Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(54)

“I’ve always heard that all is fair in love and politics,” I said. “Do you mind telling me what you didn’t want to put on a billboard?”

“Our people had tape and video and photos of Morris giving her drugs. She had a habit before they met that escalated. She wound up getting busted by the Knoxville cops. She asked him to use his influence to get her out of the jam, but these cops wanted money. So Morris apparently got the sheriff to start sending a fairly large amount of pills his way each month, and he gave them to Leslie Saban. She sold them and gave two vice cops a cut. Her charges were dropped.”

“You just can’t make this stuff up,” I said.

“How did you know about her, come to think of it?” Claire said.

“I might have followed Morris one day and just sort of stumbled across her.”

“And why would you have been following him?”

“No particular reason. I was just curious about how he went about his day.”

“What else did you know about her?”

“Not much. The paper said she was a third-year law student at the University of Tennessee.”

“She’d done an internship at the district attorney’s office,” Claire said. “That’s how they met.”

I remembered thinking she was probably a law student, but I didn’t say anything to Claire about it. And I thought about the shoe box Morris was carrying the day I saw him go into her apartment. The box must have been full of drugs.

“Has anyone from the sheriff’s department been in contact with you?” Claire said.

“No, not a peep.”

“I guess no news is good news as far as they’re concerned.”

“I just hope they don’t try to pin any of these killings on me.”

“There’s no way they could, is there?”

“I don’t think so, but it’s happened to me before. So what now? Who takes over at the district attorney’s office?”

“Generally, if an elected official dies in office, someone is appointed to replace him until the next election. But since the next election is only two days away and you’re obviously going to win because you’re now unopposed, there won’t be any point in putting someone else in the office. Normally, you wouldn’t take over until the first day of January, but under these circumstances, I think my grandfather will call the governor and persuade him to appoint you to replace Morris immediately.”

“So I’ll start when? Wednesday?”

“They’ll have a criminal court judge swear you in first thing Wednesday morning.”

“Are you serious? I don’t think I’m ready.”

I wasn’t ready. I’d never done anything remotely similar.

“You don’t have any choice. You wanted to be the district attorney general, and now you’ve gotten what you wanted. It’s time to hit the ground running.”





CHAPTER 31

The cops finally did show up, around three o’clock in the afternoon. There were two of them, both men, one younger and one older. I didn’t recognize either of them as they flashed their badges at me, but there was a sleaze factor about them I noticed immediately. One introduced himself as Detective Henry Scott. He was a black man, about forty-five, with a potbelly and a closely trimmed goatee. He was wearing a brown leather jacket and tinted wire-framed glasses. He also smelled like a teenager on his way to the prom, the result of entirely too much repugnant cologne. The guy reminded me of someone straight out of the seventies. The other man was early thirties, an acne-scarred kid named Josh Pence with long, scraggly, sandy-blond hair, a beard, and a screw-you attitude. I’d cross-examined guys like them dozens of times in court and had learned that to them, lying was a second language. I knew before they put their badges away they were vice, most likely narcotics.

I invited them in, which seemed to surprise them, and offered them bottles of water. We sat down at my kitchen counter, and I said, “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

“Looks like you might be the new district attorney,” Henry Scott said.

“Wednesday morning, from what I’m told.”

“Heard about the murders last night?”

“Is that a rhetorical question? Of course I’ve heard. Does this place look like a cave to you? I hated to hear it, too. I didn’t like Morris, but I didn’t want him dead. I was looking forward to putting him in jail after I beat him.”

“That’s funny,” the young detective said, and he let out a short chuckle. “The thought of you putting people in jail.”

The smirk he wore on his face was something that definitely needed to go, and I was in just the right mood to remove it.

“Oh yeah, Pence? Was that your name, Pence? Why would you say that?”

I already knew the answer, but I just wanted to bait him.

“Because everybody and his brother knows you should be under the damned jail if not on death row.”

“That right, wiseass? You got proof of that?”

“You got some stones, man,” Pence said. “Everybody’s talking about it. I mean, running for district attorney after all the shit you’ve pulled and gotten away with? You’re a legend in your own mind.”

“And you’re a punk with a smart mouth. I’d be careful about who I judge, especially when you’re nothing but a phony who goes out on the street, does drugs with people, gets them to trust you, and then busts them for trusting you. You’re worse than most of the criminals out there, as far as I’m concerned. You’re a professional snitch. A rat with a badge.”