Read Evidence of Guilt for Free Online

reputation. Whether or not the reputation was deserved, it would be there in the minds of the jurors. I made some notes for myself, then went back to the file.
    I read about the rabbit's foot that had been found near Amy's body, the motorcycle tire tracks in the drive, the dirt samples from Wes's cycle that were consistent with the soil on Lisa's property. Again, I skipped the technical analysis. There'd be time for that later.
    Wes had been arrested on Tuesday, pursuant to a warrant that allowed the police to search his house. They
    hadn't found the murder weapon, but they had found an extensive collection of knives. They'd also found a long, blond hair on one of Wes's shirts, and a pair of blood-spotted jeans in the clothes hamper.
    Witness accounts of Wes's activities Friday evening were fairly consistent. He'd spent the early part of the evening with some buddies at a local bar, drinking, dancing and carousing with the other Friday night regulars. He was apparently in a foul mood, however, and left about nine o'clock after a nasty exchange with one of the women on the dance floor. Wes claimed to have driven home and gone to bed, but a neighbor heard what he thought was a motorcycle sometime about midnight.
    I sipped my coffee, scribbled more notes, and with a growing sense of misgiving, wondered what I'd gotten myself into.
    The photos didn't help.
    Because of my association with Tom, who is the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Mountain Journal, I'd seen photos of the crime scene, including those judged too gruesome to print. But they'd been journalist's photos. The police photographs were far worse. Large, full-color glossies shot under the cold, harsh light of a strobe. Some were taken from a distance, showing the position of bodies relative to the barn's layout, but most were close-ups. Swollen, greenish-red flesh, gaping wounds, exposed torsos. Human life violated.
    Sickened, I shoved them back into the folder. At this point they weren't going to tell me anything useful. I switched from coffee to wine and pulled out Sam's case notes. Other than copies of motions filed, some correspondence with the prosecutor and a few pages of what looked to be hieroglyphics, there wasn't much. I'd just
    begun trying to make sense of Sam's cryptic scrawlings when my efforts were cut short by the peal of the doorbell.
    Daryl Benson greeted me with his usual hesitant smile. "Got the message you called," he said, jingling the spare change in his pocket. "You were gone by the time I tried your office, so I thought I'd stop by in person."
    Daryl Benson had been a family friend when I was growing up. He'd been a uniformed officer then; he was chief of police now. And counting the months to retirement.
    Before my mother's suicide when I was fourteen, Benson had been a regular fixture at our holiday meals and summer barbecues, a sort of honorary uncle whose visits were always eagerly anticipated. I'd seen very little of him after my mother died and my father started drinking heavily, and nothing at all of him in the years I was away at college and then attempting to make my mark on the legal world of San Francisco. But since my return to Silver Creek we'd forged a new bond of sorts. What we shared was not friendship exactly, but a camaraderie born of having once loved the same people and having shared a piece of the past. Sometimes I wasn't even sure I liked Daryl Benson all that much, but he was my only link to parents I'd recently come closer to understanding.
    "You want a glass of wine?" I asked, leading the way to the kitchen.
    "You got any cold beer?"
    I opened the refrigerator, handed him a bottle of Anchor Steam, and poured myself more wine. "Let's go into the other room where it's comfortable."
    Benson followed me to the living room, where he eased his bulky frame into the forest green armchair that had been my father's favorite. "Looks like you're making
    progress," he said with an approving glance at the fresh coat of paint on