Dark Justice by William Bernhardt

her notepad. “My father has worked for WLE Logging all his life. He’s one of the top foremen at their sawmill just north of here. I’ll tell him you want to make a visit.”
    “That’s not nece—”
    “I think it is. You need some perspective. After all, you’re an officer of the court. And you’ve aligned yourself with people who are avowed lawbreakers.”
    Ben bristled. “If they break the law, it’s for a reason. In the great American tradition of civil disobedience.”
    “As best I recall, Thoreau never blew anyone up.” She tore the top sheet off her notepad. “Look, if you’re going to jump into the boiling cauldron, you ought to at least have some clue what’s cooking.” She handed the address to him.
    Ben reluctantly took the piece of paper. “Could we possibly talk about the case now?”
    Granny grinned, damn near irresistibly, Ben thought. “What do you want to know?”
    “Why did you arrest my client for this murder?”
    “Because he did it.”
    “Could you give me a little more?”
    “He had motive, means, and opportunity. Call me simpleminded, but I think that’s enough to bring charges.”
    “The motive, I assume, would be Zak’s hostility toward the loggers and the logging industry at large.”
    She did not quite look him in the eye. “At the very least. And he certainly had the means. Those Green Rage nuts make no secret of the fact that they’re stockpiling bomb components. To the contrary, they advertise the fact to terrorize the loggers. Every time I turn around they’ve torched another tree cutter or eighteen-wheeler. Those people are insane.”
    “It isn’t insane to want to keep the forests from being flattened.”
    “Oh, yeah? And how about dressing up in a Sasquatch suit?”
    Ben reddened a bit. “I don’t know that the Sasquatch sightings had anything to do with Green Rage. For all I know, it could be a logger plot to make Green Rage look ridiculous.”
    Granny leaned back and laughed. “Yeah, right.”
    Ben tried to bring the conversation back to the case. “What about opportunity?”
    “In case you don’t know it, your man admits he was in the forest around the time of the murder, although he says he was just smooching with some Green Rage floozy. I agree that he was in the woods—planting the bomb that killed Dwayne Gardiner.”
    “Even if Zak planted a bomb on the tree cutter, and Gardiner had the misfortune to set it off, that wouldn’t be first-degree murder. It’s just bad luck that Gardiner was around when the bomb went off.”
    “I disagree with you. First of all, planting bombs is a felony, and if someone gets killed in the perpetration of a felony, he can be charged with felony murder, which is a first-degree murder charge in this state. But it doesn’t matter.” She paused, allowing Ben to wonder for just a moment. “Because the autopsy report showed that Gardiner had been shot.”
    “What? But I thought—”
    “Yes, the body was caught in the explosion and burned. We almost didn’t do an autopsy, especially since the fire didn’t leave much to be examined. But being the dutiful soldiers we are, we did the tests. And it turned out the man had been shot.”
    “Then he was already dead.”
    “We don’t think so. The gunshot appears to have caught the poor man in the shoulder. I’m sure it hurt like hell, but it wasn’t fatal. It was the explosion that killed him. Nonetheless, the fact that he had been shot just before the explosion tells me there was a second person present—a second person with the express, premeditated intent to kill him.” She folded her hands on the desk. “And that, Charlie Brown, is why Zakin has been charged with first-degree murder.”
    Ben couldn’t argue with her logic. He would’ve drawn the same conclusions himself. “Anything else linking Zak to the murder?”
    “Tons. Footprints. Fingerprints. You name it.” She leaned forward. “Seriously, Ben—and I’m just talking lawyer-to-lawyer now—I