Stone Shadow by Rex Miller Page A

what is the attraction to you personally? Why would you want to get involved in something like this?"
    “I'm just drawn to it, Mr. Eichord. Professionally there's something compelling about the case. It is just the way it all fell together. Almost nothing to do with the suspect you have in custody. Nothing fits. Nothing's right."
    “I can't argue that."
    “Also, what if William Hackabee is insane?"
    “He should still suck gas—he's a mass killer. Or let's abolish capital offenses for capital crimes."
    “Just to save some time let's leave it like I said before—let's not try the case on the telephone."
    “Just to save us some time—you're going to plead him insane, right? I mean, that's the reason for the verbal smoke screens and all the goofy word games. He's just messing with everybody's head—right?—laying foundation for you, eh?"
    “Come on.” She laughed. “You could say that about the whole legal system.” A B-I-G sigh again. Almost a moan.
    “Huh?"
    “Sure. The whole game. It's all a headfuck if you want to look at it like that."
    He couldn't believe she'd said the word. “A headfuck,” he repeated with a sigh.
    “That's the name of the game. Sorry, got another call.” And the line to Jones, Seleska, Beagle, Legal, and Eagle went dead as last New Year's bubbly. She'd named the tunes, all right. This whole enchilada had turned out to be a total, class-A mind-raper from the git-go.
    Jack hung up the chunk of plastic he was clinging to and looked over at Wally Michaels, who raised his eyebrows in question.
    “Batshit, catshit, ratshit."
    Wally Michaels looked at him sympathetically. It was good to see the kid, which is still how Jack thought of him. He'd been one of those at Quantico that were a little more than just nameless young faces. He was one who'd shown a talent for it. Jack had no sense of being part of the Big D Police Department in the way he had in other cities. He'd been injected into a case that already appeared solved. And a PD under siege is like nothing else.
    Ever since the world had watched Jack Ruby, the perennial “buff” of cop buffs, waltz up to the world's most infamous murder suspect and gun him down in front of all the shields and scribes and cameras that could be crammed into a hallway, the cop shop had tightened its belt in the security department. And this racial flare-up and the problems with community relations in general had only made a bad situation worse. Jack assumed it was akin to the situation in Atlanta, although MCTF had never reached out for him on that one. You had a scared community, polarized and angered by a parallel sequence of unrelated events, and a kind of dingy rep that still lingered from the 60s. Add it all up and it made a volatile, unfriendly mix.
    “Check it out,” Michaels said and laid a file story in front of him. It was a pictorial piece on Noel Collier's spa. It had a waterfall in it. “Pro bonos didn't pay for that baby.” They talked about bad lawyers. About the public-defender system. They talked about good lawyers. There were good, young moral attorneys out there. Some. A few.
    It made Eichord think about what he'd said to Noel.
    “I asked her what sort of a defense would be worth considering, it being so apparently dead-bang. Nothing but guilty. But she shot that right down. Like pleading insanity might not be the route she'd go, which frankly surprised the hell out of me. I thought we had everything but the smoking gun—I mean, wow, that's a lot of info about bodies."
    “Accessory to murder. Sure. Have to be. But if she could insert the element of doubt into a jury's collective head about Ukie doing those people. And the probabilities of one or more accomplices. Or if she can prove him to be insane at the time of the crimes and so-called confessions. Or if she could show that—"
    “His rights were violated,” Jack offered.
    “Uh huh. Or if she could show that the surrounding counties were so prejudiced against Ukie because