Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(56)

All you have to do is chase yourself into the bathroom and look in the mirror, I thought.

That Saturday morning, a week after the murders, at seven, I rented a banquet room at a hotel in Knoxville out of my own pocket and made sure everyone in the office knew that attendance was mandatory. Claire came with me. I’d asked her to stay on a couple of extra weeks to help me get things organized, and she’d agreed. She already had an organizational chart for the office prepared. All we had to do was fill in the boxes with real people.

I also rented a suite in the motel where I could interview people privately while Claire talked to the group. She outlined the organizational chart and informed them how things would be run in the future. The dockets would be tightened up. Cases wouldn’t be continued without a legitimate reason. If a police officer was subpoenaed to court and didn’t show up for his or her case, it would be dismissed and his shift commander and the police chief would be notified immediately. It was the same with the sheriff’s department. If officers were going to arrest people and bring cases, they had to show up for court.

I started interviewing the lawyers who had been with the DA’s office the longest, and I asked them four questions: What did they think about Morris? What did they think about Jim Harrison? What did they think about Ben Clancy when he was the district attorney? And what did they think about the job the investigators in the office were doing? I encouraged them to be open and honest and promised their answers would remain confidential. They were leery of me, of course, but one of them, a salt-and-pepper-haired, fifteen-year veteran named Tom Masoner who prosecuted violent crime in criminal court and didn’t seem to care much about what anybody thought of him, spoke right up.

“Morris was spineless, and I think he was a criminal,” Masoner said. “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but he had to be skimming money, and a lot of it, from somewhere. Go take a look at his house and how he lived. I knew him when he was an assistant DA, before he beat Clancy, and he lived very frugally. Maybe he inherited a ton or maybe his wife hit the lottery, but he invited me to his house about six weeks ago and I was stunned. Luxury everywhere.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s one of the things I became aware of during the campaign. What about Jim Harrison? What did you think of him?”

“A secretive weasel whose only purpose seemed to be to follow Morris around with his nose up his ass.”

“Clancy?”

“Don’t get me started. What he did to you was terrifying. If my wife hadn’t just given birth to our second child, I would have quit over that.”

“What do you think happened to Clancy?”

Masoner smiled and winked at me. “I think someone he railroaded—and you weren’t the only one he railroaded—removed him from the gene pool. And if someone removed him from the gene pool, that someone did the rest of us a favor.”

“Do you know the investigators who work in the office?”

“Of course. Their real names are Colton, Peete, and Dufner, but I call them Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. You know the poem? They’re sleepy children in search of fantasy fish. They never catch a thing. They do nothing. Have you seen them?”

“As a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

“They go about nine hundred pounds between the three of them. I guarantee you they’re sleeping through the meeting downstairs right now and they wiped out half the pastry table before the rest of us got near it.”

“So they don’t get out and investigate? They don’t make cases?”

“Didn’t you hear me? They eat doughnuts. If you want to find them at nearly anytime during the day, you can go to the break room. There’ll be about a ninety percent shot they’ll be stuffing their faces.”

I smiled at him, leaned toward him, and reached my hand out. “You’re my guy,” I said.

He shook the hand and said, “What do you mean?”

“You’re going to be second in command in the office. I need someone I can trust, and although I’ve known you for only about ten minutes, I think I can trust you. You’re going to decide which lawyers get assigned to the criminal courts. I want aggressive litigators and trial lawyers, not pussies who plea-bargain everything on the docket. If there’s deadwood, figure out a way to get rid of it and recruit some real lawyers. I’ll find a way to get you a raise. You up for that?”

Masoner nodded and smiled back at me. “Finally, a man who recognizes true talent when he sees it.”

I thought Masoner might, eventually, come to the realization that I was a man who operated in the gray areas of the law, that things weren’t always rigid. But I also thought he might be okay with it, as long as I was able to keep him from knowing too much. Besides, I wasn’t planning on running a dirty office. It would be clean, and I was sincere about getting aggressive trial lawyers and litigators into the criminal courts. I just hoped he’d be able to deal with my affinity for the Tipton family—and maybe certain other things—if the need arose.

“I think we’re going to get along well,” I said. “And I’m going to have some stuff coming down the pike I think you’ll enjoy.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Can’t tell you yet. I think I trust you, but not enough.”

“Sounds like fun. When do I start this housecleaning?”