Out Of Time by Katy Munger Page B

looked at me. “I did everything I could to help my sister,” she said slowly. “I always have. But it looks like we’re nearing the end of the line.”
    “It looks that way,” I agreed. “Were you involved in the case?”
    “Hell, no.” She looked at me incredulously. “You think they’d let me near it? Besides, I didn’t work here at the time. Ham hired me a few years later. I go by my married name. He didn’t even know that I was related to Gail until I’d worked here for six months. Then he walked around feeling proud of himself for the next five years. He felt that hiring me showed compassion and justice on his part.”
    “Why would you want to work in the office of a district attorney that sent your sister to her death?”
    “Lurid fascination?” she suggested, raising her eyebrows and picking a fleck of tobacco off of her well-glossed bottom lip. “This is what I do,” she explained. “I’m a prosecutor. There aren’t a whole lot of places where I could work and get decent cast>
    A sister on death row and she decides to specialize in trying death-row cases? A shrink would have a field day with that one.
    “Did you help Gail at all in her defense?” I asked out of curiosity. The two sisters seemed so different—in a “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” sort of way, unfortunately.
    She nodded. “Sure. I’m the one who told Nanny to hire Kaitland Cameron. She was Gail’s defense lawyer. Big mistake. She’d just hit it big and had taken on too many cases at one time. She wasn’t prepared. Just threw up her usual dog and pony show and hoped it would fly. It didn’t. My sister paid the price. People weren’t in the mood to let a woman off, whether she was battered or not. They still aren’t. I suppose you remember the Sherwood case?”
    I nodded. Betty Sherwood was a convicted killer who gave new meaning to the word “nightmare.” “I remember,” I said. “She claimed she accidentally shot her husband through the head in the middle of the night with a gun she kept conveniently stored under her pillow. It was rather inconvenient for her husband, of course.”
    “Right,” Brenda Polk said. “And she got away with it, in that she was sentenced to life in prison instead of death. Even after it came out that her first husband had died under suspicious circumstances. It made the public madder than a swarm of killer bees. Lots of people felt she got off easy. That happened right before Gail’s case. I think Gail paid the price.”
    “Why didn’t you get Nanny Honeycutt to fire Kaitland Cameron once you knew her legal strategy wouldn’t work?”
    “I tried, but I got nowhere. By then, Kaitland had convinced Nanny and the rest of the family that the battered- wife defense was Gail’s only chance to get off.”
    “And Roy wasn’t battering her?”
    “Hell, no.” She rolled her eyes and took another swig of Pepsi. “I’m addicted to this stuff. The caffeine. Coffee wrecks my stomach.” She looked at a big stack of manila folders on one side of her desk and sighed. “You wouldn’t believe my case load. No, Roy wasn’t beating Gail. That’s one thing she wouldn’t stand for. She worked alongside of my daddy in the fields every day after school. She liked that stuff. Not me. I was too busy twirling batons and being homecoming queen and studying to be a lawyer. I was really obnoxious, I admit it. But Gail was a physical person, she liked all the lifting and hard work. She was strong and she didn’t like being bullied that way. My daddy tried to hit her once when she was fifteen andoff fiftee had stayed all night with this loser who worked at the convenience store down the road. She clocked our daddy before his hand hit her face. He went down like a dead man. Didn’t try to hit her again, though.”
    “Whoa,” I said. “That sounds a little violent.”
    She stared at me and her level gaze made me feel at least three inches smaller. “You and I both know there’s a difference