Presumption of Guilt
Rachel Sinclair
Tobann Publications
Copyright © 2019 by Rachel Sinclair
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Also by Rachel Sinclair
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Also by Rachel Sinclair
Also by Rachel Sinclair
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Chapter 1
Avery
I was in my condo, pacing the floor. The dogs were on edge, along with me. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Yesterday, I had sent my brother over to talk to that Julian Rodriguez. Aidan hadn’t come home since. Not only that, he wasn’t answering his phone. I had no idea what had happened to him. I only knew that it wasn’t like him just to do this.
Aidan was sometimes a bit of a flake. He had the surfer mentality, where, on his days off, he loved to go and ride the waves. He was very good at it. And, like a lot of the surfers around, he did indulge in his share of cannabis. It was legal, so why not? It wasn’t like he could possibly lose his job, or not be able to sit for the bar, because he might get busted for having marijuana. That wasn’t how it was in this state. So he indulged in the pot, sometimes a little bit too much for my taste, but I didn’t say anything.
So, I thought at first that maybe he had decided to go and see his buddies, and toke up with them. I was annoyed all yesterday because I couldn’t get in touch with him. I imagined him sitting around with a group of guys, passing around a bong, getting wasted, and not answering his phone.
I was boiling by the end of the night.
When I woke up this morning, and saw that he still had not come back, I thought that something had gone wrong. I needed to get information from him about that Julian Rodriguez, and yet he had stood me up. But what if something worse had happened to him? What if somebody really didn’t want him to talk to Julian? Would I be in danger as well? Would Regina? After all, Regina was the one who had found the name of Julian Rodriguez in the first place.
It was bad enough that I continued to get death threats. That was happening again, although I had not heard from the mysterious X for quite a while. Not since the last email where he threatened me, and hinted around that maybe he knew who had killed my best friend. How he might’ve known that, I didn’t know. I had Christian try to track down exactly who this person was, but he had not had much luck. Christian said that whoever it was was an expert in spoofing IP addresses, and that the guy must’ve been one step ahead of even him. That was the reason why the FBI had not been able to track him down, either.
I knew what I was going to have to do. I was going have to call Regina and Christian to come over, and the three of us were going to have to figure out what to do to find my brother. I couldn’t just sit there, pacing and fretting. I had to have a plan.
Christian and Regina showed up an hour later. “Dude,” Regina said to me. “You still haven’t heard from your brother yet? I mean, what the hell happened to him? He goes over to the funny farm yesterday, talked to that guy, I guess, who knows if he talked to him? And then what, he just never shows back up here? I mean, what the hell?”
I looked over Christian. My hands were shaking, and he walked over to me and put his hands on top of mine. “What did I do?” I asked him. “I sent him over to talk to that Julian Rodriguez, and now something happened to him. I mean, if something really did happen to him, how can I ever forgive myself? I’m the reason why he was over there in the first place. He didn’t want to go over there, and I forced him to. I told him, pretty much point-blank, if he didn’t do this for me that I was going to kick him out of the house. What kind of sister am I?”
“Now, relax,” Christian said, looking me in the eye. “We’re going to figure out what happened to him. More importantly, we’re going to find him. With my computer hacking skills, and Regina’s investigation skills, we’ll figure it out. Just relax. You’re in good hands.”
I clasped my hands in front of me, and I looked down at the hardwood floor. My brother was really the only thing that had grounded me all these years. He was the only thing that has been a constant in my life ever since I got out of prison. He was the one person who had known me the best. Regina had been a good friend over the years. I just met Christian, but he seemed to be a pretty solid guy. But nobody had grounded me the way Aidan had.
If something had happened to him, especially if it was my fault, I didn’t know if I could ever recover.
“Okay, then, where do we begin?”
“The first thing we need to do is figure out if there’s any way that we can possibly track his cell phone,” Christian said. “Did he install some kind of find my phone type app? Or anything like that?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, but I don’t think so. There must be some other way that you can figure out where his phone is.”
“I’m going to start with that,” Christian said. “I want to try to locate his phone. Even if its GPS is turned off, I can still locate it. It’ll be a lot tougher to do, but I can do it. But, if his phone is turned off, all bets are off. I don’t think that I can find it. I don’t think I’ll be able to find out where he is. I can find where he was when the phone was turned off, but if something happened to him, if somebody abducted him, I don’t think that they’re going to go ahead and let him have a live phone. That would just defeat the purpose of doing what they�
�re doing.”
“Okay, Christian, so you’re going to try to locate Aidan through his phone. And what are you going to do, Regina?” I asked her.
“Obviously, I’m going to go down to that Behavioral Health Institute place, and talk to people who know him down there. Maybe somebody saw him being abducted, if that’s what happened to him. Maybe somebody saw something. I mean, maybe –”
It was then that I heard the door rattle.
I screamed as I saw who it was.
It was Aidan.
Chapter 2
Avery Collins
I woke with a start, as I always seemed to do anymore. Most of the time, I woke up screaming or with the feeling that I was being suffocated. This time, however, I simply woke to the sound of my pounding heart. I looked around the room, which, as usual, had every light on, for I no longer could sleep in the dark.
At first, I thought that I was back there – the place where my nightmares weren’t nightmares at all, but, rather, were the moments of my waking existence. The prison cell where I spent 7 long years on a hard cot, eating nasty food, showering in front of a bunch of other women and only seeing the daylight during the one hour a day that I was allowed into the prison yard. Ever since I was released because the Innocence Project took my case, which led them to finding out that the prosecutors who tried my case had concealed pertinent DNA evidence that didn’t fit their theory that I was responsible for the murder of my best friend, Becky Whitfield, which led to my new trial and subsequent finding of innocence, I simply couldn’t sleep unless I had every single light ablaze in my bedroom.
But, of course, I soon realized that I wasn’t in my prison cell. I was in my bedroom, safe in my $10,000 California King. Snuggled beneath soft sheets, my head on a specialty orthopedic pillow that gave firm support to my neck and spine while I slept. I was very careful about my bed and my bedding, not because I had any kind of special physical problems, but because I was determined that, if I ever made it out of that Joliet, Missouri prison, where I slept on a rock-hard cot with thin sheets and a limp pillow for 2,756 nights, I would treat myself to the very best of everything that sleep technology had to offer. My settlement with the State of Missouri for wrongful imprisonment, which netted me a cool $10 million, definitely went a long way towards my realization of that particular dream.
That settlement also helped me buy this beach condo in Coronado, California. Coronado was considered to be a suburb of San Diego, but it had more of a quaint small-town feel to it. From the mom and pop shops that lined the main drag, along with the family-owned restaurants, to the grand Victorian-era hotel, The Hotel Del, that was right next to my condo, the enclave of Coronado offered the escape that I needed, the fresh start that I was looking for after spending 7 years in prison, from the age of 15 to 22, and a lifetime of living in housing projects on the East Side of Kansas City before that. The only good thing about being in prison was that I got college credit while I was there, so I was able to complete my undergrad degree in only two years. I graduated from Harvard Law school at the age of 27, determined to help people like myself. People who were wrongfully convicted. I dedicated my life to just these people.
I looked at the ceiling, seeing that it was 3 AM. I was awake, wide awake, and, if history was any guide, awake I would stay. I sighed, seeing my boxer pup, Lola, snoring beside me in the bed, while her sister and litter mate, Harlow, lay sawing logs at the foot of the enormous mattress. They weren’t about to get out of the warm bed for anything or anybody. I knew that, so I didn’t even try to wake them.
I put my feet onto the hardwood floor and went to the balcony that was attached to my bedroom. My Harvard Class of 2015 mug was still on the small table, still filled with the nasty herbal tea that I always took before bed because I couldn’t ever sleep without it. A joint was stubbed out in the marble-blue ashtray, no doubt a leftover from my brother, Aidan, and some of his surfer friends who always seemed to be hanging around my house. Aidan was the reason why I was out in California – he was raised by our father out in San Ysidro, a border town a stone’s throw from Tijuana, while I was raised by our mother in a tenement on the East Side of Kansas City. Once Aidan found out that I was a millionaire, he couldn’t wait for me to move out to California and buy the beach condo that he had always dreamed of living in. I bought the condo and I didn’t object to him living with me, mainly because I was terrified of living alone and I needed the company.
Aidan was 25 and in his last year of law school at the University of San Diego in the Linda Vista area of town. USD was a private Catholic college, which was ironic, as Aidan was anything but religious. He really only wanted to go to that school because it was the only decent law school in the area, and, when I graduated from Harvard Law school and came out here to start my new life, Aidan was determined that he was going to live with me, which meant that his choices of law schools were limited to the schools in the area. He thought for sure that UCSD would have a law school, which would have been his first choice, but they didn’t, so USD it was. He didn’t mind it, as the law school was secular, so his atheistic brain wasn’t offended by having to be subjected to a constant barrage of, as he put it, “Jesusy bullshit.”
I closed my eyes, smelling the scent of the ocean and listening to the waves crashing in. Lola the boxer nudged the French door open with her nose, and came out to sit next to me. She lay down next to my chair and promptly fell asleep.
I smiled. “Oh, feeling insecure, Lola? You’re going to bother me with your snoring out here now, aren’t you little girl?” I scratched behind her ears and pet her head and looked at my empty coffee cup. I considered going into the kitchen and brewing another pot of tea in hopes that maybe, just maybe, I could get back to sleep, but thought better of it. I felt envious of the sleeping Lola and Harlow. Unlike them, I had nights that were so devoid of sleep that I was afraid that I was going to soon be hallucinating a controlling companion, a la Tyler Durden from the book and movie Fight Club. They didn’t have any trouble sleeping at all. That was what they did best, even though they were only a year old.
The sound of Lola’s snores were a great comfort to me during these early hours when the whole world was asleep. When I was in prison, canine companionship was one of the things I missed the most. I had all the female camaraderie I could ever want behind bars – I surprisingly got along well with most of the women I met there, for most of them were in the maximum security women’s prison for drug-related crimes. Specifically, most of the women were involved in armed robbery or some other kind of violent crime that stemmed from their need to finance their drug habit. I occasionally met a woman who popped her old man because he was beating on her, but, mainly, armed robbery seemed to be the most common crime of the women I met in prison.
My cell mate, Regina Baldwin, actually fell into the latter category of women who popped their abuser. She told me that her boyfriend, Michael Carter, was also her pimp and he regularly beat on her. She finally got fed up with him kicking her, and punching her, so she shot him in cold blood one night while he was in a drug-induced stupor. She was sentenced to life in prison, but, when I got my Innocence Project lawyer, I convinced them to take on her case, as well. Her brilliant attorney, Elizabeth Castro, managed to get her conviction overturned by proving that her trial attorney failed to bring up the defense of temporary insanity or the battered spouse defense, even though both defenses were available in Missouri in cases like Regina’s, and she, too, got a new trial that she won.
I looked at my cell phone, wondering if Regina was awake. She probably was. Like me, she had problems sleeping. The poor woman was suffering from severe PTSD from her years on the streets, working as a sex worker, and she never felt safe, even in her own home. She was currently working for me as an investigator, which was the perfect job for her, as she knew the language of the streets. Granted, these particular streets were much different from the streets that she knew in St. Louis – the weather was much nicer, with 300 sunny days each year, and e
ven the most run-down homes were still worth more than some of the nicer homes in Missouri – but they were the streets, nonetheless. Criminals were the same all over, and Regina spoke their language. Much better than I did.
I picked up the phone to call her, seeing that the clock read 4:11. She picked up right away.
“Yeah, girl, what’s up?” she asked me. Her voice didn’t have sleep in it, so my instinct was right. She was probably sitting on her own balcony, wondering when she was going to start hallucinating her own domineering buddy.
“Is it ever going to get better?” I asked her, knowing that she was going to know just what I was trying to say. We were cell-mates for the better part of three years, so we had long since developed a short-hand in our communication.
“No, dude, it’s not,” she said. “It’s not, so don’t even think it’s gonna get better. Life’s a bitch and then you die, man. Life’s a bitch and then you die.”
She started coughing, the rasp blaring through the phone.
“How’s your quitting smoking coming along?” I asked her, knowing the answer before she even said a word.
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