Famished, Meghan O'Flynn [free ebooks romance novels .txt] 📗

cleared his throat and strutted to the podium for his final statements.

“Ashley Johnson was ambushed,” he said. “When she came home, the living room was dark, and she was unable to see what remained of her boyfriend. She walked through the room without turning on a light and into Diamond’s bedroom to check on her little girl. And when her back was turned, someone stuck a syringe in Ashley’s neck and carried her to the bathtub. She almost died at the hands of the same person who killed Derek Lewis. Our lack of another identifiable suspect does not equate to Ashley Johnson being guilty.”

Griffen turned and caught the eye of someone behind her, and Ashley sat straighter. Is he here? Did he come? Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Petrosky nod to Griffen, the detective’s face softening a fraction before reverting to its usual stoniness.

Griffen turned back to the jury box. “This girl did not kill Derek Lewis. And if you make the mistake of convicting her, you will be allowing a killer to go free.”

The silence in the room felt heavy, like it was closing in on Ashley from all sides, until the judge spoke again.

“Is the prosecution ready for rebuttal?” Delacour’s eyes were on the clock on the side wall—not on Ashley, not on Griffen—as her lawyer walked back to his seat. Obviously, the judge thought she was expendable. Like trash. Maybe she was. Maybe she had always been.

Shannon Taylor, the prosecuting attorney, rose to her feet, thin and blond and a fucking bitch. “Ready, Your Honor.”

Ashley looked down at her hands, and the cuffs glinted like crude bracelets that weighed down her soul instead of her wrists.

Taylor cleared her throat. “At just after five o’clock on the evening of February fifteenth, a noise complaint came into the station, stating that someone was arguing at the apartment Derek Lewis and Ashley Johnson shared.”

Ashley’s hands trembled. She pressed her palms together and squeezed them between her knees.

“When police arrived at six-thirty, Derek Lewis was alone at the house, alive and in good health, and informed the responding officers that Johnson had gone to the drugstore and then to drop off their daughter at a neighbor’s. Both of these statements were later verified. What Derek didn’t know is that he had only four hours to live.”

In her peripheral vision, Ashley tried to see what the jury was doing, but her vision was blurry. Her face burned.

When Taylor spoke again, her voice was softer, but her words somehow rang throughout the courtroom. Aggressive. Dangerous. “At seven-thirty, Ashley Johnson arrived for a job interview at an all-night garage where she was described as ‘distracted’ by the owner. After the interview, Johnson disappeared.” Taylor cut her eyes at Ashley, and Ashley’s stomach twisted.

“No one seems to know what the defendant was doing during this time, but she was gone for long enough that she neglected to pick up her daughter from her babysitter’s home. When the sitter had to leave, she dropped young Diamond home with her father, Derek. And at eleven o’clock, when Ashley Johnson finally returned to the apartment, she found her daughter with a fresh bruise on her lower back and another on her leg, marks the sitter testified were not present earlier that day. Indeed, the one on Diamond’s hip was a clear imprint of Derek Lewis’s belt buckle.”

Ashley’s breath came hot and fast as she saw Diamond in her mind’s eye, saw the bruises on her sweet baby’s legs. She’s trying to get to you, trying to make you react. Her leg muscles shook with anger. She swallowed hard.

“Ashley Johnson may have put up with Derek hitting her. She might have been neglectful herself, not bothering to pick her daughter up on time. But the defendant wasn’t about to let her boyfriend get away with hitting her little girl.” Taylor paced in front of the jury box. “Johnson found Derek sleeping on the couch. She grabbed a hammer, walked behind the couch, and hit her boyfriend in the head, again and again and again.” Taylor mimed each strike, and the jury winced as they visualized Derek’s head being smashed to bits.

Ashley could see it too, the blood, the fragments of skull and brain, gooey clumps landing on the wall. She tried to focus on the prosecutor instead. Better to look angry at the false accusation than pissed at her dead boyfriend whose corpse was even now staring back at her from the easel, his face bloody and eerily blank. Well, ex-boyfriend.

“Ashley Johnson panicked, got rid of the murder weapon, and wiped down as many surfaces as she could, but she only managed to smear the blood. She did leave one intact handprint on the wall in the hallway, though. Her fingers. Her palm. In Derek Lewis’s blood.”

Ashley focused on the blond knot at the nape of the prosecutor’s neck, trying to ignore the jury. Every frown, every sympathetic look, was horribly wrong. If they were going to let her go, they’d look more hopeful, wouldn’t they? Their faces said they’d already decided she’d had a good reason to kill him—and that she had, in fact, done it. She inhaled through her nose to push back the nausea.

“Panic, ladies and gentlemen. Panic, in a severely depressed woman already stressed to her breaking point. And the defendant realized there was nowhere to go. The mess was too big. She had no money. No one to turn to. No options, no way out.” The pause was deafening, a ringing silence that hurt Ashley’s ears.

“So she prepared a syringe from Derek Lewis’s stash with a deadly overdose of heroin, left the front door ajar to ensure that someone would find her daughter, then climbed into a full bathtub and injected the drugs into her own neck.”

The jurors’ eyes swung to Ashley’s table, and she saw pity and an agitation she almost couldn’t bear to acknowledge. The air thickened further until the heaviness of it clogged her throat entirely, blocking her breath. Jesus, help me, please…

Taylor stilled, placing her hands on the polished wood of the jury box. “Just after midnight, a neighbor happened upon Johnson’s open front door and found Derek dead on the couch, Diamond in her crib, wailing, and Ashley Johnson unconscious in the bathtub, the water pink with Derek Lewis’s blood.”

Ashley prayed silently. Please, God, help me. I’ll go to church every Sunday. I’ll do anything.

“The defense wants you to believe that she was framed. But Ashley Johnson had both motive and opportunity to commit this crime.”

Yes, she’d had both of those things. She’d had the opportunity. And some nights, even now, she lies awake in her cell praying God would send Derek back just so she could fucking kill him again for hurting Diamond. No, she hadn’t done it, she knew she hadn’t. But the way the police had interrogated her, repeated their questions over and over, every word from their mouths wrapping around her throat like a noose that would eventually strangle her…sometimes she doubted her own innocence. Was it possible she’d lost it on Derek and blocked the whole thing from her mind? Had the memory of the sharp needle sting in her neck as she bent over Diamond’s crib been a hallucination, the start of some kind of psychotic break? Why would anyone want to kill her? She was a nobody. Maybe she really had killed Derek. But Eddie Petrosky didn’t believe that, and if he could trust her, then she could trust herself, too. She clenched her fists, and her face flushed with fresh determination.

Taylor’s shoes echoed against the wooden walls as she strode back to the podium and gestured to the photo of Derek’s corpse. “We can all sympathize with a mother protecting her child. But this is not the way. If we accept vigilante justice, if we set a precedent suggesting that we can harm those who get in our way, that we can take the law into our own hands, then we fail. Society fails. Derek Lewis wasn’t perfect. He should have been punished for his crimes but in accordance with the law. This isn’t about whether you like the victim or empathize with the aggressor. Even if you think Derek Lewis deserved to be punished for what he allegedly did, Ashley Johnson did not have the legal right to inflict that punishment.”

The world was fading around the edges, every sound like the shush of Diamond’s breathing when Ashley used to rock her to sleep—hazy and hot and peaceful. Those hours had been a reprieve from planning how they were going to escape from Derek.

Derek did deserve to die. But I didn’t do it.

Taylor stared pointedly behind Ashley, probably at Diamond.

Don’t look, Ashley. Don’t.

“Ashley Johnson needs to suffer the consequences of the crime she has committed. She and others like her need to know that one cannot simply take the law into their own hands and kill someone who does them wrong. You must return a verdict of guilty of murder in the second degree.”

The quiet seemed alive, squirming around Ashley, and the judge’s scrutiny wiggled up her sleeves and down her back. Shannon Taylor walked back to her chair and sat, and Ashley listened to the rustling of shoes on the floor, the sound of jurors preparing for dismissal, the audience collecting their things.

Beside Ashley, Griffen blew his nose, a low, hollow honk. Behind her, Diamond cried out. Ashley watched Shannon Taylor and clenched her fists, her eyes burning with unshed tears.