Blind Spot

Chapter One No more date rapes, Jackie Flowers swore as she flung her bomber jacket over a chair and kicked her briefcase under her desk. No matter who called or how big the retainer. Slipping off her hiking boots, she closed her eyes and tried to block out everything but the sound of the copy machine down the hall. When all extraneous stimuli had been reduced to a rhythmic whoosh and thump, the image behind her eyelids began to take form and she switched on her microcassette to record her impressions of the witnesses she'd interviewed in Boulder. Having found the missing piece to her client's defense, she wasn't about to lose it. "Courtney Briggs, eighteen, freshman from Grand Junction . . ." Elfin face and ragged cuticles, the little match girl staring through the window as the banker carved the Christmas goose. But the setting was an ivy-covered sorority house on the University of Colorado campus and not a fairy tale. . . . The phone rang two doors down and a burst of laughter from the estate planner across the hall sent the match girl scurrying back into the cold. Concentration shot, Jackie padded across the floor to the window. Her second-floor office was one of the smaller units in the converted mansion of a silver baron who'd gone bust a century before. The suites on the first floor had bars on the glass, and when you looked out you were as likely to catch a man urinating against the dumpster in the parking lot as a whiff of lilac and forsythia. The mansion on Denver's Capitol Hill was now home to a band of solo practitioners who enjoyed an easy camaraderie no downtown sweatshop could match. And far fewer financial entanglements. Gazing across the street at the egg-carton high-rise that partially obstructed her view of the mountains, Jackie spotted one of the few reliable signs of spring: dusty ficuses and elephant ferns crowding the screened balconies, hauled outside to bask in the sun. But the brilliant rays masked a nip to the air and the trees couldn't decide whether to trust the calendar. Three inches of wet snow had fallen earlier in the week, and the cherry blossoms outside the window had turned to wax. In her own yard the dwarf irises had come and gone, the crocuses that pushed through the earth in March like grape and lemon lollipops were but a memory, and now the daffodils were struggling to . . . With a sigh she realized she was projecting her own ambivalence about the date-rape case onto the weather. Spring storms always threw her. Back at her desk, she unsnapped the waistband of her stone-washed designer jeans and flexed her toes in the Ragg socks she hadn't worn since college. Regression had paid off; Courtney Briggs's sorority sisters had told her everything she needed to know. Or, more accurately, shown her. Prom queens though they may have been in high school, these children with their professional manicures and cover-girl smiles were nonetheless novices at the art of deception. A dip of the chin and sudden hesitation, the momentary drop in pitchJackie caught it all and was about to memorialize every gesture and phrase to use against them if any of them pulled a one-eighty on the stand. Freeing her honey-colored mane from its leopard-print scrunchie, she punched the rewind button and started over. " Courtney Briggs, a very young eighteen, at the Delta Kappa" "Cute outfit. Takes me back to a place I never was." The smell of freshly brewed coffee hit Jackie before she looked up. Pilar Perez, built like a desktop computer but four times more efficient, gazed enviously at the getup that made her boss appear no older than the girls half her age she'd gone to Boulder to meet. "Figure out your opening statement yet?" "Peer pressure." The coffee's earthy scent dispelled the vision of bloodred nails and perfect teeth. "Too bad they can't charge Courtney's sorority sisters." As Jackie gratefully sipped heKane, Stephanie is the author of 'Blind Spot ' with ISBN 9780553763461 and ISBN 0553763466.