Chapter 16 — Original Sin
Monday morning, Martin called Rachel from the parking garage.
"Priya starts today. Walk her through onboarding, get her set up with building access and system credentials, and give her the Hartwell files to review as a baseline exercise. Don't go easy on her — I want to know what she flags."
"Already pulled the files," Rachel said. "She'll be fine."
"I know she'll be fine. I want to know how fine."
He could hear Rachel making a note. "Where are you?"
"Rikers."
A pause. "The murder case."
"It's been six weeks. If I don't go today it'll be the week before trial, which isn't enough time to build anything." He shifted the phone to his other ear. "I'll be on my cell. If Harvey needs me for anything on the Ross situation—"
"I'll tell him you're at Rikers, which will either satisfy him or make him more curious, and either way is his problem."
"Perfect. Thank you, Rachel."
He hung up, got into the Camaro, and immediately remembered why he'd been putting off this drive.
The 1973 Camaro was, by every aesthetic measure, an exceptional automobile. The lines were right. The sound when the engine turned over was the sound of something that meant what it said. Martin had zero regrets about the purchase as an investment, as a collector's piece, or as a symbol of a particular era of American industrial confidence.
As a vehicle for navigating Monday morning Manhattan traffic, it was a form of punishment he hadn't fully anticipated.
The power steering was non-existent in the modern sense — every turn of the wheel required actual physical commitment, like arm-wrestling the road itself. The clutch required a half-engagement technique in stop-and-go traffic that had, over the course of the previous two weeks of Leonard's enthusiastic stewardship, apparently triggered what Sheldon had clinically described as anterior tibialis overuse syndrome in Martin's right leg.
In a late-model car with electronic power assist and a paddle-shift transmission, the same trip would take forty minutes and feel like nothing.
In the Camaro, it took an hour and felt like a workout.
Martin pulled into the visitor lot at Rikers Island Correctional Center, turned off the engine, and sat for a moment letting his left calf recover.
Sell it to an enthusiast. Buy something with actual power steering. He added this to the mental list he'd been building for two weeks.
Rikers occupied a small island in the East River between Queens and the Bronx, connected to the mainland by a single bridge. It was the largest penal institution in New York City and housed approximately twelve thousand inmates at any given time, a number that reflected, among other things, the city's complicated relationship with pretrial detention.
Martin signed in at the main building, presented his bar credentials, and was processed with the bureaucratic efficiency of a system that handled a lot of attorney visits and had streamlined accordingly. A correctional officer — tall, broad, with the particular quality of alertness that came from years of reading rooms for potential problems — walked him down to the attorney consultation suite.
"First time here?" the officer said.
"First client here," Martin said. "I've been through the building before."
The officer glanced at him sideways — the suit, the age, the briefcase. "How long you been practicing?"
"About six weeks."
The officer absorbed this without visible judgment, which Martin appreciated. "The woman you're seeing today has been here two months. She's not in population — she's in the lower-security wing, which means lower-risk, but lower-risk here is still its own thing." He stopped at a door, swiped his badge. "If anything feels wrong, there's an alarm button under the table. Don't hesitate."
"Thank you," Martin said. "I appreciate the briefing."
"You're polite," the officer said, in the tone of someone noting an unexpected variable. "Lawyers usually aren't, their first time."
"I figure the building runs better when people are decent to each other," Martin said.
The officer looked at him for another moment. Then he pushed the door open. "Two hours. Knock when you're done."
The consultation room was exactly what institutional architecture produced when efficiency was the only design principle — fluorescent lights, a laminate table bolted to the floor, two chairs on each side, a partition window running the length of one wall. The kind of room that was built for function and had accumulated the particular weight of all the difficult conversations that had happened inside it.
Martin sat down, opened his briefcase, and arranged his materials. Voice recorder, notebook, the case file, a legal pad.
The door on the far side of the partition opened.
The correctional officer who brought her in was female, crisp, professional. The woman she escorted was in her early twenties, in the standard-issue clothing of pretrial detention, her wrists in restraints that the officer removed once she was seated.
Amanda Somme.
Two months of Rikers had left marks. Her hair was dry and needed attention. The dark circles under her eyes suggested a sustained deficit of sleep rather than a single bad night. Her face had the particular gauntness of someone eating institutional food under sustained stress.
She looked at Martin with an expression that moved through several phases in about three seconds — assessment, skepticism, and then something that was trying very hard to be nothing.
"You're the lawyer they sent me," she said. Her voice had a slight rasp, like someone who'd been in a dry building too long.
"Martin Scott, Pearson Hardman." He set his pen down. "I took your case four weeks ago. I apologize for not coming sooner — I needed to understand the file before I sat down with you, because I didn't want to use this time asking questions I could answer from the documents."
Amanda looked at the voice recorder he'd set on the table. "Are you recording this?"
"Yes. It's privileged — the recording is protected by attorney-client confidentiality. I use it so I can focus on listening rather than taking notes." He met her eyes. "You can say no and I'll put it away."
She looked at it for another moment. "Leave it."
Martin turned it on.
"Let me tell you what I already know," he said, "and you can correct anything that's wrong or add anything that's missing."
He went through it plainly, without editorializing.
Amanda Somme, twenty-one. Second-year student at the University of Pennsylvania's fashion design program, partial scholarship. On May 13th of this year, she and her boyfriend, Sorkya Spencer, went to a Walmart in Queens for their weekly grocery run. Inside the store they separated. Amanda had a brief, casual conversation with a man she didn't know. Sorkya witnessed the end of it.
In the parking lot afterward, the argument started. Amanda told Sorkya she wanted to end the relationship. The argument escalated. Amanda got in her car — a BMW X5, registered in her name, purchased four months prior. Sorkya moved to the front of the vehicle and stood there.
Amanda drove forward.
Sorkya went down. His body was carried under the vehicle for three hundred and ten feet before it stopped. He was pronounced dead at the scene before the ambulance arrived.
Five witnesses in the parking lot. All five confirmed in their statements that Sorkya was blocking the car but was not physically preventing Amanda from exiting the vehicle by any other means. No one observed him threatening her.
Amanda had been charged with second-degree murder.
Martin set down the file. "Anything wrong in that summary?"
Amanda shook her head slowly. The self-protective performance from her first line had receded. What was underneath it was quieter and considerably more frightened.
"Tell me about Sorkya," Martin said. "Not the parking lot. The relationship. From the beginning."
She talked for forty minutes.
The shape of it was recognizable in the way that certain patterns were recognizable — not dramatic, not cinematic, but accumulative. It had started well. Sorkya was attentive, wanted to spend time with her, remembered things she said. By the fourth month, the attention had changed character without her being able to point to a specific moment when it happened.
He checked her phone. Not confrontationally — he'd pick it up when she set it down, look at it, hand it back. He wanted to know where she was going before she went. If she was talking to a male classmate and Sorkya appeared, the classmate would find a reason to leave within a few minutes, and she could never identify exactly how that happened.
He never raised his hand. Never raised his voice above a certain register. There was nothing she could have taken to an RA or a campus counselor and pointed to as unambiguous.
"Did you try to end it before that day?" Martin said.
"Twice." She looked at the table. "The first time he cried. I felt — I stayed. The second time he told me that I'd regret it and that I didn't understand how much he loved me, and I believed him, which I know sounds—"
"It doesn't sound like anything except what it was," Martin said. "Keep going."
She'd stayed. The month before the Walmart trip, she'd been building toward something — finding the right time, having the right words. The argument in the parking lot had happened faster than she'd planned.
When Sorkya moved in front of the car, she'd thought he was going to open the door. Then she realized he wasn't. And she made a decision in a fraction of a second that she couldn't take back.
The room was quiet for a moment after she finished.
Martin wrote something in his notebook. Looked at what he'd written. Looked at the case file. Looked at the ceiling.
The prosecution's case was structurally clean. Subjective motive: she'd been trying to end the relationship and he'd tried to stop her from leaving. Objective act: she'd driven into him and kept going. Five eyewitnesses establishing that she wasn't physically trapped, that she had other options in that parking lot.
Second-degree murder in New York required intent to cause serious physical injury or death. What she'd described was a decision made in seconds of extreme emotional distress, which was not the same thing as premeditation — but it wasn't without intent, either. The law didn't require planning. It required choosing.
The DA had looked at this file and seen a textbook case.
Martin looked at it and saw something else underneath the textbook case.
"Amanda." He set his pen down. "I'm going to tell you the worst-case scenario, because you deserve to know what you're actually facing and because a good lawyer doesn't make you feel better by hiding the ceiling from you." He held her gaze. "If we go to trial with what's currently in this file, the prosecution's case is strong. Fifteen years, no parole, is a realistic outcome."
She didn't flinch. She'd been sitting with this for two months.
"That's the worst case," he said. "It's not the only case. The question I'm going to spend the next several weeks answering is whether there's something in what you've told me — in Sorkya's behavior, in the history of this relationship, in anything that the initial investigation didn't examine — that changes the frame." He paused. "I can't promise you an acquittal. I can promise you that I won't bring you to trial until I've exhausted every legitimate angle. And I can promise you that I won't lie to you about where we stand."
Amanda looked at him.
"How old are you?" she said.
"Twenty-seven."
She closed her eyes briefly. "My mother hired someone very young."
"Your mother hired the youngest Senior Lawyer in the history of Pearson Hardman," Martin said, without arrogance, just accuracy. "I know that doesn't mean anything to you right now. It will eventually."
Amanda opened her eyes. "What do you need from me?"
"Everything," Martin said. "Every friend who knew both of you. Every incident where his behavior made you uncomfortable, even the ones that seemed small. Classmates, professors, anyone who observed the two of you together. The name of the man you spoke to in the store." He picked up his pen again. "And I need to know if Sorkya had this pattern before you — if there's someone before you who left and can tell me what that looked like."
Something shifted in Amanda's expression. "His ex-girlfriend transferred out of Penn in February."
Martin wrote this down. "Name?"
"Jessica Liang." She paused. "I always thought — when we were still together, I thought she'd left because of him. But I couldn't ask him that, obviously."
Martin wrote the name down. Underlined it.
Jealousy and anger. Two of the seven deadly sins. Both present in this parking lot on May thirteenth.
But underneath them — and this was what Martin had been looking for since he opened this file — possibly something that the parking lot had interrupted rather than originated.
He closed his notebook.
"Two more weeks before trial," he said. "I'll be back before then. If anything comes to you between now and that visit — anything, however small it seems — tell the officer and have her get a message to my office."
Amanda nodded. "Mr. Scott."
"Martin."
"Martin." She looked at him with the eyes of someone who'd been running on diminishing hope for eight weeks and was deciding whether to add a small amount back. "Do you actually think there's something there?"
Martin looked at her for a moment.
"I think," he said carefully, "that the prosecution's case is built on what was visible in that parking lot. And I think that parking lot was the end of something that started much earlier. Whether I can prove what that something was—" he stood, began packing his briefcase— "that's what I'm going to find out."
The correctional officer tapped the window. Time.
Martin picked up his recorder, his files, his pen. He nodded to Amanda once — not reassuring, not grave, just present — and went to knock for the door.
Outside, the East River moved past the bridge with the unhurried indifference of water that had seen everything and remembered nothing. The Manhattan skyline was visible from the visitor lot, close enough to feel like a different world.
Martin sat in the Camaro for a moment before starting the engine.
Jessica Liang. Transferred February. Find her.
He wrote it in his notebook. Then he started the engine, felt the wheel resist, and pulled out onto the bridge road.
One case at a time.
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