Ransom River Read Free

motto was “Look away—nothing to see here.”
    Except the Ransom River Superior Courthouse had become center stage for a spectacle of murder. And Aurora Faith Mackenzie had been plucked from the voter registration pool and thrown into it. Juror number seven on the teen burglar execution trial.
    Twenty-four hours. If she had waited, even long enough to spit on the corporate hacks who slashed the funding for Asylum Action, she would have had an out.
Please excuse me from jury duty. I’m overseas, assaulting heartless pricks.
But cast adrift in Geneva and nearly broke, she’d grabbed the only escape route she had: her return airline ticket. She’d tried to outdistanceher anger and dejection. So she ran straight ahead and in the wrong direction. Home. Where a jury summons waited.
    Juror number seven. Caucasian female, age twenty-nine. Slight, angular, with what her parents called Black Irish looks. Today she’d dressed conservatively, at least compared to her Peace Corps days. V-neck sweater with a tank beneath, hipster khaki jeans, boots. The press was getting an eyeful. The jurors’ names had not been made public, but a courtroom artist had sketched each of them, and one journalist had described her as having “night-sky hair and blue eyes with a challenging gleam.”
    She’d rolled those eyes at that.
    Beside her, Helen Ellis adjusted her bifocals. “They look so excited.”
    She was eyeing the public gallery. The crowd was Southern California exurban: women in mom jeans or in mom-jean shorts. Men in
Tijera Sand and Gravel
shirts. Ranch workers in denim. At least today nobody wore T-shirts with an agenda. No
Justice!
shirts, no
Self-defense is our right.
The first day of the trial several people had shown up in pro-defendant attire. Judge Wieland had put a stop to it. No shirts with messages, he decreed. No disruption from the gallery. Violators would be ejected.
    He’d clamped the lid down. Still, the atmosphere hovered between edgy and
We’re going to Disneyland.
    “Bring on the popcorn vendors,” Rory said. And maybe the Reaper, dancing up the aisle playing his scythe like an electric guitar.
    Because the heart of this show was death. And its emissaries were the defendants. Behind the defense table, they took their time sitting down.
    Charged with murder, they were standing tall. Wearing civvies, they looked every inch the cops they were.
    Jared Smith shifted his shoulders inside the jacket of his suit as though it was too snug and his tie was choking him. He sat forward, like a plow. Like he expected other people to move aside for him.
    Lucy Elmendorf didn’t look at him. Sober and drawn, she sat with her hands laced together on the table.
    Helen Ellis leaned heavily toward Rory. “Check out Lucy’s husband.”
    Neil Elmendorf sat in the second row. Though his expression was stoic, he hunched, as though flinching. He seemed sandblasted with humiliation.
    “Telling, don’t you think?” Helen said.
    Rory didn’t respond. Elmendorf had put distance between himself and his wife. Maybe that lessened the anguish. After all, the man had to watch Lucy stand trial for murder. More than that, he had to endure her sitting beside the lover she’d been romping with when the gunfire began.
    And Rory wondered again why the defendants hadn’t had the sense to screw around in a motel across the county line. If Officer Lucy Elmendorf had handcuffed Jared Smith to a vibrating bed in Bakersfield instead of playing Bad Cop, Really Bad Cop at Smith’s house in Ransom River, the victim might still be breathing.
    And Rory wondered again how Smith and Elmendorf thought they could prove self-defense when they’d shot an unarmed sixteen-year-old kid in the back from point-blank range.

    Traffic on River Boulevard was light. This city didn’t really have a rush hour. Or rather, it did, at six a.m., when half the population hit the road to drag their asses onto the freeway and over the pass and into Los Angeles to punch a