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Anonymous Tip: Donna’s Melting Down

Anonymous Tip: Donna’s Melting Down

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 5:52 am by Libby Anne

Anonymous Tip: Donna’s Melting Down 2016-04-29T05:52:24-04:00 Libby Anne

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A Review Series of Anonymous Tip, by Michael Farris

Pp. 283-287

I feel like I’ve been doing this a long time. A very, very long time. I’m about ready for this book to end, frankly, but we still have over 180 pages left.

This section opens with Peter making some changes to the official complaint, adding a count against Donna and Rita for falsely claiming there were fading bruises, and adding a count against Donna, Rita, and “the estate of Gerald Blackburn” for computer tampering. Farris tells us that Peter knew these counts might not be allowed, but he felt Judge Stokes would want to include them if at all possible. Peter just had to find a way to convince him to do so.

By ten the next morning, Sally and the Amended Complaint ready for Peter’s signature. He debated the alternative of signing the document himself alone or asking Gwen to sign the new complaint as well. The rules permitted either method, and he decided to sign it alone since he realized the only real reason he was considering having her sign was to gain another opportunity to see her. He was trying to do better.

While I’m glad Peter didn’t create yet another excuse to see Gwen—he’s done that basically every time he could so far—I’m curious whether he checked with Gwen about making these changes. From the beginning, he has been in the driver seat on this lawsuit, with Gwen popping in to play the role of tortured love interest.

Willet was surprised by nothing other than the speed of Peter’s action.

Can we stop doing this? It’s getting weird. We know that Peter puts in his paperwork way fast. We’ve been told like fifteen times. We also know that Gail does the same. Honestly, why is Gail surprised at this point? She’s been surprised at Peter’s speed in filing things like five times now, right? If she’s as whip-smart as she’s supposed to be, she would no longer be surprised.

She was angry at the department—for now she was reasonably certain that Blackburn acted alone—but in a strange way she enjoyed the additional challenge of defending a case with bad facts. She knew the court precedents were on her side, and her job was simply to make Judge Stokes realize that he had no alternative but to dismiss this entire case—even the surgery and tampering counts.

This is also like the fourth time Farris has explained this.

She was as dedicated to this case as Peter. Gail Willet would love to set legal precedents advancing the cause of government programs to protect children.

It’s interesting to note that Farris positions Gail as doing what she’s doing in order to advance “the cause of government programs to protect children.” It’s interesting because of what we know about Farris. He appears to be trying to mix some things in his readers’ minds, to associate efforts to protect children through government programs with efforts to put computer tampering and fraud beyond legal accountability. It’s a nice propaganda tool, but as someone extremely concerned about the fact that Farris’s parental rights organization is currently hiring more lawyers and planning to litigate more individual cases in an effort to set precedents against children’s rights, it is a deeply, deeply troubling approach.

At this point the scene changes. Donna takes vacation time to spend a week with her boyfriend, Stephen, at his parents’ lake house. Stephen has finished taking the bar, you see. He tries again to convince Donna that she should come with him to D.C.—“We can get married there or back here at Thanksgiving”—but Donna declines and says she has “so many doubts and so much confusion.” She’s not doing well—not well at all. Peter assumes her fears and confusion are related to Blackburn’s death, and starts her asking questions about it.

“Was he involved in anything peculiar just before he was killed?” It was a question the police had never asked her.

WHAT. Spokane has some damned incompetent police! Isn’t that something you should ask after any sudden and random death, and especially in cases where the deceased is in the middle of defending himself against a civil rights lawsuit? How was Donna not asked this?!

Corliss’s heart sank. She knew she could not lie convincingly to Stephen, but she could not bring herself to tell him the truth. And she felt certain he would feel responsible to tell the police if she revealed the details of the blackmail plot. She knew that Blackburn had coerced a payment out of Coballo, and she had begun to wonder if someone else had been blackmailed as well.

Stephen’s question prompted her to think, for the first time, that the murder might actually have been committed by someone who had been blackmailed. The thought scared her. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

WHAT. Really? Really? A guy blackmails you and an unknown number of other colleagues, tells you he has a plan to “fix” a legal case with freaking bombs, and then gets mysteriously shot and you never even consider that this could be at all related? Weren’t we introduced to Donna as an ace investigator?

Sigh. So. Anyway. Stephen is all worried about Donna, and worries about how she’ll do when questioned in court given that she’s crying and all he did was ask a few questions, and asks why they can’t get the case postponed further. As he asks more questions—about whether she knows who all was involved with the tampering, whether she’s sure it was Blackburn, and so on—she’s freaking out and squirming and rocking and refusing to make eye contact because she doesn’t want Stephen to know she was in on the computer tampering. Stephen is pretty straight-laced, remember. He probably would go to the police.

Amidst all this, she starts worrying that he doesn’t believe her. He responds:

“Who said I didn’t believe you? I was just asking if you knew what really happened. I remember that one time you were involved with Blackburn in embellishing some facts on a case. I just wanted to know what you knew.”

He’s referring to the time they were having lunch after the very first hearing, and Donna told him that she had fabricated the bruises in the case. At that time she claimed it was because she knew, given the way Gwen said she spanked Casey, that there had to sometimes be bruises, that she was just looking out for Casey, and that she had to embellish the facts because the law didn’t go far enough to protect children. She did not mention to him that she had actually decided to use this “Code B” procedure because Gwen had screamed at her and called her a witch. Either way, Stephen was not okay what Donna told him.

Okay, back to the present:

Despite the inability to see her eyes, Stockton had doubts about her story. She protested way too much. He knew her well enough and had good lawyerly instincts. He decided to change the subject. For the first time he was secretly glad she was not going with him to Washington, D.C. He would not ask her again.

The conversation ends there, and on Sunday Stephen leaves for D.C.

Stephen is still a confusing character to me. He is supposed to be the trust fund kid of a rich lawyer father, following in his father’s footsteps as he is expected to do, but one might expect such a character to be privileged and entitled and okay with adjusting the facts as needed to get the required ends. Instead, he is ethically scrupulous and hard working—remember all the weeks of study he put in for the bar. He doesn’t expect to slide by on his dad’s handouts, and in fact he’s rather glad to be going to D.C. for a time to establish himself before coming back to his father’s firm.

As for Donna, her character started out confident and cool and is now in full meltdown mode. I get that people do find themselves in such situations, but given Farris’s initial presentation of Donna I would have expected her to be acting more like Gail at this point. Instead, she has shifted from being cool and calculating to bursting into tears every time someone mentions the case. Now yes, she did just have a colleague murdered, but if she was that affected by Blackburn’s death you’d think she would have spent more time thinking about why he was killed and who could have done it.

Either way, Stephen is leaving the picture and Peter and Gail are gearing up for a battle over whether the tampering charges can be added to the case. It should be riveting.

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