BAD FAITH
RACHEL SINCLAIR
Tobann Publications
CONTENTS
HARPER ROSS VOL. 1-3
BAD FAITH
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
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Also by Rachel Sinclair
Justice Denied
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
Also by Rachel Sinclair
Hidden Defendant
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
Also by Rachel Sinclair
HARPER ROSS VOL. 1-3
BAD FAITH
HARPER ROSS LEGAL THRILLER SERIES VOL. 1
Copyright © 2017 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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ALSO BY RACHEL SINCLAIR
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CHAPTER ONE
“The body of Gina Caldwell was found and your client has been arrested. Do you have any comment?”
Flash bulbs popped in my eyes, blinding me. I felt bile travel from my stomach to my throat and I swallowed hard. I had a headache that would have blinded me if those damned flashbulbs didn’t first. I didn’t want to deal with this, even though I knew that I was going to have to, eventually. Ever since my former client, John Robinson, had been arrested for killing his current girlfriend and dumping her body in a ravine, I knew that this day was coming. My day of reckoning.
“Yes,” I said, putting my hand over my eyes to try to shield them from any more insult from the popping flashbulbs. “My client, John Robinson, has a Sixth-Amendment right to counsel, same as anybody else in this country. I was simply fulfilling my constitutional duty in defending him.”
My statement wasn’t something that I practiced in front of a mirror before leaving my house this morning. I didn’t dream that there would be reporters camped outside my door. After all, I lived in a quiet neighborhood in Brookside – I had restored one of those rambling turn-of-the-century homes that the Brookside area is so famous for when I won my first big case and the offers and new cases came pouring in. It was always my dream to own a large older home, and I was able to achieve this. This home became my enclave, my space where I could decompress.
Now, it seemed, it was my prison. The place where the media camped out to get some kind of word from me about how I felt to, essentially, be an accessory to murder. At least, that was how it was framed by them – I was the lower-than-scum who managed to free my client on a technicality, even though I surely knew that the guy was guilty. Blood was on my hands.
I didn’t have time to think about what had happened to that poor girl, Gina, before the media besieged me. I was suddenly surrounded by all these people who wanted to talk to me about how it was I could get this guy off. John Robinson was a Kansas City Chief’s fullback who had been charged with brutally murdering his business partner with a baseball bat. He owned a bar downtown and his partner was found in the back room, bludgeoned to death. I did know that he was guilty – he told me as much. But he expressed remorse, breaking down in my office as he told me about how he came to fear for his life around this guy, and how the victim, who was a known drug user, charged at him late one night with a large kitchen knife.
The whole thing became “he said she said,” of course, because the victim was the only person who really could tell me what had happened, and he wasn’t talking anymore to me or anyone else. Still, it seemed like a pretty cut and dried self-defense case, and I only needed to make the jury buy his story. I also had to constantly quell
my own misgivings about my client’s story, which didn’t really add up. My client John was 6’6” and 250 lbs, while the victim, a slight Jewish man named Anthony Gold, was a foot shorter and one hundred pounds lighter. John insisted to me that Anthony had a drug problem, but I could find no evidence of this. When I did my investigation, I spoke with Anthony’s closest relatives and friends, all of whom described a quiet, slightly nebbish man who loved animals and never lost his temper.
Not that any of this meant that Anthony didn’t charge John with a kitchen knife. But it certainly did seem like Anthony wasn’t the type to do such a thing, and my gut was telling me that something was off.
I ignored my gut and went into the case full speed ahead, the media following the case every step of the way. It turned out that John flunked a lie detector test, which pretty much sealed it for me – I was representing a guilty man. And I was going to give him the same treatment that I gave everyone else – I was going to go balls to the wall and give him all I got.
What I actually ended up getting was a mistrial. The prosecutor introduced the polygraph evidence without warning, I immediately objected because the judge had previously ruled that the polygraph evidence couldn’t come in, and that was that. The jury was sent home, and the prosecutors, tired of the media glare, decided not to try him again. The judge ruled that the jury was tainted by the surprise admission of the polygraph test, and the fact that John flunked it, so there was no way that they could make an unprejudiced decision.
And that was that.
Or so I thought.
I tried walking to my car, but the throng of reporters were surrounding me, essentially blockading me from my black Beemer SUV. They were all asking me for a comment, but, of course, I wasn’t going to give them anything juicy. “No comment,”I finally said. “Now please back up and let me into my car before I call the police.”
I shoved a few reporters to the side, pushing one so hard that she fell on the ground. I just rolled my eyes, not bothering to help her up. She was the enemy, or she was part of the enemy squadron, and I couldn’t care less about whether or not she tore her panty hose and skinned her knee on the pavement.
I finally was able to put my car in drive and drive off.
WHEN I ARRIVED at my office, I finally was able to process the news that my client was in jail again for a brutal murder. Well, he was no longer my client, because my contract with him only lasted for the length of his murder trial, with the option that I could write the appeal if it came to that, which it didn’t. But he was my client, and, because of me, he was free to do what he did to that poor Gina Caldwell.
I felt sick, so I opened my purse and brought out some Tums. I drank a glass of orange juice and sat back in my chair.
This isn’t your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. If you didn’t take this case, somebody else would have and he still would have been free.
I shook my head. It didn’t really work that way. Alternative universes with alternative endings didn’t really go in a linear line – if I didn’t take the case, it was possible that John would have never walked free, because perhaps, with his alternate attorney, the whole accidental polygraph courtroom admission wouldn’t have occurred. Maybe a different attorney would have pled him out to 25 to life, and Gina never would have met the guy. Who knows what would have happened if I didn’t get involved?
As I sat looking out the window of my office, at the expanse of the Country Club Plaza below, my mind kept going there - to my guilt in getting off this John, which enabled him to do it again. Deep down, I knew that this day of reckoning was coming one day. I always knew it, from the moment I was a baby lawyer and working at the Public Defender’s Office. I always knew that I would do my job so well that I would one day unleash a monster back on the streets, and that I would end up with blood on my hands.
I had been practicing for 10 years, and, thus far, it hadn't happened. Now it did, and I felt…haunted. Sickened. Like I couldn’t get the picture of Gina - so young and beautiful and full of life – out of my head. Gina had two girls who were only 11, and they would be without their mother for the rest of their lives. They would grow up knowing that their mother died in the worst, cruelest way possible, outside of being burned alive. Gina worked at the animal shelter as a volunteer, and she had rescue animals at her home. She had devastated friends, and a whole life ahead of her. A life that was cut short because I chose to give John the best defense I could give, even though I knew, deep in my heart, that he was guilty as hell.
“Hey,” Tammy, my law partner, said as she peeked her head through my door. “I saw you on the news this morning. And I saw what happened with John. Tough break, huh?”
I smiled, feeling that the words “tough break” were the most hollow, meaningless and understated words I had ever heard. “Yeah, tough break.”
I didn’t invite her in, and, ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been a big deal. She and I always practiced an open door policy, so it went without saying that we could always come into one another’s office and bounce ideas off each other or just give encouragement when one of us was down. We often celebrated together when we won a big case. Ironically, the last really big case that we celebrated was my getting John off of his murder charge. After hours, we blasted classic rock out of our stereos, and she drank champagne while I stuck to my sparkling cider – I had just gotten my one-year chip from my local AA, and I was determined not to blow it – and we ended up going downtown to a seedy bar and dancing the night away.
Now I felt like the only appropriate song for the situation was a dirge. A funeral dirge. That was how I felt – like somebody close to me died. And, in a way, something did die – my soul. My ethics. My sense of right and wrong. What the Hell was I doing with my life?
While I didn’t invite her in, she sat down anyhow. She was sitting in the swivel chair that I reserved for my client and she rocked back and forth while she carefully watched me without saying a word.
“What?” I finally asked her. “You’re looking at me like I’ve grown another head.”
She grimaced and plopped both of her elbows on my mahogany desk. “You’re not okay,” she said, stating the brutally obvious. “Listen, you were-“
“Just doing my job,” I finished for her. “Blah, blah, blah.” I felt the rancor building up inside of me. The rage over what had happened, and about my career path and life in general. “No, Tammy, I wasn’t doing my job. Not at all. If I did my job, I would have pled that bastard when I found out he flunked the polygraph. I would have listened to my gut that was screaming at me to make sure that that guy didn’t walk out that courtroom door a free man. Or I would have-“
All at once, I realized that I was sobbing uncontrollably. Tammy came up behind me and put her arms around me, and I clung to her like I was a small child clinging to her mother. “Shhh,” she said. “If it wasn’t you who walked him, somebody else clearly would have. He had all the money to get the best hired gun in the world. He would have gotten somebody who would have walked him, just like you did. Don’t blame yourself.”
I shook my head rapidly. I suddenly felt that I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was under water, and my lungs were filling up with fluid. “No,” I finally said between sobs. “That’s not true. You know that’s not true. He was guilty as sin, and maybe he would have hired a lawyer who would have done the right thing and pled him out. Or maybe that whole polygraph debacle wouldn’t have happened with another lawyer, and the case would have gone to a jury, and the jury might have fried him.”
Tammy sighed as she let go of me and sat back down on the chair across from my desk. “What’s this? I’ve never known you to have a dark night of the soul. Ever.”
I looked at her, thinking that what she just said to me was not a compliment. Like I had no conscience. I knew that there were attorneys around who apparently didn’t have a conscience, and, for them, winning was the only thing. They would take the news that John did it again in stride, figuring
that they weren’t to blame. Only John was. That kind of thinking drove me crazy – as if, in a situation like this, there was only one person to blame. That wasn’t true. It was never true. Yes, John was to blame, because he apparently had a problem with his temper, to say the very least. But I, too, was to blame for what happened. I was. There was just no getting around it.
“Dark night of the soul.” I looked out the window and realized that it was starting to get dark. I had decided to come to work late after I found out the news, and it was December, so the darkness started to fall at 4 PM. In about an hour the entire Country Club Plaza would be lit up, which ordinarily would have cheered me up. Ordinarily. Tonight, though, nothing could cheer me up.
I sighed. “I guess I should go to the funeral,” I said.
Tammy raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“No. But I need to do it anyhow.” I dreaded doing that, of course. I was going to be faced with the consequences of what I did. Of what I set loose. John was back in jail, of course, and, no doubt, would be calling me to represent him again. If he did, I would hang up on his ass so fast…I had repeat offenders before who I represented, but they were low-level things. One guy getting a million DWIs, for instance. As long as these guys didn’t kill people while they were drinking, I pretty much took their case again and again and again. But in this case…no. Just no. I wouldn’t touch that guy with a twenty-foot pole ever again.
Harper Ross Legal Thrillers vol. 1-3 Page 1