VIII

"Your Honor, and may it please the Court."

Kennedy took a deep breath in as the man who was certainly not DA Hartlen started to speak. Hotchky sat beside her, perfectly still, pen poised above a fresh college-ruled notepad. There was another lawyer from the firm sitting on Hotchky's other side, but Kennedy couldn't remember his name for the life of her. He was mousy-looking, with circular glasses that made him look like a character from a book series that Kennedy was too pretty to have read.

She was glad that Hotchky was her real lawyer.

The jury pool looked like a bunch of sad, dusty people had been herded in off of the street in dull-colored clothing. There were seven men and five women, which Kennedy already knew was a bad sign. Women were more lenient with defendants than men. Eight members of the jury were white—truly a jury of Kennedy's peers—two were Black, one was Asian, and one Latina woman who was the only one looking remotely interested in being there.

Kennedy had become accustomed to DA Hartlen's voice and demeanor as the weeks had gone on leading up to her trial. This new person speaking was throwing her off a bit—no one had told her someone else might be doing the state's opener.

"My name is Jaxson Karl and I am one of the Assistant District Attorney's for DA Hartlen. It is my pleasure to represent the 10th Circuit Court, and the state of South Carolina on this incredibly influential case."

Kennedy leaned over to Hotchky.

"I thought DA Hartlen—"

"He's sick." She replied shortly, scribbling something down on her notepad.

"On September 28, 2020, the defendant, Kennedy Abrams, was driving through the backroads of Tampa, Florida, with a friend from school. A girl's trip, down from Clemson University for the week. In actuality, Miss Abrams had a far more sinister goal in mind. As she was driving through Tampa, the defendant took a turn onto a street where she began speeding, until she hit something that made her stop. The defendant hit and killed Hank Wilcox, a prolific public speaker and millionaire philanthropist. She then continued to drive away, not bothering to call the police or do anything to save the man's life.

"But this was not a freak accident. The defendant knew the victim personally and had had an intimate relationship with him months beforehand. At the conclusion of this case, and after you have heard all the evidence, I am confident that you will come back with a verdict of guilty of murder with express malice.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this case is about a woman who became angry with her former lover and decided to take matters into her own hands, rather than going by the letter of the law."

Kennedy took in a deep, shaky breath. She didn't know how she was supposed to look at that moment. Perhaps sorrowful, or annoyed, or stoic. Her face remained still and flat, eyes glued to ADA Karl as he paced around the floor of the courtroom, inching closer to the jury as he went.

"Members of the jury, the State will call five different witnesses in this trial. We will call someone who was an eyewitness to the crime itself."

Kennedy felt her heart stop and Hotchky's hand froze mid-word on her notepad. Both women looked up at ADA Karl to find him turned around and staring directly at them, his smirk hidden from the jury but on full display for the defense.

"Rebecca Eaves, friend of the defendant's, was sitting in the passenger's seat of the car when the murder took place. She will be testifying of exactly what she saw on the night in question."

Kennedy whipped her head around to see who was sitting in the audience behind her. Her eyes locked with Celeste's, and Rebecca's best friend returned her gaze with wide, empty eyes. She didn't know anything about this.

Rebecca had evidently planned this betrayal all on her own.

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Rebecca was back on the strange website she had found, anxiously trying to find some more information about Jaxson Karl and any reason he could be connected to the man Kennedy killed.

Talk about a conflict of interest.

The website was one of the most confusing things Rebecca had seen in quite some time. It was riddled with typos, and she couldn't find anything past the initial homepage. 'Karl Farrow Wilcox LLC; Attorneys at Law' was displayed prominently across the top of the page, with a phone number listed right underneath. The rest of the page contained lists of different articles, all with misspelled titles, claiming to have been written by Jaxson Karl, Lydia Farrow, or Hank Wilcox, with Kristopher Abrams popping up every now and then in the bylines. But when she clicked on the articles, she was directed to a blank page that wouldn't load no matter how many times she tried to reload the page.

So, she returned to her search engine.

Jaxson Karl Hank Wilcox

The first thing that popped up was a news article about the trial that had been published three hours earlier, detailing how ADA Karl was going to be filling in for DA Hartlen in the trial of Wilcox's alleged murderer. The next three pages of search results showed nothing of the two being connected in any way—their joint website didn't show up anywhere. Rebecca ventured to the fourth page of search results and still, everything showed something about either ADA Karl or Hank Wilcox—but never the two of them together.

Rebecca took a deep breath. Why wasn't the website popping up?

She thought for a second before realizing that ADA Karl probably didn't want to be connected to Hank, since if he were, he wouldn't be allowed to try the case. He would be forced to hand it over to someone else, as there would be a clear conflict of interest.

Rebecca had only found the website connecting the two because she knew to look Hank up in relation to Kristopher Abrams. She doubted Kennedy's defense team was thinking of relating Hank to Kennedy's father, unless Kennedy had explicitly told them about how she knew Hank in the first place. And that was something that Kennedy had appeared to be keeping quiet, for the most part. Hell, Kennedy had kept quiet about Kristopher to Rebecca until the last possible second.

She went back to https://www.karlfarrowwilcox.net, staring at the odd home screen in front of her. The misspelled article titles that led to nothing. And then she noticed something interesting.

In the byline of every article, the author's name was spelled just a tiny bit wrong. Jaxson Karl became Jaxon Karl, Lydia Farrow became Lidya Farrow, Hank Wilcox because Hank Wiicox. One of the only articles that had the names spelled correctly was the one co-authored by both Hank and Kristopher.

No wonder they weren't popping up in search engines.

Rebecca exited out of the website and instead searched for Karl Farrow Wilcox LLC attorneys at law. The first result was the website she had just been on, and everything below that was completely unrelated. There weren't even any articles about Lydia and her quite famous modeling career. Or Hank's murder and the subsequent trial.

All she could find, at the bottom of the fourth page of search results, was a paper that Jaxson Karl had written for the Cornell Law Review back in 2008 entitled, Defending the Guilty: How Do You Keep the Faith?

Rebecca didn't feel like reading that, if she were being perfectly honest with herself.

She took a deep breath and leaned back in her seat, directing her eyes away from her laptop screen and up towards the ceiling. She wondered how the trial was going. She wondered if Kennedy had found out that Rebecca was one of the state's witnesses yet. If she had found out, Rebecca wondered just how angry her former best friend was.

Rebecca looked back at her laptop and started writing out everything she already knew.

· Karl, Wilcox, and Farrow were all connected without Kristopher's involvement

· But then Kristopher became involved anyway, somehow

· Karl is prosecuting Kennedy because Hartlen got sick

· This is a huge conflict of interest if anyone knew about his connection to Kennedy's dad and to Hank

· If no one knows about their connection yet, then no one knows about this fake law firm

· Law firm = front for something?

· Professions: Karl = lawyer, Farrow = model, Wilcox = public speaker, Abrams = plastic surgeon

· All professions are relatively lucrative, if you play your cards right

· So what were these rich people conspiring to do together?

· And why did they make a fake law firm? I know Lydia and Kristopher are definitely not lawyers, and neither is Hank. His Wikipedia would have said something about law school.

· Isn't it against the law to pose as a lawyer?

· Or maybe that's a police officer.

She took a second to stop typing and looked at her notes. Half of them looked like the ramblings of an obsessed person, but the other half were coherent, more or less. Nothing seemed to be too crazy or too out of left field.

Now she had to figure out why the fake law firm was necessary, how Kristopher came into play, and what this had to do with Kennedy. Because Rebecca was almost positive that there was no coincidence in this entire debacle.

But, seeing as this was going to be a difficult task with virtually no starting point, she knew she needed someone with less of a conscience and a larger bag of tricks than she had.

Rebecca needed Kennedy on board.