Trial by Fury by K.G. MacGregor Page B

we’re supposed to call. The AD handed out a bunch of his business cards at a meeting a couple of years ago.” Kay opened her wallet to find it. “Here it is…Austin Thompson. I think he went to law school here a few years ago, but apparently he works now at Hubbard-McCaffrey. I guess that’s one of the law firms downtown. All I know is he’s in with all the big shots in the AD’s office. And the boosters too. Pals around with the players…you know the kind—a jock sniffer. He shows up like a genie out of a magic lamp whenever one of ’em gets in trouble with the cops. Bar fights, DUIs, shoplifting. I bet the football team has him on speed dial.”
    So that’s how it worked—an attorney on call who ran interference for all the athletes. Apparently the basketball team had him on speed dial too. “Who pays him? The athletic department?”
    Kay paused her story while the waitress delivered their lunch.
    “Beats me. I just know I called him like they said and he turned a bike theft into a lost and found.”
    If Celia had to bet, he also had a hand in turning a gang rape of an unconscious woman into consensual sex.
    * * *
    Theo twisted in her chair at the massive conference table where she and Jalinda had splayed more than a dozen law books open to cases relevant to wrongful death. The State of Georgia made it all but impossible to hold another party responsible for suicide, no matter how ugly the circumstances.
    “For the sake of argument, let’s assume we get past the issue of standing,” Theo said. A formidable assumption, since the defense would argue Donald Lipscomb was not Hayley Burkhart’s closest surviving relative, and therefore not eligible to sue anyone for her loss. “What’s our best way around Appling ? Hayley didn’t lose the ability to behave rationally during the thirty-day period following the rape. No rage, no frenzy, no loss of control. The defense will argue there’s no proximal cause of death. Case dismissed.”
    Jalinda reviewed her notes, which were tagged as usual with multicolored tabs linking them to the evidence they’d collected so far. “So we’ll need to document her state of mind. Interviews with friends, sorority sisters. Establish a change in personality or demeanor during the window.”
    “Good, good.” She’d gotten some of that in her interview with Michael, which Celia had arranged. As they’d suspected, his boyfriend, Gavin Sandifor, played for the Hornets and was part of the players’ secret group where the video had been shared. “And since she reported the crime to the student health center and campus police, followed up when she received the video, and ultimately took it to one of her professors when the police refused to charge her assailants, we can also show that she believed the university was equally responsible for her state of mind.”
    It was a stretch but Theo couldn’t cut new law out of whole cloth—she had to shape the facts of the narrative around existing cases. The key was convincing first a judge then a jury that Hayley’s feelings of being violated—along with frustration at the university’s lack of action on her behalf—had created a sense of hopelessness. When her rapists were glorified after their championship win, she suffered a sudden mental breakdown that led to her impulsive act.
    Jalinda’s nose wrinkled with uncertainty. “What if they say she was already unstable? That the circumstances of her birth and the loss of her grandmother made her unable to cope. Or she suffered remorse after engaging in sex with multiple partners. Or maybe she was just acting out a dramatic scene because of her interest in performance studies.”
    Already unable to cope . Without realizing it, Jalinda had just given her a brilliant idea.
    “Damn, Jalinda. I’m going to use that to argue her suicide was foreseeable. I wish you’d think more seriously about my advice to go to law school. You’re a natural.”
    “It’s not natural. I get it