What You Deserve

Chapter 1: The Fundraiser

The champagne was too warm and the string quartet was too loud, but Rachel Collins smiled through both because that was what you did at the Philadelphia Children's Hospital Benefit. You wore a dress that cost more than some people's rent. You held a glass you barely sipped from. You laughed at jokes that weren't funny, and you wrote a check large enough to quiet whatever kept you up at night.

Seven years of nights.

Rachel stood near the east windows of the ballroom at the Bellevue Hotel, the city lights of Broad Street glittering sixteen stories below. She was forty-one, tall, with dark hair she wore pulled back in a way that other women at these events called "effortless" and that actually required thirty-five minutes and an imported French clip. Her face was angular, attractive in a way that read as serious rather than soft. Judges trusted that face. Juries trusted it. She had built her career on it.

"Ms. Collins, you look like you're plotting an escape."

She turned. David Grier, a senior partner at Grier & Falk, was grinning at her with the ruddy confidence of a man who'd been drinking since five o'clock. He was holding two glasses of champagne, extending one toward her.

"I'm pacing myself, David."

"Nonsense. It's for the children." He pressed the glass into her hand. "I heard you got the Petrakis verdict. Not guilty on all counts. The man's wife called you a miracle worker on Channel Six."

"The man's wife should have called his alibi witnesses, who put him in Atlantic City the night of the alleged assault. But I appreciate the sentiment."

David laughed, too loudly, and drifted away toward a cluster of younger associates who would tolerate him longer. Rachel set the champagne on a passing tray without drinking from it.

She checked her phone. 8:47 PM. She'd committed to staying until nine. Thirteen more minutes of smiling, then the car service, then the quiet of her townhouse in Fitler Square, then the Ambien she told herself she didn't need but took anyway.

Thirteen minutes.

She moved toward her table—Table Seven, near the stage—intending to collect her clutch and say her goodbyes. The table seated ten. Most of the chairs were empty, their occupants circulating through the room. Only one seat was occupied: the chair directly to the left of hers.

The man sitting there was perhaps fifty, with close-cropped gray hair and a face that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts—a nose that had been broken at least once, deep-set eyes the color of river mud, a jaw that was slightly too wide for his skull. He wore a tuxedo that fit well enough but that he clearly wasn't comfortable in. His hands were folded on the white tablecloth, and he was watching Rachel approach with the patient stillness of someone who had been waiting a long time.

She didn't recognize him. That wasn't unusual at these events—there were four hundred guests, and she knew perhaps a quarter of them—but something about the way he was looking at her made her slow her steps.

"Ms. Collins." His voice was flat, mid-Atlantic, unhurried. "Please sit down."

"I'm sorry, have we met?"

"No. But we should talk. Please."

She could have walked away. She should have walked away. Later, she would replay this moment thousands of times and wonder what would have happened if she had simply turned on her heel and disappeared into the crowd. But there was something in his eyes—not menace, exactly, but a gravity that held her in place. She sat.

"My name is Henry Murphy," he said. "I'm not going to waste your time with small talk, so I hope you'll forgive me for being direct."

"Direct is fine."

"October fourteenth, seven years ago. The woods off Wissahickon Creek, near the old covered bridge. A man named Thomas Devlin."

The room didn't spin. The lights didn't dim. Rachel had always imagined that if this moment came, she would experience something cinematic—a rush of blood, a narrowing of vision, the world contracting to a single terrible point. Instead, what she felt was a vast, cold stillness, as if every molecule of air in the ballroom had frozen solid.

She said nothing.

Henry Murphy continued in the same unhurried tone. "Thomas Devlin, age thirty-eight. Reported missing by his landlord on October twenty-first. Never found. No body, no leads, case went cold inside of six months. But you know all that."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Ms. Collins, I said I wasn't going to waste your time. I'd appreciate the same courtesy."

Rachel's hands were in her lap, hidden by the tablecloth. She pressed her fingernails into her palms until the pain gave her something to focus on. The string quartet was playing Vivaldi. Around them, four hundred people were laughing and drinking and being generous with other people's money.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"I don't want money, if that's what you're thinking. I'm not interested in blackmail for profit. I want a favor."

"A favor."

"My younger brother, Neil, is on trial for murder. You've probably seen it in the papers. The Sarah Buckley case."

Rachel had seen it. Everyone in legal Philadelphia had seen it. Sarah Buckley, twenty-six years old, a graduate student at Temple, found dead in her apartment in Fishtown. The details that had leaked to the press were gruesome. The defendant was Neil Murphy, her ex-boyfriend. The lead prosecutor was—

"Josie Kendal," Henry said, as if reading her thoughts. "Your former law partner. Your closest friend, from what I understand."

"Former friend. We haven't spoken in over a year."

"That's fine. You'll reconnect. People do that. You'll call her, suggest lunch, catch up on old times. And during those conversations, you'll find out everything you can about the prosecution's strategy—their witness list, their evidence timeline, their theory of the case. And you'll pass that information to me."

Rachel stared at him. His expression hadn't changed. He might have been discussing the weather or the quality of the hors d'oeuvres.

"You're asking me to spy on a prosecutor. In an active murder trial."

"Yes."

"That's obstruction of justice. That's—"

"That's considerably less serious than what they'd charge you with if an anonymous package arrived at the Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department tomorrow morning. A package containing, among other things, soil samples from the burial site, a detailed map, and a sworn affidavit from a witness who saw you that night."

Rachel's nails broke skin. She felt a thin line of warmth in her left palm.

"There was no witness."

"There was. You were careful, Ms. Collins, but not careful enough. The witness didn't come forward at the time because he had his own reasons for being in those woods that night, reasons he'd rather not explain to police. But circumstances change. People's motivations shift."

The string quartet finished Vivaldi and began something by Handel. A woman at the next table threw her head back and laughed. Rachel watched all of this as if through thick glass.

"If I do what you're asking," she said slowly, "and I get caught, I lose my license. I lose everything."

"If you don't do what I'm asking, you lose your freedom. You'll be charged with murder, or at minimum manslaughter and concealment of a homicide. I've consulted attorneys. There's no statute of limitations on murder in Pennsylvania. You know that better than I do."

She did know that.

"The trial is already underway," Henry said. "Jury selection finished last week. Opening statements are Monday. I need information flowing by Wednesday at the latest."

"And if I do this—if I give you what you want—then what? You destroy whatever evidence you have?"

"When Neil is acquitted, everything I have goes into a fire. You have my word."

"The word of a man who's blackmailing me."

Henry smiled for the first time. It was a thin, humorless expression that didn't reach his eyes. "The word of a man who loves his brother, Ms. Collins. That's all this is. A brother trying to save his family."

He stood, buttoned his tuxedo jacket, and placed a business card on the table beside her untouched water glass. The card was plain white with a phone number printed in black. No name, no address.

"Wednesday," he said. "I'll be waiting for your call."

He walked away through the crowd, and Rachel sat alone at Table Seven with her bleeding palm and the sound of Handel and the knowledge that the thing she had buried seven years ago had finally clawed its way back to the surface.

She didn't stay until nine.

In the car going home, she pressed her forehead against the cool window and watched the city slide past. Philadelphia at night had always felt like a place that kept secrets. The narrow colonial streets of Old City, the dark stretches of Fairmount Park, the industrial wastelands along the Delaware—the city was full of places where things could be hidden and forgotten. She had counted on that.

The driver, a quiet man named Luis who had been driving her for three years, glanced at her in the rearview mirror.

"Everything all right, Ms. Collins?"

"Fine, Luis. Just tired."

At home, she locked the door, poured a glass of bourbon she didn't drink, and sat in the dark living room with her shoes off and her feet on the cold hardwood floor. The townhouse was beautiful—three stories of exposed brick and restored woodwork, furnished with the careful taste of a woman who needed her environment to project control. Everything in its place. Every surface clean. Every book on its shelf.

She thought about Thomas Devlin.

She thought about him more often than she would ever admit. Not every day—she had trained herself out of that—but often enough. The weight of the shovel. The smell of the earth. The sound of dirt hitting something that was no longer a person.

Self-defense. That was the story she had told herself for seven years, and most nights she almost believed it. Almost. The word was important. It was the crack in the foundation, the hairline fracture that she papered over with work and routine and the occasional Ambien. Almost believed it.

Because the truth was more complicated than self-defense, and the truth was what Henry Murphy was now threatening to drag into the light.

She picked up her phone and stared at the business card she'd brought home. A phone number. Ten digits that could end her life as she knew it.

Then she opened her contacts and scrolled to a name she hadn't called in fourteen months.

Josie Kendal.

They had been partners once, at the firm Rachel started after leaving the public defender's office. Collins & Kendal, a two-woman operation in a rented office on Walnut Street that had somehow, against all odds, become one of the most respected small practices in the city. They had been more than partners. They had been the kind of friends who finished each other's sentences, who knew each other's secrets, who had seen each other at their worst and stayed anyway.

Or so Rachel had thought.

The partnership ended when Josie decided to switch sides. She'd always had a prosecutorial streak—a belief in right and wrong that was more rigid than Rachel's, more certain. When the District Attorney's office offered her a position, she took it, and the professional split became personal in ways neither of them had anticipated. Defense attorneys and prosecutors could be friendly, but the friendship Rachel and Josie had shared required a level of trust that became impossible when they were standing on opposite sides of a courtroom.

They'd drifted. Lunches became monthly, then quarterly, then not at all. The last time they'd spoken was at a bar association dinner where the conversation had been polite and hollow and had left Rachel feeling like she was talking to a stranger wearing her best friend's face.

Now Henry Murphy wanted her to pick up the phone and pretend that none of that mattered.

Rachel set the phone down. Picked it up. Set it down again.

She went to bed without calling anyone and lay in the dark for two hours, listening to the sounds of the city through her bedroom window—a distant siren, the rumble of a garbage truck, a couple arguing on the street below—and tried to see a way out that didn't exist.

She took the Ambien at 1:00 AM and was asleep by 1:20.

In the morning, she called Josie.