Page 36 of The Best Lawyer
Quick rose. “The state calls Jenna Rodney to the stand.”
There it was. The crux of Quick’s whole case. The eyewitness.
Chapter 15
Jenna Rodney was scaredto death. A slight woman, with long brunette hair touching her waist, she pulled the front back in a wide gold barrette. She wore a plain white blouse and black skirt. She fiddled with the positioning of the microphone as Quick came to the lectern.
He spent very little time getting her background. She was twenty-eight, had lived in Delphi her whole life, finished high school but dropped out of college. For the past six years, she’d cleaned homes for a living.
“How did you become acquainted with the victim in this case, Tom Loomis?”
“A cousin of mine gave him my number. He posted in a neighborhood social media group that he was looking for someone reliable to clean his home. I’d been doing that sort of thing for extra money here and there. But I had references. He had me come to the house to meet him, go over his expectations, then he hired me on the spot.”
“What was the scope of your employment for Mr. Loomis?”
“The scope,” she said, adjusting the microphone once more. “Just the usual stuff. His house isn’t very big. Three bedrooms, two baths. There’s a basement but the main living space is on one floor. I would clean and mop the kitchen, load any dishes he had in the sink into the dishwasher. Run it. Empty it. Vacuum the living room. Clean his bathrooms. Make his bed. And I did his laundry. About every three months I’d come in and do a deeper clean. You know, the fridge, baseboards, windows.”
“When did you start?”
“Close to four years ago.”
“So you worked for Mr. Loomis before his marriage to the defendant?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Okay. How was Mr. Loomis as a boss?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, was he picky? Did he pay you fairly? Did you like working for him?”
“He was good,” she said. “He paid me a hundred a week. I cleaned for two to three hours. Mr. Loomis was a bachelor then and not very neat. But his house was easy to clean. He was always pleasant. Respectful. And he left me alone to do my work. In fact, after I’d worked for him for a while, he trusted me enough to let myself in and out of the house when he wasn’t there. He left for work really early. I think five thirty. So I’d get there around six and do my job while he was gone.”
“You had access to his home,” Quick said. “How?”
“He gave me the garage door code. I would let myself in through the garage and he kept the door to the housethroughthe garageunlocked. It leads straight into the laundry room. Like a mudroom.”
“Did you have a key to the house?”
“No.”
“Just the access code to the garage? That’s all you had?”
“Yes.”
“Has he ever changed the code since you started working there?”
“No,” she said. “It was a four-digit code.”
“How did he communicate that code to you?”
“He told me it,” she said. “I think I worked once or twice while he was in the house. Then he started having me come when he was at work. So he gave me the four-digit code.”
“And it was always the same one.”
“Correct.”
“You said you went in through a service door through the garage. Did you have a key to that door?”
