Jessie Black Legal Thrillers Box Set 1
Books 1-3
Larry A. Winters
Box Set Copyright © 2018 by Larry A. Winters
Burnout Copyright © 2013 by Larry A. Winters
Informant Copyright © 2014 by Larry A. Winters
Deadly Evidence Copyright © 2016 by Larry A. Winters
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.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Contents
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Burnout
Informant
Deadly Evidence
What’s Next: Fatal Defense (Jessie Black Legal Thrillers, Book 4)
Books by Larry A. Winters
About the Author
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Burnout
A Jessie Black Legal Thriller
for Joan
1
After a six-hour drive, Woody got his first good look at the death house. He climbed out of his car and stretched his cramped limbs. The stench from the complex stole much of the sweetness from the crisp October air. No surprise there. Like other prisons, SCI Greene exuded an almost palpable stink, something like sweat and old bowling shoes. A bus—carrying either prisoners or their visitors—rumbled off the highway behind him and paused at the perimeter fences he’d just passed through. Time to get moving.
He carried only what he needed—a counterfeit driver’s license, a forged letter from the Philadelphia Legal Aid Society, and Gil Goldhammer’s retainer letter.
Inside the main building, he quickly identified the lobby officer, a middle-aged man with a face that looked like it had been carved out of rock. A nameplate identified him as Officer John Rice. Rigid posture and a spotless, perfectly pressed uniform gave Rice a military air which, Woody knew, would not be unusual in this place. Rice had likely served in one of the armed forces—most of the personnel here had. SCI Greene was the most secure facility in the Pennsylvania correctional system, the home of Pennsylvania’s most brutal criminals, including over a hundred men on death row.
Behind Lobby Officer Rice, a laminated poster detailed the prison’s visitation policy. Woody scanned the rules, pausing at the list of individuals prohibited from visiting inmates:
Former inmates of any correctional system;
Any person who is currently under parole or probation supervision;
Any current inmate in pre-release status;
Any DOC employee;
Any former DOC employee;
Any currently active volunteer for the DOC;
Any current or former contract employee; or
Any victim of the inmate.
Although one of these described Woody, none described the person identified on Woody’s counterfeit driver’s license, which he handed to Rice.
“I’m here to see Frank Ramsey.”
Rice glanced at the driver’s license, then studied Woody. It had occurred to Woody that one of the COs here might recognize him. While he was almost certain he’d never met Officer Rice, the man’s scrutiny twisted a sliver of fear in his stomach. He reminded himself of the changes in his appearance: He was three years older now. His figure, once bulging with steroid-fed muscle, was now slim, unremarkable underneath his clothing. He wore his hair cropped close to his head, and he’d grown a goatee. He touched that patch of facial hair now and the bristles reassured him. He would not be recognized.
Rice opened a file on his desk. “I don’t see your name on Ramsey’s visitor list, Mr. Butler.”
“I work for Mr. Ramsey’s attorney.” Woody reached into the inside pocket of his leather jacket—Rice tensed at the motion—and withdrew the forged letter. Under the letterhead of the Philadelphia Legal Aid Society, a few sentences written in the name of Ramsey’s pro bono appellate lawyer identified Donald W. Butler as his paralegal. The document looked real, and Rice didn’t question it. He stamped Woody’s hand with invisible ink.
“Ramsey’s Custody Level 5. Are you familiar with the rules?”
“Yes.”
Rice looked like he might recite them anyway, but a noisy group bustled into the lobby. The passengers from the bus, probably relatives and loved ones from Philly or some other city distant from this remote southwest corner of the state. Rice turned his attention to them and waved Woody toward a metal detector.
Woody passed through the metal detector. He tried to ignore the numerous eyes—human and electronic—that he knew were tracking his every move. This place held murderers, rapists, and every other manner of violent offender, and it was appropriately locked down. After only five or six steps, he faced two more guards.
“You the guy visiting the Family Man?” the younger of the two guards said.
“His name is Ramsey.” Woody didn’t need to feign offense at the guard’s use of Ramsey’s nickname. It genuinely pissed him off. The media’s idiotic practice of naming serial killers as if they were superheroes was bad enough. A correctional officer should know better than to buy into the bullshit.
“What are you carrying?” the other guard said. Like Rice, he had a military bearing. A frosty white crewcut and flat cheeks made his head look like a cube, and a shallow scar running from the corner of his mouth to his chin suggested he’d seen some combat, either in a foreign country or the concrete and steel battlefield of SCI Greene. Or maybe he’d just tripped at the playground when he was a kid. A tag on his uniform identified him as CO Earl Gunn.
Woody held up Gil Goldhammer’s retainer letter, the only document on him that was real. “Legal document,” he said. “I need Ramsey’s signature.”
“Let me see it,” Gunn said.
Woody tightened his grip on the paper. “Sorry, Officer. Attorney-client privilege.”
“Doesn’t matter. I need to check it for contraband.” He yanked it from Woody’s hand, flipped through the three-page letter as if a chisel or a machine gun might fall out. When he handed it back to Woody, the paper was bent and marred by a smudged thumb print. “Here ya go.”
Woody forced a polite smile. “My client is going to need a pen.”
Gunn sighed, turned to the other officer. “Get me a flex pen.” Flex pen was prison-lingo for the special pen consisting of a small ballpoint ink refill set in a four-inch cylinder of soft rubber tubing, a pen even the most homicidal or suicidal inmate would find unworkable as a weapon.
The younger guard handed the flex pen to Gunn, who handed it to Woody. “Get a few extra autographs, you can sell them on Ebay for fifty bucks a pop.”
Woody thought this might be true. Frank Ramsey’s crimes and trial had been front-page news. He had no doubt that hundreds—maybe thousands—of people would bid for his signature.
“That’s not what I’m here for.”
Gunn’s condescending smile faltered. “Do I kno
w you from somewhere?”
He didn’t like the way the CO was staring at him. There were cameras on him as well, and the last thing he wanted was for Gunn, curious, to show his picture to his friends. “I’ve been in some newspaper photos, in connection with Mr. Ramsey’s appeal.”
This was a lie. Woody had no connection to Frank Ramsey’s appeal, which had been handled—and lost—by a neophyte Legal Aid attorney.
“That must be it.” Gunn nodded and Woody’s lungs exhaled a quiet breath of relief.
He passed through a series of doors that were locked and unlocked by remote guard posts. The thunks of the locks brought back unpleasant memories, but he had little time to dwell on them.
Inmates in the general population enjoyed the luxury of meeting their visitors in the relaxed setting of the visiting room. Food and drinks were available, and the inmates were allowed limited physical contact with their visitors. They could sit side-by-side with their loved ones, embrace when meeting and departing.
Ramsey was not a member of the general population. He was in the RHU—Restricted Housing Unit—separated from the rest of the prison, and accessible only by interior walkways. Ramsey spent twenty-three hours of every day alone in his cell in G Block, one of the sections of the RHU reserved for convicts sentenced to die by lethal injection.
Woody met Frank Ramsey in a small, secure room with two guards posted outside the door. No physical contact was permitted in here, and that was fine with Woody—he hadn’t come for a hug. A metal table, stained and sticky with patches of some substance he chose not to contemplate, separated him from the inmate.
Ramsey regarded him with a prisoner’s stare, a guarded look accentuated by the dark hollows around his eyes. His face had lost some of the fullness and the ruddiness it possessed in the video clips that played on TV whenever a fresh bit of news emerged about him, but even so, prison had failed to diminish him the way it did most men.
He wore a blue “visiting” jumpsuit, which he had likely changed into moments before entering the room. In SCI Greene, there was a jumpsuit for every occasion. Cocoa-brown for the general population, white for the kitchen workers, gray for inmates on work detail outside the prison perimeter, orange for the workers inside. Inmates classified at Custody Level 5, like Ramsey, wore gray-and-white stripes like a kid’s Halloween costume. But all inmates were required to change into blue “visiting” jumpsuits before meeting people from the outside. The better for guards to identify who was supposed to be where—and who was not.
The ragged specimen that clung to Ramsey’s body didn’t look very clean. It had probably been worn by at least a couple of other inmates today, maybe more. As long as it had been washed once in the past month, it would be considered clean by the standards of prison hygiene. On Ramsey, the thing looked too small. He’d retained his impressive physique. Woody half-expected the material to split down the center of his chest if he shifted his shoulders.
A pair of handcuffs reflected the dim overhead light like cheap jewelry. They bit deep into the flesh of Ramsey’s wrists, where the skin was red and pocked with scabs and sores. Woody wondered how many hours of the day Frank endured those shackles. He probably wore them constantly, even showered in them. Kill enough people, and even seasoned prison guards will prefer not to take chances.
Seconds passed like minutes. Ramsey spoke first. “You’re not my attorney.”
“No.” Not taking his eyes from the man, Woody placed the retainer letter and the flex pen on the desk. “My name is Donald Butler. You can call me Woody.”
Ramsey nodded. “I’d shake your hand, Woody, but I’m not in the mood for a beating today.” He nodded at the guards watching them through reinforced windows in the door. “No offense.”
“Trust me, I have no desire to shake your hand, Mr. Ramsey.”
The insult didn’t faze him. After over a year in the RHU, it would take more than casual cruelty to ruffle him. He said, “Call me Frank.”
“Are you familiar with a lawyer by the name of Gil Goldhammer?”
Ramsey shook his head. “He the one sent you?”
Woody had prepared for this meeting, but staring into the man’s eyes was getting to him more than he’d anticipated. He felt a sudden urge to flee, to grab Goldhammer’s letter and the tiny prison pen, and bolt.
He clasped his hands together, concentrated on the contrast between the smooth, soft texture of the skin between his knuckles and the hardness of the bony joints, a relaxation ritual he’d taught himself.
He breathed.
“Something wrong, Woody?”
“Gil Goldhammer is one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the country. He’s defended celebrities, politicians. Maybe you read about Jorge Bonilla, the Florida businessman accused of importing cocaine from Colombia?”
Ramsey shook his head. “I don’t get much news in here. Warden turned down my request for an iPad.”
“Gil got him acquitted six months ago.” He pushed the letter and the pen closer to Ramsey. “This is a retainer letter. Sign it and Gil will become your counsel of record.”
“If I could afford the best lawyer in the country, do you think I’d be represented by a girl just graduated from law school last May?”
“You don’t need to worry about that. The financial arrangements have already been worked out.”
Instead of grabbing the flex pen, scrawling his signature, and thanking Woody on his hands and knees—which is what a sane man in Ramsey’s position would have done—the killer burst into laughter.
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, Woody, but a jury’s already convicted me. My first lawyer, from the public defender’s office, petitioned the trial judge to reconsider the verdict, but—big surprise—he denied it. Then I got a new lawyer, from the Legal Aid Society. She’s the one just recently passed the bar. She wrote up my appeal and argued it, but—again, big surprise—the Superior Court affirmed. Few weeks ago, she came by here to give me the happy news that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has refused to hear my case. So you see, Woody, unless this lawyer pal of yours is butt-buddies with the governor himself, I’m fucked.”
Woody regulated his breathing, concentrated on the tactile stimuli of his hands. The urge to run had receded, but now he was seeing himself smashing Ramsey’s face against the filthy surface of the table, shattering his nose, knocking out a tooth—and that was worse. There were guards outside the door. There were walls and locks all around him, razor wire around that, guard towers, assault rifles. He was inside the highest security section of a maximum security prison and this was abso-fucking-lutely not the place to lose control.
He thought of his brother. Don’t let him down. Don’t you dare let him down this time, Woody.
Ramsey was staring at him. His angry laughter had subsided, and with it the only spark of life he’d shown since entering the room. He looked hollow again, hopeless.
Good.
“I’m not a lawyer,” Woody said. “Gil has assured me that you are not out of options. He’s going to get you out of here.”
“I’m sorry if I don’t sound grateful to you. But when you’re in here long enough, you get careful about your feelings. Especially hope. Hope’s a treacherous feeling in here.”
Woody thought of his brother again. Hope was in short supply in many quarters.
Ramsey picked up the flex pen, and flipped to the final page of the retainer letter without reading a word of it. The chain connecting his wrists jingled merrily as he signed his name.
“You know what Mumia Abu-Jamal called this place?” Ramsey said. “A bright, shiny hell.”
“Here’s some advice,” Woody said, not looking at him. “You want to get out of here with your heart still beating, find someone to quote besides a convicted cop killer.” He took the letter, folded it, returned it to the inside pocket of his leather jacket, and stood up.
“Hey.” Ramsey was watching him intently. “Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”
Nothing comes w
ithout a price—a typical criminal’s assumption, natural when your worldview includes neither mercy nor kindness, where friendship and love are myths.
But hey, in this case it was accurate.
Woody offered him a half-smile. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
2
A familiar bell tinked as Jessie shoved open the stiff door to Quick Mart and shouldered her way inside. The owner, Alish, didn’t even glance up from his Armenian newspaper to acknowledge her, even though she’d been coming here every weekday morning for years. Morning to you, too. She moved through the narrow aisle toward the back of the store, half on autopilot at 6:00 AM, drawn by the smell of coffee.
Alish’s convenience store didn’t have the selection of a Wawa—or the fresh air and elbow room, for that matter—but it did have a couple key things going for it. First, it was really close to work. Only a couple of steps from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, where her coffee would still be hot when she settled behind her desk. And second, that coffee. The smell was fully in her head now, tingling in her nose and on her tongue, as the grimy carafes came into view beyond the racks of Doritos and Tastykakes. The best coffee in Philly.
She was filling her travel mug when she saw the kid out of the corner of her eye. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt with the hood up, a few flakes of snow still melting in the black material. He held a magazine in his right hand, but his left hand picked four-packs of Duracell batteries from the rack and slipped them into the wide front pocket of the hoodie. He was good, but not good enough to get away with it here. She shook her head. Let him learn his lesson the hard way. She had a ton of work waiting for her down the street.
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