innocent.

(santiago)
It's been a week or two since Brunetti's death. The police had come minutes after her call. Her statement had been taken, and psychological counseling offered. The house had been cordoned off and investigators crawled over every inch. Brunetti may have been a cop in disgrace, but he was one of the boys in blue nonetheless.

The killer had left no fingerprints, though, and no signs of himself. No spit, no hairs, nothing traceable. What DNA-rich material had been found were traced back to Brunetti's ex-family. Days passed and interest waned. The case will remain open indefinitely, but general speculation has it that an angry victim of Brunetti's alleged corruption finally struck back.

Due to the damage down to the face, the funeral was closed-casket. Afterwards the body was lowered into the earth amidst a small gathering of mourners. Perhaps Eva had been among them. The widow had been, at least - or what would have been the widow, had she not left him three years ago.

Afterwards the ex-Mrs. Brunetti walked away without a word to Eva. It's a thankless job. By the end of the week she's on her next case, though, and her coworkers have forgotten her traumatic experience, and so the world grinds on.

It's unlikely she's forgotten, though. And if ever she went unarmed before, it's unlikely she ever does so now. It is human nature to fight death, or at least to die fighting: to not go quietly into that good night.

A week passes. Two.

Then she comes home one night to a dark apartment, which is odd, because she knows she set the autotimer to click the lights on at 6:20 pm every night. Perhaps her alarms are buzzing already. There's an un(growingly)familiar coat thrown over her coffee table, and now her alarms are jangling.

The door shuts behind her. She hadn't closed it. By the time she turns, there's a (gun!) - no, a computer printout held out for her, and behind it, burning black eyes under dark slashes of eyebrows.

He's in a clean white shirt. She can't see a gun.

The printout is NYTimesOnline on a case she's probably heard of. It's probably even a case someone she knows worked. A botched breaking and entering resulting in a quadruple homicide. The father, the mother, the child, and one of the policemen answering the call. The dead officer's partner stood in court and gave a stirring testimony, even unbuttoning his police dress blues to show the jury the bullet scars where two slugs had punctured a lung and narrowly missed his heart.

A family slaughtered. A cop shot down, another severely wounded. Four upstanding white citizens dead, and the defendant a Puerto Rican immigrant who had run the drugridden slums of his country in his reckless youth and had come to the States eight years ago to steal good American jobs and kill good American people. Just naturalized the past year - that ungrateful wretch.

This one didn't get off clean. Twenty-five minutes in deliberation returned a guilty verdict on all charges. The sentence was laid down harsh and the public rejoiced in the might and glory of the American justice system. And now, 8:22pm that same night, Santiago de Alvera holds the headline out and says,

"This man is innocent."

She probably did not want to hear that. And she probably does not want to hear this.

"What can you do for him?"


(eva)
Psychological counseling had been offered, and quietly declined. She had never before been involved in a crime scene, but it was not unusual among her colleagues. The following morning found them gathered around the coffee pot, jocularly exchanging stories of narrow escapes in what they no doubt thought was a comforting manner, while others quietly discussed Brunetti's crimes, the suspects he had helped to (wrong?) convict, the brutality this client or that client had endured at the man's hands. That was why such a high profile case had come to someone so young, of course: conflicts of interest. Too many attorneys in the regional office had faced Officer Brunetti from the other side, too much ill-feeling remained, there were too many appeals pending in too many cases where his testimony had cinched the prosecution's case. Conflicts of interest.

She no longer goes unarmed. One Beretta in her shoulder holster (the conceal-carry permit renewed), and another at the bottom of her briefcase. The slender cannister of mace in her handbag, the pepperspray attached to her ring of keys. It made every day longer. Five minutes here, ten minutes there, giving her weapons to the desk sergeant or the correctional officers, retrieved again fifteen minutes later, or an hour, accompanied by a knowing look from the official with which she was dealing.

"Ready to come over to the other side?" It was a joke, or so it was phrased, from the assistant prosecutor before arraignments that morning. Éva gave her colleague a mild look, but did not otherwise respond as she swept into the courtroom. Three arraignments in the morning, a hearing on a motion to quash evidence obtained through an illegal search, witness interviews, a long meeting with the investigator whose services she shared with three other attorneys regarding a routine drug charge that looked like it might turn into a capital case: the usual.

Evening. The stairs creak familiarly beneath her weight as she climbs to the second floor flat, keys jingling and ready in her hand. She's thinking about this afternoon, or tomorrow, while dreamily contemplating the evening's menu. She has a nice salmon steak, and there are microgreens in the crisper, a bottle of wine opened two days before with a few glasses still left.

The apartment is dark. Two thoughts occur, simultaneously: the bulb is burned out/someone is here.

She does not have much time to finish either, but already she is reaching for her weapon, caution evident in the sudden stiffening of her spine, tension manifest in the quickening of pulse.

The door swings shut behind her and she turns around, startled, hand curled beneath her jacket, fingertips brushing the hard molded plastic that forms the butt of the Beretta stashed in her shoulder holster.

The apartment is dark, but the diffuse glow of ambient city lights spill in through the large bank of windows facing the street. She had considered, once, asking her landlords to put bars on the windows, but she is no criminal, and has no wish to live in prison. Perhaps that thought occurs again as her eyes skim the paper thrust out for her attention, or as her eyes flicker up from the headline, over the frame of her glasses, to glance across his face. Perhaps it floats to the surface again, flotsam on the suddenly stormy sea of her mind. The windows, the bars. Motion detectors. Some monitored security system as like to go off when a stray cat sleeps the afternoon away on her balcony as when an intruder comes.

Her hand emerges from beneath the curve of her dark gray jacket slowly, fingers splaying wide to show that she is not drawing the weapon. No sudden moves: she knows police procedure. The dark gaze lingers another moment on his face, wide and watchful, wary as an animal startled in its den, then drops back to the sheet, narrowing in focus.

After a calming breath or two (willing her hands not to shake, fingers curled up tightly against the palms), several rapid beats of her still-racing heart, she reaches out and plucks the paper from his grasp. He can see the faint twithes of her eyes as she skims the story with only the amber glow of streetlamps for illumination.

Abruptly, mid-sentence in her perusal of the third paragraph, when she has the wherewithal again to speak, "You can't do this," murmured, quiet.


(santiago)
Behind the 8.5"x11" sheet of printed paper, Santiago tilts his head a half-inch to the side. Black eyes pin her and he asks, very simply, very casually, "Why not?"

As if it were perfectly normal to break into someone's home in the night and wait for her to come home with the lights all out.

As if it were perfectly normal to show her an article and claim the man wrongly convicted, and expect her to do something about it.

As if it were perfectly normal to know for a fact that the man was wrongly convicted.

As if all of this, any of this, was perfectly normal at all.

Perhaps she reaches for a light to fill the time, or to see him better, because monsters are less frightening in the day. He stops her with a look, a single shake of his head. "Leave it off." His eyes are sensitive, sharp even after the desert sunrise that destroyed them for a time, and better acquainted to the night.


(eva)
She reaches for a light to fill the time, to fill the empty spaces between her racing heartbeats, to compose what she will say to him, and to banish the reaching shadows from the room.

It is not unreasonable to fear the night.

Her arm is suspended half-way to the switchplate when he speaks. She looks up sharply, over the thick frame of her glasses and stares. Her eyes are dark in the shadows, pupils dilated, hungry for the traces of ambient light. It is an awkward moment, for the gesture is not easily disguised, cannot be folded into another movement, as if that were not what she meant to do, as if he were giving her orders, and she were obeying them.

Three shallow heartbeats, no more, pass in silence before she allows her arm to fall to the side, before she steps back and away from him, navigating the dark-shadowed room by memory as much by sight. The briefcase drops to the floor with a dull thud. Normally, her shoes - formal well-heeled pumps, which pinch her feet abominably after a long day - would follow.

It is her home, after all. Éva should feel safe here.

Éva does not feel safe here, and the shoes do not come off. Nudging aside the briefcase with the toe of her pumps, she turns. There is more space between them, now, though hardly enough for comfort. She remembers, now and then, how quickly and surely he moved. She remembers how he moved like lightning, three eyes staring bitter and black at her, one the barrel of his weapon so close she could smell the stink of gunpowder, the oil with which he had cleaned it not long ago.

Her face is a smear of pale color against the shadows, framed by the suggestion of dark hair swept back from her features. There is not enough light to define the expression, not enough light for shadows to form and pool beneath the arrogant wings of her cheekbone, nor to cast the (perhaps too long) patrician nose in relief. Her eyes are dark pools of shadow, but he can feel the weight of her brief regard once more, skimming across his face before settling on a point just beyond his shoulder. He can feel the weight of her regard. Like a wolf, he can see in the night.

The shadows filter through the rooms and hall, illuminating them uncertainly. High ceilings. Wide windows, four or six-paned, the glass wavy with age. The slip-shod suggestions that someone lives here: running shoes left tumbled by the sofa, a blanket strewn across the back, a single empty wineglass on the coffee table beside a dog-eared copy of the latest Better Homes and Gardens magazine, open to the feature on succulent spring suppers, domestic.

"Because this is my home." Her words are clearly and precisely enunciated, with just enough quiet force to project them, some subdued thrum of insistence or emotion beneath (that lying lawyer's tongue). But quiet, quiet now, and subdued. "Because I have done nothing to warrant such treatment." The dark eyes focus - fleetingly - on his face before finding that perfect point behind him once more. "Breaking and entering is a crime."


(santiago)
"A crime," he repeats, "of human law. And human law is oftentimes wrong."

The printout snaps softly in his hand, and then he folds it carefully away. Her few steps away are recorded in his pitiless black eyes, but at the least he doesn't follow her.

"The law of the Nation requires that a kin harbor a Garou, and aid him however she might. You are not my tribe, true, but my encroachment will be brief, and I ask you only one thing.

"What can you do for this man?"


(eva)
Dark eyes slide slantwise from the wall back to him, and linger there for a shadowed moment. She nods, then, a quick and dutiful gesture, as she crosses her arms, which had been hanging uselessly at her side.

"You understand that there's little to be done," she says quietly, after a moment, swallowing once before she continues. "Very little. I can review the trial transcript. If there's been some sort of misconduct by the judge or controversial evidence - procured through an illegal search, for example - " still quiet, her voice, but with a level calm gained as she discusses her area of expertise. " - then his current counsel will address that on appeal. In capital cases, defendants are allowed extensive appeals. If his lawyer missed something glaring, he could perhaps get a new trial based on incompetent or inadequate representation, though that would be difficult since his attorney is my direct supervisor.

"The only other possibility is new, exculpatory evidence. There are two possibilities there. If the prosecution and/or police failed to produce such evidence - they have a duty to do so - then he could get a new trial. The second possibility is brand new evidence, somehow unavailable at the time of trial, some new fact not previously in evidence."

She falls silent a moment, drawing in a slow, steadying breath. "You understand that all of these chances are remote in the extreme, don't you?"


(santiago)
As though in echo of her, his arms cross slowly over his chest. The white shirt pulls tighter across his sides, and try as she might, she will not discern the outline of a pistol holstered at his ribs. Perhaps it is behind him, pushed into his belt. Perhaps he doesn't carry one at all.

"I understand that many unlikely things come to pass every day." An angling of his head; a small smile, though his eyes remain impenetrably black. "You of all people should know that as well as I, kinwoman."

A pause. He leans his head back and exhales slowly toward the ceiling. His attention comes back upon her by degrees. In the depths of her mind, she can hear the heavy clank of steel as those eyes lock on hers.

"What would you need to exonerate this man, this Mister..." the paper withdrawn, the name glanced at, "Jesus Delasquez? Tell me exactly."


(eva)
She watches him, sharp, wary attention blunted by the long reach of the shadows. His shirt pulls taut across his flank, and there is nothing but the outline of his body. She exhales, but does not relax at the revelation. Perhaps the pistol is behind him. Perhaps he does not carry one at all. Creature that he is, he needs no such weapons to defend himself, in the end. Within his changing blood, all the defense he needs.

(What do you need? Tell me exactly.)

Except for her fingers, now playing with the uncertain weave of her linen suit (spring. outside, the world - crushed as it is - is awakening. The grass is green, and flowering weeds run rampant - violets, rich and blue, bloom to be crushed beneath the foot. Forsythia smears bright yellow across the gray landscape, and sap begins to flow again in the dormant trees.) she does not move.

"Give me a week - " breaking the silence that falls again after his question. It last no more than a few seconds, but in the darkness feels stretched and strained. The darkness unnerves her, and so too his hard, ungiving gaze, but perhaps the strange, brief smile unnerves her most of all. "I will review the trial transcript and the record and then I can tell you - " pause, the starched suggestion of a smile on her mouth, some mild, distant humor, perhaps, or perhaps merely a byproduct of her internal tension. " - exactly - " her voice is dry. Humor, then. " - what I need to exonerate Mr. Delasquez."


(santiago)
For a second - just a fleeting, single second - his black eyes drop from hers and move over her mouth, inspecting her slight, starched smile as though it were something alien and unknown. Then he holds her eyes again as he takes two, three, four panther-smooth steps toward her, close enough to see his own reflection in her glasses, in her doubtlessly widening eyes.

"Perfect," he says, and like that, just like that, blinks out of existence. The air doesn't even shimmer, but does suck rapidly in to fill the vacuum he leaves so suddenly behind.

The apartment is dark still, but it's hers again.