1.
Fluorescent lights shone against Karima Thomas’s face as spectators in the crowded courtroom craned their necks to get a glimpse of her.
She was accustomed to such stares. Her cocoa-colored skin, absent of makeup except for a simple lip gloss, was flawless. Her nails were painted with a pearl-colored polish that matched her Bottega Veneta clutch. The white linen suit she wore hung perfectly from her shoulders. Her silky brown hair was pulled back in a braided French twist.
It wasn’t her beauty that caused people to watch her so closely. It was her fame. In the two months since Mayor Jeffrey Tatum’s murder, she’d become a household name, and everyone knew her story.
It had begun on the first of May—two weeks before Philadelphia’s primary elections—when the mayor was gunned down and Karima was blamed.
The police had searched desperately for Karima while she and her boyfriend, Duane Faison, crisscrossed Philadelphia in pursuit of the mayor’s real killer. When they finally found the shooter, he tried to escape, and Duane was shot in the confusion.
Karima was arrested in connection with that shooting and the murders of two politically connected drug dealers. Duane’s deathbed confession in two of the three shootings—and the fact that Duane had been shot with more than one gun—convinced a judge to free Karima on $10,000 bail with the stipulation that she submit to electronic monitoring.
When Karima and her lawyer emerged from the courtroom following that decision, the media was waiting.
“Did you kill Duane?” a reporter shouted as she and her lawyer walked through the parking lot.
“Are you guilty?” yelled another reporter while cameramen jockeyed for position.
Karima stopped suddenly and turned to face them, her emotions still raw from Duane’s death two days before.
“We’ve all done things we’re not proud of, but I’m not a monster, and I won’t let you turn me into one,” she said, holding back tears as the cameras rolled. “I loved Duane. He knew it, I knew it, and that’s all that matters.”
Through the rest of May and most of June, prosecutors sifted through evidence. The media told stories about the beautiful suspect and the drug dealer who’d died defending her. Karima focused her attention on her mother, Sharon Thomas, the recluse who’d come out of hiding to defend her daughter. The two of them took walks along the tree-lined streets of Sharon’s affluent neighborhood, watching spring give way to summer as paparazzi photographed their every move. They laughed at silly jokes. They cried for Karima’s loss. They loved each other.
Along the way, Sharon resolved to make up for the time they’d lost to her years of seclusion. “I promise I’ll be there for you, no matter what happens in the case,” she told her daughter more than once.
Now it was July, and today, Sharon and the rest of the world would learn Karima’s fate. The preliminary hearing had begun at eight o’clock in the morning, and its outcome would determine whether the case would go to trial.
The wooden benches in the pine-and-marble courtroom were filled to capacity. There were cameras from truTV. There were reporters from every news outlet. There were people from both sides of the law.
Karima’s Aunt Marilyn, the disgraced City Council president who’d been implicated in the City Hall corruption probe, was in attendance. Councilman Richard Ayala was there, though he’d refused to press charges against Karima and Duane for attacking him during their quest to solve Tatum’s murder. The families of the two drug dealers who’d been killed were in the back, exchanging hostile stares with the police and federal agents who were scattered among the sheriff’s deputies who normally worked in the courts.
All of them had one thing in common: Karima. As the room’s recirculated air grew thick with the smell of stale sweat baked beneath television lights, the spectators hung on every word, waiting to see what would become of the woman who’d changed Philadelphia forever.
They listened as witnesses testified about the mayor’s extramarital affairs with both Karima’s Aunt Marilyn and her mother, Sharon Thomas. They listened as others implied that Karima was just another in a long line of women in her family who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted.
Karima listened, too. She heard people she hardly knew describe her as a whore. She heard others label her a lifelong criminal. She heard gasps when political insiders gave twisted accounts of her relationship with the mayor. With each lie, Karima’s anger grew stronger. She managed to hold her feelings in check— feelings that had been threatening to boil over since Duane’s death two months before.
The feelings ran from anger to grief and back again. In between there was the emptiness she’d always held inside. When Duane was alive, she had told herself that he had filled her void. Now that he was gone, she knew that she’d never felt truly complete. If she couldn’t find her missing part now, she never would. That was why she needed to go free. When the judge went to her chambers to consider the testimony, Karima considered her future.
She’d already been cleared in the mayor’s murder because of the ironclad case against the mayor’s chief of staff, who’d been implicated by his co-conspirator, Karima’s father, Bill Johnson. Prosecutors had also decided to drop the murder charges in the drug dealers’ deaths due to Duane’s deathbed confession.
Now she had only to beat the weapons and aggravated assault charges connected to her violent hunt for the mayor’s real killer, and the murder and attempted murder charges that had been filed against her in connection with Duane’s death. If she did, the story that had been framed by the press as the Romeo-and-Juliet saga of a beautiful good girl and a rugged bad boy would finally end. Things had rarely been that simple for her, nor would they be that simple now.
“Karima,” her lawyer said, tapping her lightly on the shoulder. “Get ready. The judge is about to come in.”
She looked at him with the hardness that had lingered in her eyes since Duane’s death.
“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath before turning around to look for her mother, Sharon Thomas, who’d kept her promise and been there through every day of Karima’s ordeal.
When Karima didn’t see her, she panicked. “Where’s my—”
“She’s in the hallway talking to the young man she was sitting with,” her lawyer said, patting her arm to calm her. “She’ll be right back. Don’t worry.”
Karima had seen the two of them sitting next to each other earlier. The man looked familiar—hauntingly so.
However, the man wasn’t important to Karima. Her mother was. Over the past two months, Karima had watched Sharon’s transformation from a recluse to a woman who’d decided to live again, a woman who’d put her own fears aside to help prove her daughter’s innocence. In spite of everything that had happened in the past, and no matter what happened today, Karima would always love Sharon for changing. More importantly, she knew that her mother would always love her, too.
“All rise!” said the bailiff, stirring Karima from her thoughts. “The Municipal Court of Philadelphia is now in session, the Honorable Myra Weaks presiding.”
Karima stood up. The judge, a stern woman with cowrie shells in her salt-and-pepper dreadlocks, sat down.
After telling the spectators to be seated, the judge glanced at Karima with a look that appeared to carry the promise of swift punishment.
“Will the defendant please rise?” she said in a strong, clear voice.
Karima and her lawyer stood.
“After carefully considering the testimony that was offered here today,” the judge said before pausing to look over the top of her glasses at Karima, “this court finds it unfortunate that there’s nothing in the criminal code to cover stupidity. If there were, I’d lock you up for going to jail for a drug dealer, going back to him when you were released, and putting your life on the line for him when he clearly didn’t have your best interests at heart.”
“You don’t know anything about him,” Karima murmured before her lawyer or anyone else could stop her.
The judge angrily snatched off her glasses. “What did you say?”
The gallery erupted in loud gasps. Karima’s lawyer squeezed her hand and gave her a look that begged her to be quiet. But there were now two angry black women in the room. Neither was about to remain silent.
“I said you don’t know anything—”
“Please forgive my client, Your Honor,” her lawyer said, cutting her off.
“I don’t need forgiveness,” Karima said, her voice rising slightly. “I need her to know this isn’t about Duane. It’s not about posturing for these cameras. It’s not about putting our relationship on trial. As far as I’m concerned, the only fact that’s come out of this is that Duane Faison loved me better than any man ever could. He loved me so much that he took a bullet for me.”
“No, he took a bullet from you, Ms. Thomas,” the judge snapped.
“That was an accident,” Karima retorted.
“None of us knows that for sure,” the judge said. “And while this court would love to consider your version of the facts, the truth of the matter is that the evidence presented here today is enough to hold you over for trial on the charges of aggravated assault, illegal possession of a firearm, and attempted murder. The evidence doesn’t support the murder charge … yet.”
The spectators’ voices rose to a loud hum and the judge banged her gavel. “I will have order in this court or I will clear everyone out of here including these cameras!”
The noise in the courtroom subsided and the judge leaned forward in her chair. “Karima Thomas, it is the decision of this court that there is sufficient evidence to take this case to trial. You will be processed at the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center. Because this court considers you a flight risk, bail is set at one million—”
A loud scream ripped through the air. It sounded as if it had come from the hallway.
Sheriff’s deputies rushed out the door as chaos erupted. A few seconds later, Karima’s worst fears were realized.
“Someone call an ambulance!” one of the deputies yelled. “Hurry!”
The judge banged her gavel as people began to run toward the confusion. The cameraman from truTV tried his best to make his way into the crowd.
Karima turned around and saw what was happening. Then she jumped the railing and began pushing her way through.
“Ms. Thomas, stop right there!” the judge shouted.
That was when everything seemed to slow down for Karima. She looked to her right and saw reporters squeezing out the door. To her left, she saw a sheriff’s deputy darting toward her. Federal agents and police detectives were spilling into the hallway in an attempt to restore order. Karima would not be stopped.
She tossed people aside with a strength that belied her size as she scrambled across the room. She pushed past the sheriff’s deputy who dared to stand in her way. When she reached the hallway and knelt down, her heart stopped at the sight of Sharon Thomas lying motionless on the floor.
Sheriff’s deputies surrounded Karima, but refused to intervene when they saw her kneel at her mother’s side.
“Get up, Mom,” Karima said, feeling like a helpless little girl. “Please get up.”
Sharon didn’t move. Karima’s eyes darted back and forth. Her breath came in great heaving gasps.
“Mom?” she said, shaking her mother’s shoulders. “Mom!” she screamed as grief washed over her. Karima felt like she was the victim, but that feeling made her want to fight all the more.
Blinking back tears, Karima stroked her mother’s hair. “I love you,” she said with a furrowed brow and quivering lips. “I’ll find whoever did this to you.”
Sharon looked up at her daughter with eyes that told her not to seek revenge. Karima saw what her mother was trying to say, and answered her mother’s unspoken plea.
“You know I’ve always done what I had to, Mom. That’s why I’ll find whoever hurt you.”
A look of grim determination swept over Karima’s face as she stroked her mother’s hair. “Seeing you grow these last two months has been …” Her voice broke, and she paused to gather herself, because Karima refused to cry. “Remember your promise, Mom. You said you would be there for me no matter what happened.”
Sharon looked up at her daughter and tried to smile. She couldn’t, though. She was too weak.
Karima reached down and cradled her mother’s head in her lap. As Sharon closed her eyes and lapsed into unconsciousness, Karima’s white linen suit grew red with the blood that leaked from the small wound at the base of her mother’s neck.
Karima’s self-control gave way to rage.
“Mom!” she screamed. “Mom!”
The sheriff’s deputies moved in. One of them slapped a handcuff on her left wrist. Karima began to scratch and claw at them with her free hand. As the deputies grew in number, Karima’s aggression became more pronounced.
“Mom!” she screamed as she kicked a male deputy in the groin. “That’s my mother!” she shouted before snatching at a female deputy’s hair.
Finally they put a knee in her back and forced her down until her screams were muffled by the floor. As she continued to struggle beneath the force of six people, they cuffed her other wrist and dragged her to her feet. That was when the paramedics arrived.
Karima grew eerily calm as she watched the rescue workers administer CPR to her mother.
“We’ll get the bail!” her lawyer shouted as the sheriff’s deputies pulled her back into the courtroom. “You’ll be out by tonight!”
Karima ignored him. As they took her to the corridor that led to a waiting prison van, she scanned the courtroom for the man who had sat next to her mother.
He was gone. Sharon might be, too. As Karima thought of her mother’s life slipping away, she felt something sticky running down her wrists. Things were just as they’d been on the day Duane had died. There was blood on Karima’s hands again.
* * *
“Why do you keep doing shit like this?” Jocelyn Lynch yelled as she wagged her finger in her husband’s face, hoping that the pain in her voice could make him care again.
Kevin Lynch wouldn’t respond. He couldn’t anymore. His refusal to take his daughter to a freshman orientation at the University of Pennsylvania was just the latest chapter in an argument that had raged throughout their marriage. His job as a Homicide captain was his identity. That left little room for anything else— including his wife of seventeen years and the daughter who’d grown up virtually without him.
“Are you listening to me, Kevin?” she said with a hand on her hip and attitude in her voice. “Our daughter needs you, and you’re telling me that just this one time out of a hundred and fifty, you can’t let someone else handle it?”
“The Tatum murder is my case, Jocelyn,” he mumbled as he tied his tie and picked his gun up off the bedroom dresser. “I need to be there.”
“Your case?” she asked with a mix of sarcasm and disgust. Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and spoke in a softer tone. “You don’t get it, do you?”
Kevin took note of the calm that had replaced Jocelyn’s rage. When she was calm, as she’d been when they’d met at the University of Pennsylvania nearly twenty years before, she was at her best.
He still remembered the resolve she’d shown when they were both at Penn and his grandmother died. She’d calmly told him how blessed he was to be alive. Then she pushed him to look at his own past and let it go. He remembered the way she’d helped him to shake off the ill effects of being raised in the rough-and-tumble world of the East Bridge projects. He remembered that woman and wondered where she’d gone, and as he thought of the way he’d treated her over the years, he wondered where he’d gone as well.
Copyright © 2009 by Sola Productions, Inc
