A Reasonable Doubt by Susan Sloan (free novels .txt) 📕

if you change your mind.”  Then, with a polite nod, he departed.

“Are you sure you shouldn’t have taken him up on his offer?” Wanda inquired, picking up the card and making a point of tucking it away in her desk drawer.

“No, I’m not sure,” Lily had to admit.  “And once I think about it, I’ll probably regret that I didn’t.”

It took less than a week.  Lily was returning to town after a routine visit with Jason Lightfoot when a red Chevrolet Silverado ran her green Toyota Camry off the back road and into a ditch.  Before she could even react, someone was throwing a hood over her head, yanking her out of the car, and dragging her into the bushes.

“The damn Injun killed a cop,” a man’s voice close to her ear said -- the words and the voice ringing eerily familiar.  “A good cop.  A cop with lots of friends.”  His breath was heavy with liquor.  “The bastard ain’t nothin’ but pond scum, and he deserves to hang.  You wanna stay healthy, you see to it he gets what he deserves.”  She felt his hands on her body, touching her in places he had no right to touch her.  She heard him snicker.  “Sorry,” he murmured in her ear.  “Much as it would be fun, you don’t do a thing for me, bitch.”  And then he was gone.  She heard the truck start up, and tear off down the road.  She pulled off the hood.  She was alone.

“I know who it was,” she told Joe and Megan and Wanda after she had to wait for the owner of the local garage to come help get her car out of the ditch, and then had to explain why she was so late getting back to the office.

“Who?” Joe asked.

“One of the guards over at the jail,” Lily said with certainty.  “I didn’t see him, but I recognized his voice.”

“Was it the same guy who sideswiped you the other day?”

“No.  Same truck.  Different voice.”

“Find that red Chevrolet, and you’ll have him, and whoever his buddy is,” Wanda suggested.

“That would be too easy,” Joe said.

“You’re looking for a red Chevy Silverado, with AJN on the license plate,” Lily told Arnie Stiversen and Paul Cady when they showed up, in response to Joe’s call, two hours later.  “But I’m pretty sure you’re going to find it burned beyond recognition in some field somewhere, or at the bottom of the Strait, or reported stolen maybe a week ago.”

The two police officers exchanged glances.

“Two out of three,” Cady murmured.

“We already found it,” Stiversen said.  “It was burning a big hole in the ground over at Maxwell Flats.  The owner claimed it went missing about ten days ago.”

“How’d you know?” Cady asked.

Lily shrugged.  “Two incidents.  Same vehicle.  Too risky to keep.”

“Same guy?”

“No,” Lily said.

“What else?” Stiversen asked.

“That’s all,” Lily said.

The police officer’s eyes narrowed.   “You know at least one of them, don’t you?”

Lily shrugged again.  “This is a small town,” she replied.

“You sure you don’t want to file a complaint?” he pressed.

“I’m sure.”

Lily sat alone in her office after Stiversen and Cady were gone, more shaken than she was willing to admit.  The guard and his buddy, whoever he was, were a pair of jerks, and she would have liked nothing better than to take them down, but she sill had the Indian’s trial to get through, and pressing charges would not only be a major distraction for her personally, it would be a public relations nightmare.  She could see the headlines already: COP KILLER’S LAWYER CRIES FOUL.  She sighed, knowing, whatever the outcome, it would likely do more harm than good.

But that didn’t mean she had no options.  It just meant it was time to be sensible.  First being sideswiped and then being run off the road and inappropriately manhandled were clear indications that this whole thing was escalating out of control, and she had no way of knowing how much further it would go. Nor did she care to find out.

Lily swallowed her pride, retrieved John Dancer’s card from Wanda’s drawer, and called the number on it.

. . .

“To be honest, I really didn’t expect you’d still be here,” she told him.

“I had a feeling you’d be calling,” he said.

They sat in her office barely an hour after Stiversen and Cady had left.

“Thank you,” she said.

There was an easiness about John Dancer, about his tone, about his manner.  She noted that right away.  He seemed totally comfortable, not only in his clothes, but in his skin as well.  “I’ve been on the job for going on twenty years now,” he told her.  “A while back, I got involved in a high speed car chase when I should have known better.  Landed in the hospital with more busted bones than I thought I had whole to begin with.  As you can imagine, I was awhile healing.  And then, just when the doctors said I was ready to get off my butt and back into gear, I get this phone call.”

Lily nodded, as it all began to make sense.  “From the Honorable Grace Pelletier, I presume.”

He smiled.  “Yes, Ma’am, that would be the lady,” he said.  “She and my mother go way back.  Anyhow, when she explained what the situation was over here, I figured I could do a lot worse than spend a few months riding shotgun for a lawyer who was just trying to do her job.  And I guess my captain felt the same way, because he didn’t argue too much.  Not after the judge talked to him, anyway.  So here I am, on loan, so to speak, to see to it that you get from here to October in good health, so you can try your case in a court of law, and not in the court of public opinion.”

Lily contemplated him for a long minute.  “Why do I think there’s more to this story?” she inquired finally.  “Something you’ve left out.”

“The judge said you were sharp,” Dancer said with a