Jury of One Read Online Free PDF Page B

what I don’t get,” said Shelly. “What does the one have to do with the other? What does your federal investigation have to do with the shooting of this police off—”
    She froze. The men across from her, now both seated, cast glances at each other and then at her. They were calculating what to reveal, and they seemed to understand that Shelly had figured it out herself. They also had probably calculated, correctly so, that she could get much of this information from her client, Alex Baniewicz.
    “Cops,” she said. “You guys were investigating cops. A drug ring of cops.” She stuck an index finger into the table. “Including this one here. The one Alex is accused of shooting.”
    Romero opened his hands, then brought them together.
    “Alex was helping you take down a dirty cop.” She looked at them for confirmation. Their lack of a response was sufficient. “And—this cop found out, didn’t he? He found out Alex was working for you and he tried to silence him.” She looked at them again. “Am I getting warm?”
    “That’s all speculation,” said Peters. “Every single thing that you have said, Counsel, cannot be proven. But we certainly expect that you might say it in court.”
    Romero concurred. “We were assuming you’d be pleading self-defense.”
    Shelly got out of her chair. She felt a surge of hope mixed with her confusion. She was playing catch-up but she was getting the picture now, and there might be a way out of this. Maybe. But it wasn’t going to happen right now. So she would keep mum about her intentions. This was time to be gathering, not giving, information.
    “Has your client spoken with the police?” asked Peters.
    She shook her head no. “He won’t.”
    “That’s very important to us,” he said. “I need to know if my guys on the street are safe. If your client is flapping his mouth and word spreads, my guys are sitting ducks—”
    “He’s not talking. He won’t.”
    “We need your word on that,” said Jerod Romero. “Everything we’ve told you.”
    Shelly looked out the window. “You need a lot from us, Mr. Romero. And it doesn’t come free. Let’s start talking about a deal, right now. And not just on this drug bust. I want a deal on this cop-shooting, too. I want the whole thing.”
    “Understand that this is sensitive ground,” said the prosecutor. “The assistant county attorneys can be pretty tight with cops. We have to be very choosy about whom we share this with.”
    “I got that. I also have a client facing a capital murder charge. Because he was doing your dirty work.”
    Peters, the special agent, scoffed and made a show of it with his hands. Romero didn’t accept the characterization well either. “Okay,” he said. “Listen. All we’re acknowledging is that you’ll plead self-defense. That doesn’t make your story true. If you haven’t figured it out yet”—Romero made eye contact with Peters—“your client says a lot of things. Some may be true, a lot of them probably aren’t.”
    Shelly felt a shiver run through her. She felt as if the insult somehow implicated her as well, at least her gullibility. “Well,” she said, a little more testily than she would have preferred, “was Alex connected with this cop or wasn’t he?”
    “They had met,” said Romero. “Look—do we think OfficerRay Miroballi was using Alex Baniewicz to sell drugs? Sure. Of course. But good luck going to trial on what we
think.
Maybe if we’d had the time to fully investigate this thing, we would have gotten somewhere. Right now, you don’t have much of a leg to stand on.”
    And they were not going to help her in that endeavor, they were saying. Okay. Regardless of the merits of a self-defense plea, the point was the federal government didn’t want Shelly or Alex disclosing the federal sting. This thing would be high-profile when it was announced, and the more cops caught in the web, the merrier for the federal prosecutors. Thus, no need to debate the