Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(9)

“Wow,” I said. “Have you seen it?”

“Yeah, of course. You can’t miss it in the parking lot. It’s silver.”

I thanked Jenny again for talking with me, and she stood and said goodbye. As I watched her walk away, black hair waving in the breeze, I thought again about the chances of getting the district attorney to agree to prosecute a doctor under these circumstances. It was doable. The facts fit the law for a prosecution for reckless homicide.

I knew Grace wouldn’t want me to kill Dr. Fraturra. Her preference, I believed, would have been for me to sue him on Jasmine’s behalf and let her parents sue on her behalf, but I thought she also would have gone along with the idea of filing a reckless homicide charge in criminal court. At least that’s what I told myself, because I wasn’t going to sue anyone.

Filing a lawsuit would take years, involve dozens of depositions and court hearings. Lawyers who defended medical malpractice cases worked for medical malpractice insurance companies, and they were cutthroat litigators and strategists. Their goal was always to drag a case out, especially a big-money case like Grace and Jasmine’s, until the other side became so frustrated that they finally gave up and settled. They would come into court and file motions, trying to convince a judge that a cloudless sky was green if it suited their purpose. They would prolong depositions for days, harassing and intimidating witnesses, going through minutiae that had absolutely no relevance to anything, until the plaintiff’s lawyer or lawyers finally threw up their hands in frustration and disgust.

So I was going to try another route. I had a plan. First, I would go to the Portal and ask around about the night Fraturra was there. I’d talk to the bartenders, the waitresses, the bouncers—anyone who would talk to me, and I’d find out what Fraturra had done there that night when he was supposed to be taking care of Grace. Then I would go to the district attorney, a man I knew and had helped get elected. I would give the criminal justice system another chance. I would lay out a case for him that was a lock. I would hand him Dr. Nicolas Fraturra’s head on a platter and let him make an example out of a man who deserved far worse than a few years in jail. I would give the district attorney an opportunity to garner some excellent publicity for himself and his staff. It would be win/win.

But if that system failed me, as it had in the past, I would have to take matters into my own hands.

And, once again, I didn’t give a damn about the consequences.





CHAPTER 6

I was a little surprised Stephen Morris agreed to see me, although we’d been close at one time. Morris was the district attorney I’d helped get elected more than six years earlier after I successfully freed my Uncle Tommy from prison. Morris beat Ben Clancy, my nemesis, largely because of the work I put in on Morris’s campaign. It didn’t really hurt Clancy, though. He immediately moved on to the US attorney’s office where one of his old political cronies gave him a job as an assistant US attorney. He later used that position to frame me for a murder and send me off to prison. I got out, with Grace’s help, after two years. Not long after that, Clancy disappeared.

I knew Morris, along with every other local and federal law enforcement officer within fifty miles, suspected that I had killed Clancy. They also thought I had killed a couple of rednecks in West Virginia who were suspected of dynamiting my mother’s house. They were right, but they couldn’t prove anything, and I wasn’t about to offer any admissions.

I tried to get Morris to meet me at a coffee shop or diner somewhere, but he insisted that I come to his office in the City County Building a couple of blocks from Neyland Stadium, where the Tennessee Volunteers had played mediocre football in front of huge crowds on Saturdays for the past ten years. He let me stew in the lobby for half an hour before he finally had his secretary lead me through the maze of hallways to his office. It was one of those ornate, ego offices. It overlooked the Tennessee River, had plush leather furniture, US and Tennessee flags, a vintage set of the Tennessee Code Annotated on a shelf to my left, and framed certificates and photos of Morris with politicians and judges and sheriffs everywhere. He’d even somehow managed to work a chandelier into the office decorating budget.

“Nice,” I said as I looked around. Morris was medium height, a stocky, powerful man whose dark-brown hair was perfectly cut and parted on the side. I could easily imagine him as one of those guys in the gym at six in the morning, wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and spandex shorts. When I walked into his office, though, he was wearing a sharp navy-blue suit with a red tie and a white shirt.

“Had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap of it,” Morris said. “Some of the county commissioners would just as soon have the top law enforcement officer in the county work out of a bathroom in the basement. Bunch of damned cheapskates.”

He reached his hand across the desk, and I took it.

“Nice to see you again, Darren,” he said. “A lot of water under the bridge since the last time I laid eyes on you.”

I nodded. “An ocean. Nice suit, Stephen. I’m not an aficionado, but that doesn’t look like it came off the rack at Sears.”

He smiled. “It’s an Armani, actually. Treat from the wife for our anniversary last year.”

“Well, you wear it well.”

“I was so sorry to hear about your mother when that terrible thing happened,” Morris said. “I should have reached out, but I just didn’t know what to say. We got the TBI and the ATF involved right away, but—”