The Attorney's Warning
Chapter 10 - The Attorney's Warning
Victoria's attorney was a man named Preston Cole — sixty-three years old, thirty-eight years of criminal defense experience, the kind of lawyer who had represented enough guilty people to have developed a professional detachment that most defense attorneys eventually need in order to survive the job without losing themselves in it.
He requested the meeting with Katz eleven days after the Texas evidence came back, and he requested it without his client's knowledge, which was itself a violation of the kind of professional boundaries Preston Cole had spent nearly four decades respecting.
"Detective, I need to say some things to you off the record, and I need you to understand I'm doing this because I have genuine concerns, not because I'm trying to undermine my own client's defense."
Katz sat across from him in a small conference room, recorder deliberately switched off at his request, though she made a note of the date and time in her personal notebook the moment he left.
"I'm listening."
"I've represented a lot of difficult clients, Detective. Murderers, fraudsters, people who did terrible things for reasons that, once you understood them, at least made a kind of twisted human sense. Victoria Sterling doesn't fit that pattern. I've met with her nine times now, and each time, I come away feeling less like I'm representing a criminal defendant and more like I'm in the room with something that's wearing a very good human costume."
"What specifically concerns you?"
"She's not worried about the trial. That's what concerns me most. A defendant facing three homicide-adjacent cases across three states should be terrified. Victoria discusses her situation with the emotional register of someone reviewing a mildly disappointing quarterly business report. She's already asked me, twice, what my professional fee structure looks like for representing her in civil matters after the criminal case concludes — as though she's already planning her life on the other side of a conviction she should, by any rational assessment, expect to lose."
Katz felt something cold settle in her chest.
"Is she planning an appeal strategy?"
"She's planning something. I don't know what. But three days ago, during a routine attorney-client meeting, she asked me a question I haven't been able to stop thinking about."
"What did she ask?"
Preston Cole hesitated, and for the first time since he'd sat down, Katz saw something that looked like genuine fear cross a face that had, by his own account, spent thirty-eight years successfully compartmentalizing exactly this kind of feeling.
"She asked whether attorney-client privilege would protect a conversation about 'contingency planning' for Sophie Hawthorne's guardianship, in the event that Daniel Hawthorne 'were no longer in the picture' before the criminal case concluded."
Katz sat completely still.
"She's still planning to kill Daniel? While she's in custody?"
"I refused to continue that line of conversation, and I terminated the meeting immediately. But Detective, I need you to understand something about my client. She is currently housed at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center, awaiting trial, and she has had visitor privileges, phone privileges, and mail privileges throughout this process, same as any pretrial detainee. If she is still actively planning something involving Daniel Hawthorne or Sophie Hawthorne, she has had ample opportunity and resources to attempt it."
"Are you telling me you think she's coordinating something from inside the jail?"
"I'm telling you that in thirty-eight years, I have never once had a client ask me a legal question that implied they still believed they had a viable path to controlling a child's future guardianship while sitting in a jail cell facing three states' worth of homicide charges. That is not the thinking of someone who believes they're going to lose. That is the thinking of someone who believes, on some level I genuinely cannot access, that this is still going according to plan."
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Katz left the meeting and went directly to the detention center's visitor log.
Victoria Sterling had received four visitors in the eleven days since her arraignment. Preston Cole, three times, for legitimate legal consultations. And one other visitor, listed under the name "Diane Fowler," who had visited twice, each time for the maximum permitted thirty minutes.
Katz ran the name Diane Fowler.
It came back clean. No criminal record, no red flags, a fifty-two-year-old woman living in Manassas who worked as a home health aide and had, according to the visitor registration paperwork, identified herself as "a longtime friend from the design industry."
But Katz had learned, over the course of this case, that Victoria Sterling's longtime friends had a way of turning out to be something else entirely.
She pulled the visitor room's security footage.
The woman calling herself Diane Fowler sat across from Victoria for the full thirty minutes on both visits, their body language calm, almost warm, the posture of two old friends catching up. On the second visit, timestamped four days earlier, the footage showed Diane Fowler sliding something across the table — too quick, too practiced, the guard on duty apparently missing it entirely in the visual noise of the crowded visitation room.
Katz paused the footage. Zoomed. Enhanced.
It was small. Folded. Passed hand to hand in under two seconds.
A piece of paper.
"I need this room searched," Katz said to the detention center's warden that same afternoon. "Cell, personal effects, everything. And I need to know who Diane Fowler really is, because I don't think that's her name any more than Victoria Sterling was ever really hers."
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Keep reading Part 8 — because the search of Victoria's cell turns up the folded paper, and what's written on it isn't a coded message or an escape plan. It's an address. Daniel Hawthorne's temporary address, the one he and Sophie moved to under a confidentiality agreement after the wedding collapsed — an address that was supposed to be known only to Detective Katz, Margaret Winslow, and Daniel's attorney. Someone leaked it. And Katz is about to find out exactly who.
