Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(55)

“Fuck you, man,” Pence said. “Maybe me and you should step outside.”

“You go outside if you want. If you talk me into coming with you, you’ll just wind up in the hospital. You also might want to keep in mind that it won’t be long before you’re going to be bringing cases to my office for me to present to the grand jury. I’m sure you know the district attorney makes all the calls on all those cases. So before you open that piehole of yours again, you might want to try thinking things through a little.”

“Whoa, now, whoa,” Scott said. “We’re getting off on the wrong foot here.”

They were definitely getting off on the wrong foot. All I’d done, as far as I was concerned, was let them into my home. I was beginning to regret that decision, and they were extremely close to being rudely ejected.

“What do you want?” I said.

“Mind if I ask you where you were last night?” Scott said.

“Yeah, I mind. I don’t talk to cops. I exercise my right to remain silent as a matter of principle. Why do you want to know?”

“We’re investigating the death of Leslie Saban.”

I thought about it for a second. Morris and his wife were killed in the county, which made the case Sheriff Corker’s jurisdiction. Harrison was killed at an abandoned warehouse in the county. Also Corker’s jurisdiction. But Saban lived in an apartment in the city.

“You guys are vice,” I said. “I think we’ve already established that. You’re not homicide, so why are you out investigating a murder?”

“We do double duty when one of our informants gets popped,” Scott said.

Shit. The cops Claire had told me about were sitting in my kitchen. Two dirty cops, having taken advantage of both Leslie Saban and Stephen Morris. I couldn’t resist having a little fun at their expense.

“Leslie Saban was an informant? So you know she was sleeping with Morris.”

Scott’s eyebrows raised, and his mouth dropped open a little. He looked over at his partner, then back at me. “What makes you think she was sleeping with Morris?”

My patience was running thinner by the second, but I really wanted to mess with their heads. Instead, Scott had apparently decided to play some mind games of his own.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “She was sleeping with him. You know it and I know it.”

“We didn’t know she was sleeping with him,” Scott said.

“Man, you guys are in way over your heads,” I said. “Was everything Stephen Morris touched corrupt? The way I understand it, you two got lucky and popped Leslie Saban on a possession with intent to resell, a felony, and she got her boyfriend, Stephen Morris, to ask you to back off. But you guys had no doubt heard that Morris is a corrupt prick, so you decided to shake him down a little. In exchange for agreeing to drop the charges, you got Morris to agree to get yet another member of the law enforcement community to provide Leslie with enough pills so that she could sell them and make a good profit. You two took a percentage of that profit. Ring a bell? I know what you’re wondering right now. Where is this man getting his information? Especially because the information is accurate. Am I right? Do you feel like you’ve taken a hit of LSD right now? Are your minds absolutely blown?”

Both of them looked like they were about to vomit.

“You, Detective Scott, probably needed a new leather jacket or a nice car for your girlfriend. Detective Pence probably has a really serious Viagra addiction. So you set it up, and you probably let the other dealers around know that Leslie was protected so nobody robbed her or killed her. But somebody obviously didn’t get the message. I swear, this whole town is a cesspool. The county is bad, but I didn’t know until recently that Morris had scams in the city, too. So why did you come by here, really? Why would you even think I killed Morris’s girlfriend?”

“Because it’s what you do, man,” Pence said. “You wiped out your competition, his wife, his girl, and his best friend all in one night, and we intend to prove it.”

He was trying to act tough, but the bravado wasn’t working.

“Yeah, well, good luck with that one,” I said. “You can go now. In the meantime, I suggest you both resign before I get settled into the office Wednesday and start looking around at corruption in the city’s narcotics division. You might even want to leave the state.”





CHAPTER 32

I hit the ground running just a few days later. There were thirty-five lawyers in the office besides me—thirty-six until Jim Harrison was murdered. There was a support staff of thirty-six that included receptionists, victim-witness coordinators, a legislative liaison, three investigators, grant writers, and several others who performed a variety of jobs.

The first couple of days I was in office, courts were in session all over the county so I couldn’t just shut everything down and meet with everyone. I had a secretary call Morris’s father and ask where his family wanted the things from his office moved. Then I asked her to hire a moving company to take Morris’s things where his father directed. I know it must have appeared hard-hearted to those in the office, but the space was already tight and there really wasn’t anything else I could have done. Meanwhile, I watched the news reports very closely. Sheriff Tree Corker said they were all over this investigation, that they would find the killer or killers of Stephen Morris and his wife and Jim Harrison if they had to chase them to the gates of hell.