Secret Prey

and he looked back at the clock as he went: he wanted to be there when Audrey McDonald made her court appearance.
    AUDREY’S ATTORNEY, JASON GLASS, SHOWED UP WITH a woman photographer, a load of photo equipment, a pair of gym shorts, and a soft halter top.
    ‘‘This is Gina,’’ Glass told Audrey. ‘‘We need to take some photographs of you, showing your injuries. This is absolutely critical for the case. Gina brought some terry cloth for modesty purposes . . .’’
    They shot the pictures in an unoccupied hospital room, against the white drape that ran around the bed. At Gina’s direction, Audrey limped into the small bathroom and put on the shorts and halter top, carefully brushed her hair, and went out to face the cameras.
    ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ Gina said before she started shooting. ‘‘I should have told you to leave your hair as it was. Nobody will ever see these photos except attorneys, and frankly, we want them to look as . . . severe . . . as possible.’’
    Audrey nodded; she knew what was needed. She trundled back into the bathroom and flipped her hair back and forth, stirred it around, then brushed it away from the scalp wound. In the mirror, she looked like a photo of a nineteenth-century madwoman in Bedlam. And that, she supposed, was what they wanted.
    ‘‘Excellent,’’ Gina said, as she set up a couple of spindly light stands. ‘‘That is just beautiful.’’
    When the photos were done, Glass, who’d waited in the hall, said to Audrey, ‘‘You look like you still hurt.’’
    ‘‘I do,’’ Audrey said, deliberately vague. She peered around as though she’d lost a pair of glasses, or her shoes, and her lip trembled. ‘‘I can’t believe Wilson is gone.’’
    ‘‘I’m going to put you in a wheelchair before we head over to the courthouse,’’ Glass said. ‘‘I think you’ll be more comfortable that way.’’
    ‘‘Thank you,’’ Audrey muttered.
    A MAN NAMED DARIUS LOGAN WAS SAYING, ‘‘I KNOW I shouldn’t have done it, Your Honor, but the dude flipped me off, you know?’’ when a sheriff’s deputy wheeled Audrey into the courtroom, the two of them trailed by Glass.
    Lucas was sitting in the back row, reading the St. Paul paper. Del sat next to him, thumbing through Cliffs Notes on Greek Classics . Two dozen other people were scattered around the courtroom, half of them lawyers, a couple of defendants’ wives, reporters for the local television stations and newspapers, waiting for the McDonald hearing, and two or three courthouse groupies following the TV people.
    McDonald looked bad, Lucas thought. Her head was patched with white bandages, stark against her gray face. She was wearing a gingham dress with short sleeves, a summer dress really, but one that beautifully showed off the bruises on her arms and lower legs. She looked beaten, both physically and psychologically: then, as the bailiff wheeled her toward the defense table, she saw Lucas. And for a vanishingly small instant—a time so short that it must have been imaginary—Lucas felt her eyes spark. Not sparkle, but actually spark , as with electricity.
    The judge, a prissy little blonde who was known for occasional bouts of judicial intemperance, had grown impatient with Logan. He said, ‘‘That’s all very well, Mr. Logan, but you’ve been here a number of times before and we’re getting a little tired of it. I’ll put bail at five thousand dollars and expect to see you back here at . . .’’ As he thumbed through a calendar, there was a meaty smack from the audience, as though somebody had just been punched. The impact came from the forehead of a young woman who’d just slapped herself with one heavy hand. The judge looked up and said, ‘‘Do you have something to say, young lady?’’
    The woman stood up and said, ‘‘Your Honor, if we got to pay some bail bondsman seven hundred and fifty dollars to get Darius out of jail’’—she pronounced it ‘‘Dare-Ius’’—‘‘where in the hell am I gonna get the money for the kids’ dinners?’’
    The judge’s eyes clicked to the face of a well-known TV reporter, then back to the woman. ‘‘Why don’t you leave Dare-I-us in jail for a while?’’
    ‘‘Don’t dare do that,’’ the woman said.
    ‘‘Why not?’’
    ‘‘Just don’t dare.’’
    ‘‘Okay. Sit down. Dare-I-us, are you gonna show up for the trial?’’
    ‘‘I sure will, Your Honor.’’
    ‘‘All right. Bail’s set at one thousand dollars,