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

. . .

Lily picked up half of her chicken salad sandwich and took a bite.  Along with her father and Dancer, she was having lunch on the patio, and she was pretty proud of how adept she was becoming at using her left hand.

“If I can do it, you can do it,” Carson had told her.  “And look on the bright side -- at least it’s only a temporary inconvenience for you.”

“Yes, but I’m getting so good at it, maybe I should never go back to being right-handed,” she declared with a chuckle.

Carson chuckled in return.  “I’ll believe that the next time you need to sign your name on something official,” he said.

“Well, maybe I’ll be ambextrous then,” she amended.

“What’s that?”

“Ambex -- ambibex,” she tried to say, but the word she wanted got lost somewhere and wouldn’t come out.

“I think you mean am-bi-dex-trous.”  Carson said gently.

“Yes, that’s what I meant,” she said.  “Am-bi-dex-truss.  After all, I shouldn’t let all this retraining go to waste.”

“Never let it be said that you let anything go to waste,” her father chided.

“From what I can see, she’s letting a perfectly good fruit plate go to waste,” Dancer observed.

“No, I’m not,” she retorted.  “I just haven’t gotten to it yet.”

As if to emphasize the point, she picked up her fork, poked it awkwardly into a big piece of melon, and proceeded to shove it into her mouth.  “See?” she said, but both the word and the melon got caught in her throat, and she started to choke.

“Watch it there,” Carson said, and Dancer reached over and slapped her a couple of times on the back.

She managed to spit out the errant piece of fruit, but she was still choking.  Dancer reached for the water pitcher that sat in the middle of the table.  The sky was cloudless, and as he raised the pitcher, sunlight glinted off it and, for an instant, the water seemed almost to glow.

Lily froze in mid-choke.  “Gold,” she croaked.

“What?” Carson asked.

“Gold,” she repeated.  “Metallic gold.  The plane -- it was painted metallic gold, and there were two black stripes running along the side.”

. . .

They met at The Last Call, at a back table only slightly larger than the one Joe and Stiversen had sat at the evening before.  It was Saturday afternoon, the day and time having been chosen specifically because none of the three police officers was on duty.

The surrounding tables were empty, and only a few people sat at the bar, probably because it was still early -- barely past three o’clock, which suited Joe just fine.  He didn’t need any unauthorized ears around.  He was the first to arrive, Stiversen following right behind, and the two detectives showing up ten minutes later.

“As you know, I‘ve been working with Lily on the Lightfoot case,” Joe began, once the obligatory pitcher of beer and glasses had been placed on the table, and they were more or less alone.  “But when that bomb got dropped on the Jansen cottage, I guess you could say, my attention got a bit diverted.”

“No one could blame you for that,” Flynn said.

“At all,” Coello added.

“Well, while my attention was diverted, I happened upon some rather interesting information,” Joe continued.  “Information that I think could be key to making the case.  But the thing is, it doesn’t do any good for me to have it, since I can’t do much with it -- officially, I mean.  And, too, Lily is recovering, and pretty soon she’s going to be getting back to work.  And since we’re pretty much done with July, and the Lightfoot case is going to trial in a little over two months, that’s going to have to be my priority.”

“It was my idea for Joe to bring you in,” Stiversen told the two detectives.  “Obviously, because it’s your case, but more important, because we trust you to do what’s right.”

At that, both Flynn and Coello hunched forward in their chairs.

“Well, you sure have our attention,” Coello said.

“What I’d like to do,” Joe said, “is to turn over what I’ve got to someone who can legitimately pursue it.”  He looked at the two detectives.   “As Arnie says, it’s your case, so the question is -- do you want what I’ve got?”

The two detectives looked at each other.  “Lay it on us,” Flynn invited, “and we’ll see if we think we can do something with it.”

Joe proceeded to do just that -- lay out for the detectives pretty much everything he had shared with Stiversen the day before.

“Wow,” Coello said, when the private investigator was finished.  “We weren’t anywhere close to making that connection.”

“Neither one of you was here when the assault went down,” Joe told her.  “You would have had no way of knowing.  And when the victim recanted, the case was essentially closed.  The fact that I remembered it helped me narrow the playing field, and then putting the rest together turned out to be pretty easy.”

“When the victim recanted,” Coello inquired, “did you believe him?”

Joe shrugged.  “Didn’t matter, had no choice at the time,” he said.  “But I suspected then, and I still do now, that there may have been coercion involved.”

“I’d like to take this on,” Flynn said.  “The chief was trying to tell us, just yesterday, in fact, that we’d hit a blank wall, and it was time to move along, but I think maybe he’ll have a change of perspective once he hears some of this.”

“There’s just one small hitch,” Stiversen said with a sigh.  “The assault case file -- two suits came looking for it yesterday.”

“What do you mean?” Coello asked.

“I mean that two lawyers from Seattle showed up at the station yesterday, trying to get their hands on it, probably intending to make it disappear.”

“Are you kidding?” Flynn exclaimed.

Stiversen shook his head.  “Wish I was.”

“Did they get it?”

“No, they didn’t,” he was told.  “They sure looked for it, but it seems it might’ve gotten misplaced.  Anyway, they couldn’t find it.”

“What does that