Shortness of Breath

Chapter Sixteen

Casey - October twenty sixth

In my entire life, I'd only ever contacted two lawyers. The first I hired to draft my prenuptial agreement in 1998, and back then I'd sought far and wide for the best family attorney available to me in the state of North Carolina. I'd dug through phonebooks, testimonials and law firm websites, and I'd asked around with every friend and acquaintance who'd ever hired, known, or heard of a lawyer until I finally found someone I was relatively sure I could trust handling my marriage, and if that day ever came, my divorce. That was the first attorney I ever called. The second, conversely, I called from a business card I'd been handed by a stranger outside my husband's wake. I had no prior information on Melena Lambros, and I hadn't even Googled her. But I also hadn't been expecting the police to show up at my door, and when I was in a bind, I was in a bind.

That, and her offer sounded enticing. Under any other circumstance I'd have been reluctant to hire an attorney before an arrest warrant was even issued, but as long as she wasn't charging I couldn't have been too careful. Sure, maybe I should've been a little more cautious about letting strangers handle my murder one defense, but from the looks of things, I was already screwed.

And so she'd answered my first phone call and agreed to meet me down at the precinct, no questions asked. She was there no more than ten minutes after I arrived. She lived, apparently, in Adams Morgan. Aidan asked me if he should come, and I'd declined as kindly but as firmly as possible. I didn't know what exactly he thought this was, but I could already tell it wasn't good. If I hadn't been thinking all morning about how grave a mistake I'd made the night before, well, I certainly was then.

Before this day, I'd never realized how easily the police could treat a mere witness just like a suspect under arrest. Save the absence of a pair of handcuffs, I could see or feel no differences in the way I was being treated from how I'd have envisioned an apprehension. I could imagine that, like the media and most of my in-laws, these officers had already decided to believe in my complicity in Wilson's murder and were ready to hang onto that until convincingly shown otherwise. If they had their way, I would be bound to the same restrictions of a person under arrest - and them liberated from many of the restrictions they themselves were forced to adhere to, in terms of how they were allowed to question me and for how long - but in the absence of the evidence that could've supported an official arrest, they were relegated to simply acting like it. I rode in the back of the squad car, silently. Barring the empty condolences one officer had given at the onset, there were no formalities, no friendliness or familiarity. And once we'd arrived, I was sat in a room where I was sure they were staring at me on the other side, watching vigilantly to observe my behavior and glean from it any nonverbal clues they could grasp before my counsel arrived.

When Melena arrived - Melena, whom I'd met all of once for all of ten minutes - I felt a foreign wave of relief in the strangest sense of the word. If I was going to be questioned in a room full of strangers, the cheapest sense of comfort came from the knowledge that at least one person there was on my side, and was forced to be no matter how much evidence piled up against me.

"I'm sorry I'm late," she said, setting her things down. She wasn't wearing an expensive suit or carrying a briefcase. She looked like a regular person in her twenties, despite an above average face and a very expensive-looking engagement ring. "You caught me in the middle of a meeting."

"Oh," I said, caught off guard. "I didn't mean to interrupt business--"

"It wasn't business. Why are we here, Detective?"

"Good to see you, Melena."

"My client has a very demanding career and two young children in the mourning process, so if you wouldn't mind keeping this brief--"