Keep No Secrets Read Free

home, but still call the hotline in the morning? And if it's the latter, what would he say? That he wants to report a sixteen-year-old girl who's afraid to go home after getting caught drinking and having sex? He can just imagine the look on the police officer's face assigned to investigate that report.
    Given her intoxicated state, she almost manages to keep her voice level and composed as she speaks the next words.
    She still doesn't look at him. "Mr. H, I shouldn't have said what I did, okay?
    You're misunderstanding. I just don't want to get in trouble. That's all."
    She reminds Jack of all the abused women who call the cops in the heat of the moment but then refuse to testify when the case comes to trial. But maybe he's blown things out of proportion.
    Maybe she's just a kid who said things to get him to do what she wanted.
    Before Jack responds, her shoulders slump and she adds, "Just take me home.
    I'll deal."
    And this is when Jack makes his first mistake. With a sigh, he cuts the lights and turns off the ignition. These actions cause her to finally turn to him, her brows furrowed in confusion.
    "We'll just let you sober up some more," he explains. He prays no one comes along in the meantime.
    She speaks a soft "thank you" and resumes playing with the button on her sweater. He switches on the radio for lack of anything better to do.

    After a while, the two of them start talking. Just idle conversation. He asks about school and her teachers and what she wants to do after graduation, where she wants to attend college. She asks him what it's like to be the DA and whether he likes being a lawyer and if law school was hard. He keeps thinking that
    eventually he'll segue to talking about the drinking, about her relationship with Michael, but she's opening up so much and he doesn't want to cause her to shut down again.Thank you for downloading from dpgroup.org.
    "What's the worst case you've ever been involved in?" she asks.
    He tries to read the meaning of the question. It's an innocent question; after all, her family didn't even live in Missouri back when the Barnard case—and then Jenny's case—was news. But still, he wonders how much she knows, if Michael has told her anything.
    "Um . . ." He takes a long time to answer. He can't think about the Barnard case without thinking about everything else that happened afterwards. Jenny charged with the murder of Maxine Shepard, a prominent client at the law firm where Jenny practiced law. Jack her alibi, because he happened to make the worst decision of his life on the same night Maxine was murdered. This fact set Jenny free, but it changed Jack's life forever.
    He shakes his head as if to dust the cobwebs away and tells Celeste about the Barnard case. "It was this case, a little girl named Cassia Barnard had been abducted and murdered. I mean, I've seen a lot of bad things happen to kids, but . . . I don't know . . . this one was harder for some reason."
    "Why?"
    "A lot of reasons, I guess. For one, we were pretty certain she suffered a lot.
    He'd raped her, really hurt her. Then he left her in the woods to freeze to death."
    Celeste winces. "But we didn't ask for the death penalty, and a lot of people thought we should have and were angry that we didn't. Angry at me. At the end of it all, I almost thought we should have, too, and I'm opposed to capital punishment.
    That's how bad it was."
    She looks down at her hands. "I'd like to do what you do, I think."
    "Really? Why?"

    "I don't know." She shrugs. "What you do makes a difference, you know?"
    Jack tenses, remembering a
    conversation between Claire, Jenny and his brother Mark, back when Jack was an assistant prosecutor. He was trying to decide whether to run for DA. The three of them had been discussing whether Jack should run despite his opposition to the death penalty. What had Jenny argued? To get into a position to make any difference, you sometimes have to compromise . The comment had made Claire mad, though she'd