Chapter 6
HARVEE
Not guilty.
I sit with those two words while the air in the courtroom seems to drop ten degrees. Around me, grown men are crying. The sound of it is awful in a room with this much marble and wood, nowhere for grief to go but up and back down again.
Clark Turner convinced the jury that Cassandra Pistocco must have abused her medication.
Taken more than prescribed. The autopsy contradicted him and he dismantled it anyway, piece by piece, until it meant nothing.
He built a different woman in front of that jury instead.
A successful real estate agent. Financial means.
A certain kind of lifestyle. The implication left to breathe on its own, doing its quiet, poisonous work.
He almost convinced me. That's the part I can't shake.
But I watched the jury's faces when they came back in. I know what I saw.
Cassandra Pistocco. Dead at thirty-two from kidney failure caused by her prescribed medication.
No prior history of kidney disease. No window for intervention, no time for treatment.
She leaves behind her husband Mario, her father Zachary, and two little boys — Jensen, six, and Drew, four — whose feet didn't reach the floor when they sat in that front row and waited to find out what a jury thought their mother's life was worth.
Hands are being shaken across the aisle now.
Smiles passing between people who should know better.
The courtroom empties around me and I stay in my seat a moment longer than I need to, watching Zachary Bast move through the room with the particular stillness of a man who has just had something confirmed that he already knew.
He'll go back to running the real estate company alone now. Mourn his daughter while keeping the whole thing from falling apart. I don't know how a person does that. I don't know how any of them do any of this.
My grandmother had a phrase for days like this. A slice of dick pie, served cold. I finally understand exactly what she meant.
I get to my car. There's already a text from Turner.
Plans tonight? I figure we celebrate with a few pints.
I stare at the word celebrate until it stops looking like a real word.
No thanks, still have to get my notes together and I'm exhausted after today. Great job though!
The exclamation point costs me something. I send it anyway.
Let me know if you change your mind ;)
My skin prickles. The winky face sits there on the screen, obscene in its cheerfulness, while Mario Pistocco is somewhere in this city trying to figure out how to drive home and explain this to a six-year-old and a four-year-old.
I will not be changing my mind. Not tonight. Not ever.
I pull out of the parking lot and point the car toward home, and I pray, in the specific and fervent way my grandmother taught me, that Clark Turner and every person who signed off on that warning label gets exactly what is coming to them.