the case, the victim had unhooked himself from his I.V. bottles and had walked out of the hospital, never to be seen again. The wallet and credit card he had left in the hospital administrator’s office turned out to belong to a man who had been dead for two years, so the name was an alias. Frank Lemay didn’t exist. The case against Joe Rina was on the verge of being dropped when Carol Sesnick stepped forward and said she had been waiting for a friend in the country club parking lot and had seen the whole thing. She had become the State’s whole case now that the victim had disappeared.
Victoria Hart had on occasion been called “Tricky Vicky” in the Trenton press because she often employed unorthodox legal strategy to achieve courtroom success. Prosecuting Joe Rina, a frequent star of Hard Copy, without a complainant got her a lot of ink that she would have rather done without.
Victoria anxiously looked out the car’s rear window. “Are we clear?” she said to her State Police driver, who had a weight-lifter’s neck that widened like a cobra’s hood at the trapezius muscle.
“I’m gonna take one more precaution, but I don’t see anyone back there,” he said, then slammed down the accelerator and made an abrupt turn through a darkened gas station … shot down an unlit narrow alley, turned left onto a residential street, swung a quick U, then parked and switched off his headlights. Nobody followed. Victoria knew the precautions were necessary, but after two weeks, they were getting damned tiresome.
The car they were in had been selected moments before from a line of fifty plain-blue police sedans in the State Police Motor Pool. This was in an effort to defeat any tracking devices that might get placed if Victoria used the same vehicle more than once. She suspected Joseph Rina would go to any lengths, including murder, to shut down the case against him. The trial was scheduled to start in two days and Victoria had been making nightly visits to her hidden witness to prepare her for testimony.
Victoria’ notes for the first day in court were scribbled in her obsessively neat handwriting on a yellow legal pad in her briefcase. She had her opening argument down pat. She was going to give the jury a tour through the graveyard of Rina Mafia tyranny. It would be a morbid history lesson, and she hoped it would redefine that handsome little shit with the perfect white teeth and wavy black hair.
Victoria had been assigned this prosecution by the District Attorney, Gil Green, because Tricky Vicky was popular with the media and had a near-perfect conviction rate, but the voir dire process had been brutal. New Jersey used the “Donahue Method” to pick jurors, which meant that the jury box was filled with candidates and the Prosecution and Defense had to question each one in front of the others. It was hazardous because you ran the risk of offending a juror you would later be forced to accept. Voir dire had already taken a week and they had gone through two complete panels. Victoria thought the composition of potential jurors was extremely unfortunate and had favored the Defense. The panels were loaded with undereducated ethnic males who, she thought, would be her least sympathetic jurors. They were already disenfranchised by the system and would see Joe Rina as a role model who disrespected City Hall and won. In the end, she had broken the cardinal rule of jury selection and used her last peremptory challenge to eliminate a twenty-five-year-old Sicilian street character who, she was almost certain, would vote for acquittal.
After six days of selection, Victoria was nervous about her jury. Defense attorney Gerry Cohen, on the other hand, seemed pleased. All through voir dire, he had his jury selection experts spread around him like card kibitzers, whispering, pointing, and pushing pieces of paper in front of him. As each juror was questioned, Gerry would nod sagely and then decide whether to use a peremptory challenge, dismiss a juror for cause, or accept. Victoria had to rely on gut instinct. She didn’t have any background checkers with psychology degrees. She had only David Frankfurter to help her.
David was former Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter’s great-grandson. He was a tall, skinny, twenty-seven-year-old Assistant State Prosecutor known around the office as “Dodger Dog” because of his last name and because he had been raised in Los Angeles and loved the Dodgers.