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

doing.  And the problem is, I can’t even explain it to myself.”

“Did you ask your client?” Carson inquired.

“I did -- he doesn’t remember a thing.”

“Everyone has his breaking point,” Dancer suggested.  “Maybe he reached his.  Maybe it had nothing to do with Dale Scott.  Maybe it was about something else entirely, and Scott just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Now that’s a thought,” Lily was willing to concede.  “But if my client doesn’t have a clue what it was, how am I supposed to figure it out?”

“Maybe what you ought to do is take a totally different approach,” her father suggested.

“A different approach?” she echoed.  “What do you mean?”

“You’re trying to figure out why your client killed a police officer.  Maybe the best way to do that is to start from the other direction.”

“What other direction?”

“Well, I assume you’re going on the assumption that Lightfoot is guilty, right?”

“Of course.”

“So, instead of assuming he’s guilty, why not, just for the sake of argument, assume that he’s innocent?”

“But he isn’t,” she reminded him.  “Remember -- he fired the gun.”

“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t,” her father conceded.  “But, tell me -- how do you defend a guilty client?”

Lily sighed because she knew the answer to that question better almost than she knew her own name -- even her muddled up brain couldn’t forget it.  “By working twice as hard as I would for an innocent one,” she recited.

“Exactly,” Carson declared.

“So if I give the case the same scrutiny I would give it if I believed Jason Lightfoot was innocent,” she said slowly, almost to herself, “I might just find out what put him over the top that night.”

. . .

Lily mulled over her father’s suggestion all weekend, and on Monday morning she went looking for Joe Gideon.

“Just the man I want to see,” she said brightly when she found him in the kitchen, making himself a cup of coffee from the community Keurig.  “I’m in need of your expertise.”

“For you, anything,” he replied.  “What’s up?”

“The Lightfoot case.”

“Of course, what could I possibly have been thinking?” the private investigator said with a chuckle.  “What about it?”

“I want to take a whole different look at it,” she told him.  “Starting with everything.”

“Everything?” he repeated.

“Everything,” she said.  “If I’m going to beat the grim reaper, I have to find something I haven’t found yet.”

“But isn’t your client the one who says he’d rather die than spend the rest of his life in prison?” the private investigator inquired.

“He’s the one,” Lily confirmed.  “But I can’t care about that right now.  Whatever he may say he wants, my job is to defend him, and in order to do that, I need to know everything about what went on in that alley.  So, make this whole scene come to life for me, my friend.  And while you’re at it, dig hard around the edges of Jason, too -- dig real hard.  I want to know everything there is to know about him.  I want to know what it was -- good or bad -- that pushed him over the edge that night.”

Joe whistled appreciatively.  “Well now, you’ve got the blood boiling this morning, haven’t you?” he teased.

“You’ll have a copy of everything I’ve got in an hour,” Lily declared.

“Yes, Ma’am!”

“Good morning, Wanda, it’s a whole new day,” she said, as she marched out of the kitchen and greeted the receptionist.  “Make a copy of the Lightfoot file for Joe, will you, please?  Absolutely everything we have.  Don’t skip a page.”  It was a joke, of course.  The whole file didn’t add up to fifty pages.

“And good morning to you, too,” Wanda said.  “I’m on it.”

Lily put Megan to work, too.  “Haunt the prosecutor’s office,” she instructed.  “Make a list of every bit of information we should have, and then make sure we have it.  And if we don’t have it, do whatever you have to do to get it.”

Megan grinned.  “And who put a bee in your bonnet this morning?” she asked.

“My father,” Lily acknowledged.

This might not have been the case she would have chosen, but it was the case she had.  And the redemption she needed.  And like it or not, Jason Lightfoot was going to get the best legal representation of his life.

. . .             

Charles Graywolf was sixty-eight years old.  He pulled on his jeans and his work boots, tied his long white hair back at the neck, and farmed every day of his life.  His family was grown and gone, but there was still his wife and himself to provide for, and of course his sister, who was doing her best to drink herself to death.  Except for that part, he didn’t mind doing what he did at his age.  It gave him a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

“Jason’s a good boy,” he told the private investigator who knocked on his door.  “Responsible.  Honest.  Worked hard.  Never complained about anything.  And never asked for nothin’ in his life he wasn’t entitled to.”

“Did he ever mention the police officer he killed?” Joe asked.  “Did he ever say anything about there being any bad blood, or any kind of issue, between them, or that he held a grudge against him of any kind?”

“You talkin’ about that Scott fella?”  Graywolf shook his head.  “Jason never held no grudge against no one -- never even heard the name before what happened,” he replied.  “From then on, of course, that’s all there was to read about in the papers and hear about on the news -- all about some big long feud between them two that I can tell you never was.”

“How often did you see your nephew?”

“After he got hurt bad that time on the boat, and before all this stuff happened and he got himself arrested, I saw him just about every Sunday.  He’d hitch a ride out here from town.  And if he couldn’t hitch, he’d walk.  Ten miles.  Bad for his leg, but he did