Read Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith for Free Online Page B

Dillard, the former defense attorney miraculously and suddenly turned prosecutor. Lee Mooney had invited Dillard to the crime scene, and now he was supposed to … What was he supposed to do, anyway? Mooney had called earlier and said he wanted Dillard involved in the investigation. His mission, Mooney said, would be to make sure Fraley didn’t make any mistakes that would come back and bite them on the ass later.
    “What kind of mistakes?” Fraley had asked.
    “ Legal mistakes,” Mooney said. “ Constitutional mistakes.”
    What a load of horse crap. Fraley was doing homicide work when Dillard was still shitting in his diaper. He’d be as useless as teats on a bull. And besides, Fraley was looking for murderers, the kind of people who shot babies at point-blank range. Fuck legal. Fuck constitutional .
    The secretary buzzed. Fraley snuffed out his cigarette and told her to send Dillard in. He was a big guy, dark-haired, green-eyed, and athletic-looking, at least twenty years younger than Fraley. He hadn’t managed to put on the paunch yet, but his hair was just starting to go gray and the lines in his forehead and around his eyes were starting to run deep. He was wearing a charcoal suit, a nice one, and a blue shirt and tie. Movie-star teeth.
    Fraley had heard a lot about Dillard since being transferred up from Nashville to replace a bad cop named Phil Landers. There’d been a scandal about Landers soliciting false testimony from a jailhouse snitch who turned out to be Dillard’s sister. Then Landers was accused of conducting an illegal search in a big murder case and subsequently lying about it on the witness stand. Dillard was the defense lawyer who finally took Landers down. The bosses in Nashville sent Fraley in to clean up the mess. Said they needed a “stable” force in the office, which Fraley took to mean somebody old. They told him he could ride out his last few years with the TBI in the relative peace of northeast Tennessee. And now this, the worst fucking murder he’d ever seen.
    “What can I do for you?” Fraley said without shaking Dillard’s hand. He didn’t bother to stand. He wasn’t about to make it easy.
    “I’m not really sure,” Dillard said pleasantly. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know why I’m here. All I know is that Lee Mooney said he called you, and he sent me up here to help.”
    “I don’t need any help, especially from a lawyer.”
    There was an awkward silence.
    “How can I help?” Dillard said, standing in front of Fraley’s desk, still smiling.
    “Go back to your own office. Let me do my job.”
    “I’d love to,” he said. “But my boss sent me up here. First day on the new job and all. Probably wouldn’t be good if I told him to go to hell. So here I am.”
    “I didn’t know a law degree qualified a person to be a homicide investigator.”
    A puzzled look came over Dillard’s face. He stood looking at Fraley for a moment; then he smiled again and said, “Excuse me.”
    Fraley watched the man as he walked back out the front door. He thought he was rid of the lawyer, but about fifteen minutes later Fraley looked up from his desk again to see Dillard walk back through the front door and straight past the secretary. He was carrying a bag in his left hand. He walked into Fraley’s office, grinned, and stuck out his right hand.
    “Hi, I’m Joe Dillard,” he said. “I think maybe we got off to a bad start. I brought you some coffee and a couple of sticky buns from Perkins.”
    Fraley looked at him deadpan, but decided grudgingly to at least shake his hand. “I know who you are,” Fraley said.
    “Mooney told me,” Dillard said.
    “Told you what?”
    “That you can’t resist sticky buns. I called him from the car and he said I should bring you sticky buns.” Dillard opened the bag. “How about it?”
    Fraley wanted to say, Fuck a bunch of sticky buns, but that wasn’t what came out of his mouth. What came out of his mouth was, “So you