Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1)

by Peter Kirkland

  Small Town Lawyer

  Defending Innocence

  Identical Evidence

  The Testimony

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, MAY 2021

  Copyright © 2021 Relay Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Peter Kirkland is a pen name created by Relay Publishing for co-authored Legal Thriller projects. Relay Publishing works with incredible teams of writers and editors to collaboratively create the very best stories for our readers.

  www.relaypub.com

  Blurb

  An innocent client harbors dark secrets…

  Defense attorney Leland Monroe lost it all: his big-city job, his reputation and, worst of all, his loving wife. Now he’s back in his hometown to hit restart and repair the relationship with his troubled son. But the past is always present in a small town.

  Leland returns to find his high school sweetheart hasn’t had the easiest of lives—especially now that her son faces a death sentence for murdering his father. Yet what appears to be an open and shut case is anything but. As Leland digs deeper to uncover a truth even his client is determined to keep buried, a tangled web of corruption weaves its way throughout his once tranquil hometown.

  Leland soon realizes it’s not just his innocent young client’s life that’s at stake—powerful forces surface to threaten the precious few loved ones he has left.

  Contents

  1. Monday, June 10, 2019

  2. Tuesday, June 11, Morning

  3. Tuesday, June 11, Later That Morning

  4. Tuesday, June 11, Evening

  5. Wednesday, June 19, Evening

  6. Wednesday, June 19, Evening

  7. Thursday, June 20, Evening

  8. Thursday, June 20, Evening

  9. Friday, June 28, Afternoon

  10. Thursday, July 11, Morning

  11. Friday, July 19, Morning

  12. Friday, July 19, Afternoon

  13. Friday, July 26, Afternoon

  14. Friday, July 26, Evening

  15. Sunday, July 28, Morning

  16. Monday, July 29, Morning

  17. Monday, July 29, Afternoon

  18. Tuesday, July 30, Morning

  19. Thursday, August 1, Evening

  20. Wednesday, August 7, Afternoon

  21. Thursday, August 15, Afternoon

  22. Tuesday, August 27, Afternoon

  23. Monday, September 9, Afternoon

  24. Friday, September 27, Afternoon

  25. Friday, September 27, Evening

  26. Saturday, October 5, Afternoon

  27. Friday, October 11, Morning

  28. Sunday, October 27, Morning

  29. Tuesday, November 5, Morning

  30. Thursday, November 21, Afternoon

  31. Monday, December 16, Morning

  32. Monday, December 16, Afternoon

  33. Tuesday, December 17, Morning

  34. Tuesday, December 17, Afternoon

  35. Wednesday, December 18, Morning

  36. Tuesday, December 24, Morning

  End of Defending Innocence

  About Peter Kirkland

  Make an Author’s Day

  Sneak Peek: Lethal Justice

  1

  Monday, June 10, 2019

  The Ocean View Diner, where I was waiting for my fried shrimp basket, was a dump with a view of nothing but the courthouse parking lot. It was already shabby when I was in high school, living on fries and coffee while I brainstormed the college application essays that were my ticket out. Much to the surprise of folks in my hometown, I’d made it to law school and beyond. I owned more than a dozen suits. I had tan for summers in the office, navy for opening statements to the jury, charcoal for talking to the media on the Charleston courthouse steps. My kid had admired me at an age when it was almost unnatural to think your dad was anything but a loser. I was a law-and-order guy trying to make the world safer. I’d thought I might run for office.

  I nodded to the bailiff who walked through the door giving him a cordial “howdy”, but he looked right through me, as he walked past. We’d certainly seen enough of each other in the courthouse, and I tried not to take offense at the slight but there’s only so much a man can put up with when it comes to small town judgment.

  They say pride goeth before a fall.

  I’d seen enough, in my past life representing the great state of South Carolina, to know a man could have it a lot worse. The amount of depravity and human misery that had flowed across my desk made me know I ought to be grateful for what I still had left. My son, in other words, and my license to practice. I’d nearly lost both. The accident that took my wife had nearly killed him too, and even if he still hadn’t entirely recovered from it, he’d come farther than anyone expected at the time, but Noah was incredibly angry all the time. Mostly at me but I tried not to let it get to me.

  Like water off a duck’s back, the little things ought not to have bothered me at all. It shouldn’t have mattered that the locals at the next table had stopped talking when I walked in, apparently suspicious of anyone who wasn’t a regular. Which I wasn’t yet, since it’d been barely six months since I dragged my sorry ass back from the big city. Getting to be a regular took years.

  A better man would not have been annoyed by the smell of rancid grease or the creak of ancient ceiling fans. It was even hotter in here than in the June glare outside, and a good man would’ve sympathized with my waitress, who was stuck here all day and probably never even got to sit down.

  But I was not that man. I did say “Thank you kindly” when she dropped my order on the table and sloshed another dose of coffee in my cup, but I was irrationally annoyed that no one had ever fixed the menu sign on the wall between the cash register and the kitchen. The word “cheeseburger” was still missing its first R. When my friends and I were sixteen-year-old jackasses, we thought it was hilarious to order a “cheese booger.” Now it was just pathetic that I was back. Especially since the reason I wasn’t in the new ’50s-style diner on the next corner—the popular lunch place for judges, local politicians, and successful attorneys—was that I couldn’t afford it. Here, in exchange for tolerating the broken AC and worn-out furniture, I got decent shrimp at prices that were fifteen or twenty years behind the times.

  The folks at the next table had gotten back to jawing, though at a lower volume on account of my being unfamiliar, I supposed. Between crunches of my dinner, I caught the gist: a body had washed ashore a little ways down the coast, where tourists rented beach houses. Maybe I shouldn’t have eavesdropped. But although I wasn’t a prosecutor anymore, I was probably never going to lose the habit of keeping a close eye on every local crime.

  “Bunch of them Yankees was playing volleyball on the beach,” the man said. “You know, girls in their bikinis, one of them thousand-dollar gas grills fired up on the deck.” His voice held a mix of humor and scorn. “They were having themselves just a perfect vacation. And then this corpse washes up! This, I swear to you, decomposing corpse crashes the party!”

  The table erupted with guffaws.

  “So what’d they do?” a man said. “Hop in the Subarus and hightail it back to New York or wherever?”

  “No, the thi
ng is—and I heard this from my cousin, you know, the one working for the sheriff? The thing is, they thought a gator got him! Thought they had a gator in the water! And I’ll be damned if they weren’t pissing themselves like little girls, trying to get everybody back out of the water. Couple of them was so scared they started puking!”

  They all lost it. One of them was so entertained he slammed a hand on the table, rattling the silverware. As the laughter started fading, one of them wondered aloud who the dead man might be.

  “Aw, don’t matter none,” the storyteller said. “We ain’t missing nobody.”

  I felt a sourness in my gut. I couldn’t go a day here without being reminded why I’d left. In Basking Rock, compassion for your fellow man was strictly circumscribed. Tourists got none. The wrong kind of people, whatever that meant, got none. Your family and lifelong friends could do no wrong, and everybody else could go straight to hell.

  I signaled the waitress and asked for a doggie bag. Might as well finish eating at home, away from present company. She scowled, probably thinking I was switching to takeout to avoid leaving a tip. I scrounged through my wallet, sure I’d had a few ones in there and grudgingly set down a five knowing I was leaving more than necessary. Making any kind of enemy was not my style. You never knew who might help you out one day, if you’d taken care not to get on their bad side. More to the point, I knew from friends who worked in health code enforcement that there were few things stupider than making enemies of the folks who make your food.

  I’d parked my Chevy outside. It used to be the beater, until the nice car was totaled in the accident. When I fired it up, the engine light came on again. I kept right on ignoring it. I’d yet to find a local mechanic I could trust. The one I knew of had been a bully back in high school, and from what I’d heard, age had only refined his techniques. If he thought you’d gotten too big for your britches—which I certainly had, what with my law degree and my former big-city career—he took his rage out on your wallet.

  The Chevy heroically made it home once again. I parked beside the clump of fan palms that were starting to block the driveway. I needed to get them pruned, and to fix the wobbly porch railing that would’ve been a lawsuit waiting to happen if we ever had visitors. I needed a haircut. My geriatric Yorkie, Squatter, who limped to the door to greet me, needed a trip to the vet. The to-do list never stopped growing, and checking anything off it required money I no longer had.

  I tossed the mail on the table and scratched the dog on the head. He’d come with the house—the landlord said he’d been abandoned by the previous tenants, and I couldn’t bring myself to dump him at the pound. As he wagged his tail, I called out to my son. “Noah?”

  All I could hear was the breeze outside and Squatter’s nails scrabbling on the tile. I was no scientist—my major, long ago when I thought I was smart, was US history—but I knew physics did not allow a house to be that quiet if it contained a teenage boy. It looked like I’d be eating another dinner alone. I’d texted Noah when I got to the diner, to see if he wanted anything, but he hadn’t answered. I never knew where he was lately, unless he was at a doctor’s appointment I’d driven him to myself.

  After feeding Squatter I pulled up a chair, took a bite of now-cold shrimp, and flipped through the mail. The monthly health insurance bill—nearly thirteen hundred bucks just for the two of us—went into the small pile of things I couldn’t get out of paying. Noah’s physical therapy bills did too; as long as he still needed PT, I couldn’t risk getting blacklisted there.

  And he was going to need it for a good while yet, to have a shot at something like the life he’d been hoping for. We were both still hanging on to the thread of hope that he could get back into the shape that had earned him a baseball scholarship to USC in Columbia. The accident had cost him that, but he was determined to try again.

  Or so he’d said at first. Lately he’d gotten depressed with how long it was taking, and how much fun he saw his high-school buddies having on Instagram. They’d gone to college and moved on with their lives. He’d started making new friends here, but to my dismay, they were not what you’d call college bound. College didn’t seem to have occurred to them. One worked in a fast-food joint, and another didn’t seem to work much at all.

  I heard gravel crunching in the driveway. Even without the odd rhythm his limp gave him, I knew it had to be Noah; our little bungalow was an okay place to eat and sleep but too small to be much of a gathering place. I stuffed the bills into my battered briefcase. He didn’t need to know we were struggling.

  Squatter raced to the door to celebrate Noah’s return and accompanied him back to the kitchen in a state of high canine excitement. Noah looked a little glum, or bored, as usual. Without bothering to say hi, he poured himself some tea from the fridge, sat down in the chair next to mine, and took one of my shrimp.

  “I would’ve brought you some,” I said. “I texted you from the diner.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t see it in time,” he said, feeding the crispy tail to Squatter.

  “That’s a shame,” I said. “What were you so busy doing?”

  He glared at me. That look was a one-two punch every time. He had his mother’s eyes, so it felt like the hostility was coming from both of them.

  I knew I should back off, but I was never good at drawing the line in the right place. “Hanging out with Jackson again?”

  He took another shrimp, got up, and went into the living room. At fourteen, Noah had perfected the art of sullen teenager. Now at nineteen, he’d turned it into a lost art as he immersed himself in the depression and apathy that comes with having your life turned completely upside down.

  I was a big believer in surrounding yourself with people who had similar goals. Or at least not with people who’d just drag you down. Jackson wouldn’t have been my first, second, or twelfth choice of friends for Noah. He was a troubled kid. Maybe it was time for me to admit that Noah was too, and not because of Jackson. We’d gone downhill as a family. It was as much my own fault as anyone’s; although most days, I felt as though Noah blamed me for all of it. Many of those days, I was sick and tired of being on the receiving end of my son’s anger. For a man who made his living talking, I couldn’t seem to make any headway with my son.

  In my head I apologized to Elise. She’d been dead nearly a year and I still talked to her, sometimes out loud. She would’ve wanted me to make peace with our son.

  So I tried: “Y’all have fun, at least? I hope it was a pretty good day.”

  “We hung out on his porch,” he said, digging in the couch cushions for the TV remote. “If that counts as fun.” From his tone of voice, it didn’t.

  He found the remote and turned the TV on.

  Later that night, when Noah had gone to his room to do whatever he did there, I parked in front of the TV to catch the local news. The big story was the body that had washed up. Unlike the guys at the diner, the newscaster displayed suitable respect for human life. “The condition of the man’s body,” as she put it, made identification difficult, but police were treating it as a homicide. She asked the public for assistance. A toll-free number scrolled across the screen.

  Then she went from murder to town council elections, and I was glad to have the mental image of a decomposing corpse replaced with the perfectly healthy, smiling face of a man I remembered from high school. Henry Carrell was seeking another term. I didn’t know how he had time, what with running the yacht charter company he’d inherited from his dad. He’d brought the company back from the brink of ruin, bringing a much-needed influx of tourists and jobs, and the town regularly rewarded him with reelection.

  It was strange to see a guy I knew from high school on TV. It was strange to be back here and recognize so many people and see they hadn’t really changed.

  If the man whose body had washed up was from around here, I thought, chances are I’d known him too. I hoped not.

  2

  Tuesday, June 11, Morning

  The next morning,
Noah was gone before I got up. I wrestled down the urge to text him. At nineteen, he had the right to start living his own life. As I mixed my coffee, I reminded myself that worrying about him wasn’t helping my concentration any. I had to keep my eyes on the prize: building my fledgling practice into something that could keep us afloat. I’d gone straight from law school to the solicitor’s office—what most states call the prosecutor’s office—and had never learned the first thing about landing clients or running a business. It turned out all that was at least as important as legal acumen.

  I was working for one of Basking Rock’s only prominent lawyers, Roy Hearst. “Of counsel”: a nice title on paper, but at Roy’s firm it didn’t come with a salary or benefits. Roy paid me hourly when I did work for him, and I was free to bring in my own clients if I could land them. I got a free office, and he got a bonus for his business clients: whenever some friend or relative of theirs ran into trouble—the usual DUIs or their kids’ frat-boy drunk and disorderlies—he had a former prosecutor right there in his office to help them get out of it. A one-stop shop.

  And I should’ve gone straight there—it was past eight—but when I opened the cabinet, I noticed Mazie’s casserole dish. Jackson’s mom had taken to dropping off home-cooked food once in a while. I didn’t know if it was out of sympathy or if Noah had complained to her about my cooking skills. Either way, I had to return the dish at some point, and her house wasn’t that far out of the way. Dropping by would let me see if that’s where Noah had gone.