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

When she marched into the Broad Street Victorian, she was loaded for bear, hugging Wanda and pouncing on Megan.  “All right, we’re eight weeks from trial,” she told her paralegal.  “Bring on the Lightfoot case!”

There wasn’t much.  Crime scene photos that showed Dale Scott lying in a pool of his own blood, a bullet hole in his head.  And there was the ballistics test that had matched the bullet to the detective’s own gun -- the gun that was found in the possession of Jason Lightfoot.  And gunshot residue, DNA tests, and fingerprints that proved the Indian had indeed fired the weapon.

In addition, there were a number of injuries to the victim’s face and body, including those not unlike the ones Jason had suffered at the hands of Paul Cady, clearly indicating that there had been a physical interaction of some sort prior to his death.  And blood alcohol tests, performed approximately twelve hours after the crime, suggested that Lightfoot had no alcohol in his system.

She picked up the police file on the Indian.  It wasn’t thin.  It went back almost twenty years.  There were fourteen separate times that Scott had cited him for drunk and disorderly conduct.  But there was no record of violence on the part of Lightfoot associated with any of the charges, at least nothing that was serious enough that it earned him more than a night in jail and a minor fine.  There was one instance of him urinating on a fire hydrant, another of him doing some kind of chant at the top of his lungs at three o’clock in the morning, and an accusation of petty theft that was eventually dismissed when the clerk at the fast food shop was unable to pick him out of a lineup.

What had happened this time to make it so different, she wondered.  What had gone down -- that had not gone down so many times before -- that had incited a fight that had escalated into murder?  And, whether her client wanted her to or not, what could she possibly find in these few pages that might help mitigate the crime, at least so far as to remove the death penalty from consideration?

“What about self-defense?” Megan, the brown-haired, brown-eyed paralegal, suggested.  “If there was a fight, maybe Jason feared for his life.”

Lily frowned.  “If Dale was attempting to arrest Jason, and Jason resisted, and a fight started that ended with Dale’s death, that’s not going to get us to self-defense,” she said.  “Resisting arrest is a crime in itself.”  She flipped back and forth through the file.  “If we can’t find something else, we’re going to be stuck with. . .with -- ”

She stopped in mid-sentence, shaking her head back and forth, as if to clear it, searching for the words that had been on the tip of her tongue just a few seconds ago.

“With diminished capacity?” Megan asked gently.

“Right -- dim-in-ished cap-a-city,” Lily repeated, frustrated with herself.  “Which means we have to be able to prove he was not just drunk -- he was drunk out of his mind.”

. . .

“Hey, how ya’ doin’, Lady Lawyer?” Jason Lightfoot said when he was ushered into the visiting room.  “Long time no see.”

“I’m doing okay, Jason,” Lily replied.  “Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve been here.”

“That’s okay,” he said.  “Your bodyguard kept me company.”  He looked her up and down.  “Guess you had a few other things on your mind.”

She smiled.  “If you think I look bad now, you should have seen me a month ago.”

“You don’t look so bad,” he assured her.  “It’s the two who did that to you that are gonna look bad once I get done with them.  From what Dancer here says, I figure we’re all gonna end up in the same place.”

              “Never mind that,” she said.  She looked him over carefully.  “How are you doing, Jason?”

“I been better, I guess,” he replied.  “But I ain’t doin’ so bad.  Your friend Parker -- now he’s been a real help.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said.  “Any chance you’ve remembered anything that could help us?”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Not yet, at least not anythin’ you’d be interested in knowin’ about,” he replied.  “The memory -- it just keeps comin’ and goin’.”

“Well, I wish I could say I didn’t,” she told him with a dry chuckle, “but I know exactly what you mean.”

. . .

“I must be missing something,” Lily said over dinner at the Morgan Hill house.

Carson Burns looked up from his carefully cut up braised pork chop.  “Are you being critical of Diana’s cooking?” he asked.

“Very funny,” she said, making a face at him.  It was Friday evening, she had been mulling over the Lightfoot case all week, and she was plainly frustrated.   “The Lightfoot case -- I can’t figure it out.”

“What can’t you figure out?”  Dancer asked.

“Why this time was different,” she said.  “The guy has a record going back years.  But it was all small stuff, and there was never any violence.”

“You mean, on Jason’s part,” Carson reminded her.

“That’s right,” she said.  “He’s got over a dozen D&Ds on his record, and each time, they haul him in without resistance, he pays a fine, he sleeps it off, and that’s it.”

“But Dale was the one who used to beat up on him, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, I know, I know Dale was a bully, and he liked to take his frustration out on people like Jason,” she conceded.  “But my point is -- there’s no evidence, anywhere in the record, that Jason ever resisted.  And there’s nothing to explain why, this time, he goes off the deep end, gets into a fight with Dale, and then winds up putting a bullet in his head.  If I’m going to argue diminished capacity, I’m going to have to explain to a jury what was different this time -- unlike all those other times they had run-ins -- that caused him to do what he ended up