CUTTING ROOM -THE- by Jilliane Hoffman Page A

I’m personally gonna have a hard time sleeping, wondering whose terrified kid that is on that clip.’
    â€˜How many children do you have?’ Daria asked. ‘No, no, scratch that — how many daughters?’
    â€˜None and none. No little Mannys or Emanuelas running around. At least, none that I know of.’
    Daria rolled her eyes. ‘I would’ve pegged you for the dad of a harem of teenage daughters with that last comment.’
    â€˜I may not have kids myself, Counselor, but it doesn’t take much to imagine what it would feel like if my daughter was raped and whacked by a psycho with a camera and a thing for household cleaners. Maybe the dad of the girl in that video has no idea what happened to his kid. Maybe she went out one night and never came home and he has no idea what became of her. Maybe her family’s hoping she had a car accident and bumped her melon and has amnesia, and they wait for the day she walks back through their door.’
    â€˜She’s a little old to be calling a kid. I’m thinking late twenties.’
    â€˜Okay, so she’s not a kid. Then maybe she’s married and her hubby has been scouring every waterway within a ten-mile radius of their house thinking she had a car accident and that’s why she didn’t come home for supper. Or maybe she’s not dead. Maybe she was raped and her assault was caught on camera and the bastard uploaded it to YouTube. Those are just a few of the scenarios that popped into my head. You and I have had to deal with the families of enough murder victims to understand that not knowing is the worst. I don’t have to be a dad or a husband to feel for them.’
    â€˜What if she left home at sixteen to earn a living as an adult entertainer in LA and this shit she does with her boyfriend is mild compared to the other tricks she can perform with a rope? I just thought of
that
scenario off the top of
my
head.’
    Manny shrugged and moved to the door. ‘It’s a forty-nine second clip, Counselor. Just imagine what we didn’t see, what footage might’ve ended up on the cutting-room floor.’
    â€˜That works both ways, you know. It could be ten minutes of foreplay and cigarette smoking.’
    â€˜Could be.’
    â€˜Ugh.’ She spun her chair around to face the jail. ‘I’m not heartless. I’m being practical, is all.’
    â€˜Okay,’ he answered, but he didn’t sound convinced. He pulled the cigarette from behind his ear. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow after the grand jury, although I’m sure you’ll be on the horn with Guy to find out how I did way before that.’
    Daria waited until the door closed before she sank her head into her hands. She wanted to scream. She heard everyone saying hello to Manny as he made his way down the hall and finally out of the unit.
    Talbot Lunders definitely had headline potential. If she didn’t see that before, she did now. The rape and murder of a pretty college coed by a privileged, former male model was intriguing enough to attract interest, and without adding yet more salacious detail, could prove a difficult story to control. But throw in a mysterious, lurid email, a homemade bondage sex tape, a secret family hideaway in Switzerland and the distraught, well-dressed, hot, young socialite momma of the defendant alleging lookalike blondes were being hunted and tortured by a real killer who the police weren’t bothering to look for, and you had the potential makings of a national news sensation. A savvy publicist would pitch it to the morning talk shows as ‘the perfect story’. Daria thought it more akin to the perfect storm.
    After five years prosecuting everything and anything from shoplifting to homicide, Daria knew that Sex Batt was where she wanted to be. And she didn’t want to settle for being a line prosecutor — she wanted to lead the charge. As the cliché went, she’d