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

“Maybe so,” Dancer conceded.  “But if I know Jason, unless he wants to be found, they’ll never find him.”

. . .

“If you’re lookin’ for my nephew,” Charles Graywolf said, “I’ll tell you what I told them others -- he ain’t here, and I ain’t heard from him.”

“Relax,” Joe said.  “I’m not here to bust your chops.  I’m just here to give you a message to give to him -- should you happen to hear from him.”

“And what makes you think I’m gonna?” the Indian asked.

The private investigator shrugged.  “Let’s just say, gut instinct,” he said.  “So, when you do get to talk to him, tell him his lawyer’s got a better case to make for self-defense than he realizes, and she wants him to come back and let her present it.”

“Does she really think she’ll get to finish this trial?”

“She’s hoping to,” Joe told him.  “And she’s hoping, when she does, that it’ll all turn out right.”

“And Jason’s supposed to believe that?”

“I know the lawyer,” Joe said.  “And I believe her.  Now, whether he believes it or not is up to him.”

“If I hear from him, I’ll be sure to tell him,” the uncle said.

“That’s all I can ask.”

The conversation was over.  Graywolf walked his visitor to his car.  “They’ll never find him up there, you know,” he said.  “He knows them mountains better than any white man ever will.  If he wants to, he can stay lost in ’em forever.”

Joe nodded.  “I know,” he said.

. . .

“Quite an interesting turn of events,” Carson Burns observed that evening.

It was just the two of them, sitting in the library after dinner was done.  Lily had sent Dancer down to the Last Call, and the other bars along lower Broad Street, and over to the casino at Cypress Ridge, and anywhere else he could think of to go, to nose around, to pick up any stray word that might be floating about, to see if anyone had any idea where Jason Lightfoot was hiding, and what he might be thinking.

“Tell me about it,” she said

“Do you believe what you told Grace?”

“Actually, I do,” Lily replied.  “The trial was going pretty well.  And even though I realize that Jason wasn’t holding out much hope of getting an out-and-out acquittal, I’m reasonably sure he understood we at least had a good shot at a hung jury.”  She sighed.

“What?” her father asked.

“Well, I guess I agree with Dancer,” she said.  “Maybe he wasn’t paying so much attention.  Maybe what he was seeing out the window had a stronger pull on him.”

“They won’t find him, you know,” Carson said.

Lily nodded.  “I know,” she said.  “That’s what Dancer says, too.  And what Jason’s uncle told Joe.  And to tell you the truth, I’m not sure how to feel about it.  On the one hand, I would have liked the chance to argue self-defense.  I think we could have put up a strong case for it.  On the other hand, who really knows if the jury would have bought it?”

“You think it’s a hanging jury?” her father inquired, because the one thing that the television cameras were not allowed to show were the jurors.  So he wasn’t able to see their faces or their expressions or their body language, which was how he had always judged how a jury was leaning.

“I think there’s a dead cop, and the feeling in the community is that someone’s got to pay for that,” Lily said.  “What I was hoping for was that I could get first-degree down as far as maybe manslaughter.  But at this point, I suspect nobody’s thinking about reasonable doubt.”

. . .

With the trial on hold, Joe Gideon and Arnie Stiversen met again at The Hangout.

“Why am I doing this?” the police officer asked.  “The guy’s gone.  We can’t find him.  The State Patrol boys can’t find him.  No one’s going to find him.  Why am I putting my neck on the line for him?”

“Because Lily isn’t ready to give up on him yet, so I can’t,” Joe told him.  “And besides, the judge could always decide not to declare a mistrial and try the guy in absentia.”

“Yeah, well, if anyone finds out what I’m doing here,” his former colleague said, “it won’t just be my badge, you know -- it’ll be my pension.”

“No one’s going to hear a word about it from me, I can tell you that,” Joe assured him.  “As far as I’m concerned, and I’ll get up in court and testify to it, if I have to, there’s any number of ways I could have gotten this information.”

“Yeah, well, if that’s so, then I wish you’d gone one of those ways,” Stiversen said wryly. “Not that I blame the guy for running,” he added.  “Self-defense was going to be a pretty steep climb, even for Lily.  And from what I was hearing, the jury might have been intrigued by her courtroom drama, but they weren’t necessarily buying into it.”

“She never got to put on her case,” Joe reminded him.

“Yeah, well, if we do catch him, it’ll make it even worse for him, you know -- everyone will be assuming he ran because he was guilty, and then what’ve you got?”

“A bigger problem than we’ve got now, I guess,” Joe replied.

“You might say,” Stiversen said with a brief chuckle that was quickly followed by a thoughtful frown.  “The thing is,” he added, “if we do catch him, and he does go back to trial, I don’t want to see him hang if all he tried to do that night was protect himself.”

With that said, he slid a small folded piece of paper across the bar toward his friend.

Joe unfolded the paper.  The name that was written on it was indeed one of the three that Neil Van Aiken had given him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I hope you get to use it.”

“So do I.”

Joe slipped the paper into his pocket, and took a big slug of beer.  “Dale wasn’t such a bad cop when I