A Matter of Life and Death by Phillip Margolin (ereader with dictionary TXT) 📕

baby meant everything to him, and he was certain that he would lose them. What a fool he’d been. He had known that illegal fights were run by gangsters, and he’d fought anyway. Now he might pay the ultimate price if he was arrested for a murder he had not committed.

At some point, Joe found a trail and followed it down until it ended at a road. The rain had let up, but he was cold and exhausted. He checked a street sign and learned that he was on the west side of the Willamette, miles from the motel.

Joe rested until he had his breath back. Then he started jogging toward the closest bridge. As he ran toward Maria, he thought about the fight. Something had been wrong with Carlos. He had moved so slowly, and there was the glazed look in his eyes. He was certain that Carlos had been drugged, which meant that the fight had been fixed and he’d been set up. Once he’d killed Carlos, they had him, and they’d made him the perfect fall guy.

The sun was starting to rise when he knocked on the door to the motel. Maria opened the door and stared at her husband. Joe had fallen more than once, and his jeans were soaking wet and covered with mud. His shoulders sagged, and he looked exhausted.

“Where have you been?”

“Pack up,” Joe said without answering her.

“We just got here.”

“It’s not safe.”

Maria stared at Joe. He averted his eyes.

“Why isn’t it safe? What did you do?”

Joe was about to answer when he heard several cars pull into the lot below his room. He pulled back the shade. Armed police officers were getting out of the cars and following a large woman and slender black man up the stairs.

Joe felt like crying. He’d failed his family. Maria and the baby would be lost to him and thrown on the mercy of the state. He doubted that he’d ever get them back again.

“Stay inside,” he said. Then he opened the door and walked onto the landing with his hands in the air.

“I give up. Don’t shoot. My wife and my baby are inside. Please don’t hurt them.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

During the drive downtown, Ian Hennessey and Judge Carasco barely said a word. Hennessey was exhausted from answering Carrie Anders’s questions and in shock after seeing Betsy Carasco’s mutilated body, and nothing he thought of saying to comfort the judge seemed appropriate. A little after two in the morning, the young prosecutor dropped the judge at a hotel a few blocks from the courthouse.

Hennessey lived on the fourteenth floor of a new condo in northwest Portland. Wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows gave him a spectacular view of the city lights, the river, and the mountains. He could afford to live in luxury because a hefty trust fund supplemented his salary.

Hennessey collapsed onto his king-size bed shortly after entering the condo, but he had a hard time getting to sleep. The horror at Carasco’s house had made him forget his ordeal at Stacey Hayes’s apartment, but the threat she posed came flooding back as soon as he closed his eyes.

What was he going to do about the warrants? He’d been counting on Judge Carasco to help him, but the judge would be preoccupied with his wife’s murder and her funeral, and this wasn’t the time to approach him. That meant he would have to make a decision that could destroy his career, and his career meant a lot to him.

Ian’s parents were A-plus-plus personalities. His Princeton and Harvard Medical School–educated father was a brilliant, highly compensated physician. His mother was a very successful stockbroker. Ian had never been able to live up to their expectations, and his parents had done a poor job of hiding their disappointment.

In high school, Ian had finished with a B average only because no one at his exclusive prep school received a grade below a B. He had flunked out of the top-ten college his parents’ pull and donations had gotten him into, and he had graduated with a low-B average from a state college. Ian knew that he would never have gotten his job with the district attorney’s office if his parents hadn’t pulled some strings, but he’d come to love his job, and he was desperate to make a success of this chance. Now, through no fault of his own, he was once again on the brink of failure.

Eventually, Hennessey fell into a nightmare-plagued sleep. When he woke up, it was still dark, and he was still exhausted. Hennessey tried to get back to sleep, but failed miserably. A little after six, he scarfed down a breakfast of black coffee and toast, which was all he could tolerate, and drove to work. Only a few people were in, and the deputy with whom he shared his cramped cubicle wasn’t there yet.

Hennessey logged on to his computer and typed in Stacey Hayes. He couldn’t find any outstanding warrants, but he did find an order from circuit court judge Wilma Malone dismissing two prostitution cases and two warrants for failure to appear. The order had been put in the system shortly after Stacey moved to Portland.

Hennessey had tried a case in Malone’s court. She was new to the bench and had practiced insurance defense in one of Portland’s big firms. Why would Malone get rid of Stacey’s warrants? It made no sense. Then Hennessey wondered if Malone knew about the order. It would be pretty simple to slip an order of such little consequence into a pile that had been sent to the clerk’s office. If that’s what happened, who had authored the forgery?

Anthony Carasco, the only person Stacey knew in Portland, was the most likely suspect. And that led to more questions. When they were in Carasco’s chambers and at dinner, Carasco had acted surprised when Hennessey told him that Hayes was a prostitute who had warrants out for her arrest in Oregon, but he had to know if Carasco