind of funny.
    Once or twice, Cavello glanced back at me. But most of the time he just sat there, hands joined, staring straight ahead.
    A couple of times, our eyes met. How ya doin’, Nicky, his smile seemed to say, like he didn’t have a worry in the world, a guy about to go away for life.
    Every once in a while he huddled with his attorney, Hy Kaskel. The Ferret, he was called. Not just because he made a living representing these bums, but because he was short and barrel-chested, with a hanging nose, a pointy chin, and thick, bushy eyebrows you could brush your shoes with.
    Kaskel was a showman, though, among the best there was at his job. The Ferret had gotten two mistrials and an acquittal in his last three mob trials. He and his team just sat there sizing up each juror on a large poster board, taking notes. The Verizon guy. The MBA. The author.
    I glanced up at the actress again. I was pretty sure she thought she was out of here. But sometimes that’s what you need on a jury, someone who can cut through the bullshit, break the ice.
    “Ladies and gentlemen.” Sharon Ann Moran, the judge’s clerk, got everyone’s attention. The defense and the prosecution had finalized their selections.
    I was thinking, just give me twelve jurors smart enough to see through the