See Me(32)

“In what way?”

“Before I took a job here, I was an assistant district attorney in Charlotte.”

“No kidding?”

“A little over three years. It was my first job after I passed the bar.”

“So you were more used to prosecuting guys like me than dating them?”

She half nodded in agreement, but went on. “It’s more than that. Most people pick and choose the way they tell their stories. There’s always a positive bias involved, and they frame the stories that way, but you… You’re so objective, it’s almost like you’re describing someone else.”

“Sometimes it feels that way to me, too.”

“I don’t know if I could do that.” Frowning, she went on. “Actually, I don’t know if I want to do that, at least to the extent that you do.”

“You sound like Evan.” He smiled. “How did you like working in the DA’s office?”

“In the beginning it was all right. And the whole thing was a great learning experience. But after a while, I realized it wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

“Like taking a walk with me?”

“Kind of…” she said. “When I was in law school, I thought that being in a courtroom would be more like the stuff you watch on TV. I mean, I knew it would be different, but I wasn’t prepared for just how different it actually was. To me, it seemed like I was going after the same person, with the same background, over and over. The DA would take the higher-profile cases, but the suspects I dealt with were like walking clichés; they were usually poor and unemployed with limited education, and drugs and alcohol were usually involved. And it was just… relentless. There were so many cases. I used to dread coming in on Monday mornings because I knew what would be waiting for me on my desk. The sheer volume put me in the position of having to prioritize the cases and continually negotiate plea bargains. We all know that murder and attempted murder or crimes with guns are serious, but how do you prioritize the rest of it? Is a guy who steals a car worse than a guy who broke into someone’s house and stole jewelry? And how do either of those compare to a secretary who embezzles from her company? But there’s only so much room on the court docket; there’s only so much space available in prison. Even when the rare case did go to trial, it’s not what you know happened, it’s what you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and that’s where it gets even trickier. The public believes we have unlimited resources to prosecute, with advanced forensic capabilities and expert witnesses at the ready, but that’s just not the way it is. Matching DNA can take months, unless it’s a high-profile crime. Witnesses are notoriously inconsistent. Evidence is ambiguous. And again, there are just too many cases… even if I wanted to really delve into a particular crime, I’d have to neglect all those other files waiting on my desk. So more often than not, the pragmatic thing was to simply work something out with opposing counsel, where the subject pled to a lesser offense.”

She kicked at the sand, her footsteps dragging. “I was constantly being put into situations where people expected results that I couldn’t deliver, and I’d end up being the bad guy. In their minds, the suspects had committed a crime and they should be held accountable, which to the victims almost always meant prison time or restitution of some sort, but that just wasn’t possible. Afterwards, the arresting officers weren’t happy, the victims weren’t happy, and I felt like I was letting them down. And in a way, I was. Eventually I realized that I was just a cog in the wheel of this giant, broken machine.”

She slowed, pulling her sweater tighter around her. “There’s just… evil out there. You wouldn’t believe the cases that would reach our office. A mom prostituting her six-year-old daughter to buy drugs, or a man raping a ninety-year-old woman. It’s enough to make you lose faith in humanity. And because there’s this great burden on you to go hard after the really horrible suspects, that means that other perpetrators don’t get the punishment they deserve and end up back on the streets. And sometimes…” She shook her head. “Anyway, by the end of my time there, I was barely sleeping and I started getting these weird panic attacks when I was at work. I walked in one morning and just knew I couldn’t do it anymore. So I went to my boss’s office and resigned. I didn’t even have another job lined up.”

“It sounds to me like your job was draining in a lot of different ways.”

“It was.” She smiled grimly, a spectrum of conflicting emotions playing across her face.

“And?”

“And what?”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?”

“The real reason you quit? The part that led to you having panic attacks?”

Startled, she turned toward him. “How would you know about that?”

“I don’t,” he said. “But if you’d been there for a while, something specific must have happened. Something bad. And I’m guessing it concerned a case, right?”

She stopped walking, turning to face the water. The moonlit shadows accentuated her expression – a mixture of sadness and guilt that brought with it a fleeting ache he hadn’t expected.

“You’re very intuitive.” She closed her eyes, holding them that way for a moment. “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this.”