Mark let go of my hand and sank into the nearest chair. He rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands.
Elise had stopped talking, which was good, because I wouldn’t have been able to hear her over the buzzing in my ears.
A lawyer doesn’t panic, Nicole, my mom’s voice lectured me over top of it all. Panicking loses cases.
And for the first time, I was glad my parents had drilled their teachings into me so thoroughly that I still heard them when they weren’t around. I had to pull myself together and be lawyer Nicole. Lawyer Nicole was strong. She could handle this.
“Were there fingerprints?” My voice still sounded thready and far away.
Elise shook her head. “Wiped clean.”
Too bad it didn’t have the real murderer’s fingerprints on it, but whoever planned this was too smart to leave their prints behind. Wiping it clean, in my opinion anyway, still suggested the phone didn’t belong to Mark. He wouldn’t have had any reason to wipe down his own phone, especially if he also intended to hide it. I knew that was the argument my parents would make if he were their client. And it sounded like he soon would be.
I knew better than to ask how Elise got the information. The outside investigators hadn’t been entirely wrong to place her on leave. Before they had, she’d obviously been digging into the case when she shouldn’t have been. She would never have done anything illegal the way they suspected, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d pushed the lines to help someone important to her.
I rested my hand on Mark’s back. He hadn’t looked up yet. “The killer could have planted it after killing Troy,” I said.
Elise’s eyes looked watery, like she was trying not to cry.
Oh no. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“They found the scalpel used to…”
I could almost hear the words slit Troy’s throat teetering on the edge of her tongue. Thankfully, she seemed to want to say them as little as I wanted to hear them said.
“Used to kill Troy,” Elise continued, “in the trash can by the road, like Mark was hoping it’d be collected before the police found it.”
There could be only one reason that would make Elise fight tears when the cell phone hadn’t. The words hurt coming out of my mouth. “It had Mark’s fingerprints on it.”
6
Mark’s back muscles shuddered under my hand, and Elise stared at me.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was wrong and her stare meant she was shocked I’d even suggest it. But I couldn’t assume anything.
I straightened. “Elise, did the scalpel have Mark’s fingerprints on it?”
She nodded once, quick and sharp.
That was going to be hard for even my parents to explain away in court.
It was hard for me to explain away.
Maybe you shouldn’t be trying so hard, the annoyingly logical voice in my head said. Look where that got you with Peter.
Breathing became enough of a challenge that I had to order my body to draw in air and let it out again. I sent up a quick prayer for wisdom. I needed more than I had on my own.
I’d wanted so much to believe Peter hadn’t killed his wife that I’d blinded myself to the truth. I’d promised myself I’d never do that again. But love did funny things to people. Could Mark have done this, and I was repeating my history?
Something twitched in the back of my mind, like a mental muscle spasm. The fingerprints didn’t make sense. “It’s backwards.”
Mark sat up slowly. The hard lines around his mouth softened slightly. “You still believe me?”
The words of my last client, Clement, when I’d suggested his wife tried to kill him came tumbling back into my mind. You have to believe in the person you’re spending your life with.
I rocked back. Mark hadn’t been upset because of what the police found. He’d been upset because he thought he might lose me, lose my faith in him. My belief in him mattered more than what could happen in the court. He knew what it meant for us if I didn’t trust him.
Mark wouldn’t do something that could cost him our relationship. He’d proven that to me.
There was only one reason he would have killed Troy. Troy would have had to be actively trying to kill me so that Mark had to kill him first to stop him. That hadn’t been the case.
And I knew in a way I’d never known with Peter that Mark hadn’t killed Troy.
I leaned in and kissed him. “I believe you. I know you wouldn’t have done this.”
He leaned his head back into the chair. “Thank God.” He rubbed his hands over his face one more time, then sat up. “What did you mean by It’s backwards?”
The change was almost jarring. As long as I still trusted him, he could believe there might be a way out of this, despite how condemning the evidence was beginning to look against him.
And that, maybe more than anything else he’d ever said or done, made me feel like I was something special.
“What’s backwards?” Elise echoed.
Right. Focus, Nikki. You’ll have plenty of time to think about your relationship once it won’t be through prison bars.
“If the cell phone belonged to Mark and he hid it and planned to keep it, but the scalpel is what he killed Troy with and he was trying to dispose of it, he would have wiped his prints off the scalpel and not the cell phone. The only reason for it to be the other way around is that they somehow stole a scalpel that already had Mark’s fingerprints on it. They couldn’t get his prints on a phone the same way.”
Elise pulled the curtain aside and let it drop back into place. “That won’t be enough to convince the investigating officers that he didn’t do it.”
