The Trial Read online

  “I see,” Mac said. “You don’t know a young lawyer who would take the case without caring about the consequences?”

  “Do you?” the judge responded.

  Mac mentally ran down the list of possibilities and shook his head. “None with any criminal defense experience.”

  “I can’t appoint someone who’s handled a few nolo pleas in traffic court to a murder case.”

  Mac shrugged. “It’s been awhile. The last major criminal case I handled was—”

  “State versus Jefferson,” the judge interrupted. “Three and a half years ago. You tried the case for three days to a hung jury. The D.A.’s office decided to nol-pros the charges and turn him loose.”

  Mac suppressed a slight smile. “You didn’t think he was guilty, either, did you?”

  “No comment. My point is that under the Sixth Amendment Thomason deserves quality representation.”

  “And you don’t want to jeopardize another young lawyer’s career by asking him to defend the man who may have murdered the Hightowers’ daughter.”

  “Right.” The judge leaned forward and picked up the order. “Even though you’re an officer of the court, I’m not going to make you do this.” Mac raised his eyebrows. “I can refuse?”

  “Yes. Consider it over the weekend and call me Monday morning.”

  “Does Thomason know about the conflict of interest?”

  “Gene Nelson is going to talk to him this evening.”

  “Fair enough.” Mac got up to leave. “I’ll let you know first thing on Monday.”

  “One other matter,” the judge said. “I understand Alex Hightower has hired Joe Whetstone from Atlanta to act as special prosecutor.”

  “Really? Bringing in the big guns for the execution.”

  “It will be a challenge.”

  “And you think I want a challenge?” Mac asked.

  The judge shook his head. “You don’t have to prove anything to me, Mac.”

  Mac stepped to the open door. “Will the county pay for an investigator and expert witnesses?”

  “Anything within reason. I’ll try to get it for you.”

  Mac walked down the steps of the courthouse. He’d read articles about the murder in the local newspaper. It would be a difficult case to handle. The Hightowers would spare no expense to obtain a conviction. Hiring Joe Whetstone as special prosecutor was just one step. The Atlanta lawyer would be supported by a cadre of associates, an army of paralegals, and the best investigators and expert witnesses money could buy.

  Forgetting about the bullets, the pills, and his beer, he crossed the street. With each step, the secret, dark thoughts of his own death retreated. Thoughts about another man whose life hung in the balance before the eyes of everyone in Echota County took their place.

  2

  The best mirror is an old friend.

  GEORGE HERBERT

  After the automobile accident that claimed the lives of his wife, Laura, and their two sons, Zach and Ben, Mac lived six months in the two-story, white-frame house where he and Laura raised their family. Only a couple of minutes from his law office, the house sat peacefully at the end of a tree-lined street in an older neighborhood behind the local high school.

  The house with the green shutters was Laura’s creation, an expression of her artistic ability and attention to detail. During construction, Mac worked long hours to pay the bills and left every major and minor decision to her. He didn’t care what she did; he just wanted her to love it, and her delight was his reward.

  For many years he came home for lunch on Wednesdays, a fringe benefit of practicing law only a few blocks away. The winter when Ben was four and Zach was two, Mac would wash Zach’s hands, fix Ben a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and together with Laura they would sit in the sunroom on the east side of the house eating soup and sandwiches for lunch. Later, when the boys were in school, Laura and Mac spent the time by themselves. They didn’t say much. Mac talked all day at work and he needed silence, but quietly sitting in the same room with Laura yielded its own unspoken pleasure.

  At other times Laura was his cheerleader, encouraging him during the lean years when he first started his law practice and occasionally kidnapping him to do something fun when his business prospered and work became too hectic. Whether he won or lost a case, her assessment never wavered. “You’re a good lawyer,” she told him matter-of-factly. Her words motivated Mac to make them come true.

  After the funeral, a friend suggested that Mac ought to stay in the house and work through his grief, but after a few months of lonely evenings and restless nights, he put the house on the market. He couldn’t continue walking into the kitchen and expecting to see Laura leaning against the counter drinking a cup of coffee.

  He sold the house with green shutters and purchased fifteen wooded acres ten miles north of town. Picking the highest spot on the property, he hired a local contractor to build a spacious stone-and-cedar cabin that faced the mountains to the east and brought the outdoors inside through several large, plate-glass windows. The master bedroom was predominantly glass on two sides and came as close to sleeping outside as possible while still providing the comforts of home. His nearest neighbors were out of sight from his secluded vantage point, and he lived in scenic, if lonely, isolation.

  As a boy, Mac had a male beagle named Buster who spent most of his time with Mac’s grandfather in the country. Though small in size, purebred beagles make a lot of noise when they bay and bugle like silver-throated trumpets, so Mac’s parents only let Buster inside the city limits for brief overnight visits. Mac enjoyed Buster so much that he always harbored the desire to own another beagle at some point in the future.

  Now that he was in the country by himself, Mac indulged himself by purchasing two female beagles—Flo and Sue, and behind his new house, he built a large, chain-link dog run, where his pets stayed until he came home and released the brown-and-white sisters to roam and sniff in the woods each evening. Except during the coldest months of the year, Mac liked to sit on the long wooden deck that extended along the back of the house and listen with an experienced ear to the sound of the dogs as they chased rabbits or harassed an unfortunate opossum.

  Turning onto the long asphalt driveway, he drove up the hill to the house and pulled into the garage. Flo and Sue barked wildly at the sound of his car, and he walked directly to the backyard to open the gate to the pen. The dogs jumped up to greet him for a few seconds then chased each other down the hill through the rustling leaves. Mac climbed the steps to the deck and looked toward the west. The sun was already below the tops of the trees, and the shadows cast by the branches reached out toward the house like long, black fingers along the ground beneath him.

  The double doors to the deck opened into a combination living/ dining room. The main living area of the house was a large open space with no dividing wall between the kitchen, dining room, and living room. A massive stone fireplace flanked by tall, clear windows provided a view of the mountains to the east. The master suite dominated the south end of the house; the sandstone-tiled kitchen and laundry room occupied the north end. Upstairs were two empty bedrooms and another bath.

  Mac went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He ate lunch at restaurants in town and rarely cooked anything more complicated than a scrambled egg at home. He fixed a roast beef sandwich and flipped on the evening news, which offered the usual spate of roped-off crime scenes. As he watched, he thought about the Thomason case. The change in lawyers wouldn’t be on TV, but the trial itself might attract limited mass-media coverage. The final clip on the newscast was a story about a high-profile drug case in Atlanta. The defense lawyer, a man not much younger than Mac, sported a long, gray ponytail that would make a thoroughbred mare jealous. While talking to a TV reporter outside the federal courthouse, the lawyer slid in a pitch to the viewing audience for future business. Mac shook his head. He doubted an Echota County jury would be mesmerized by the man flipping his hair around the courtroom in Denniso
n Springs.

  It wasn’t cold enough to build a fire in the fireplace, but winter was on the way, and Mac’s supply of firewood needed to be replenished. Pouring a whiskey, he watched a made-for-TV movie until his eyelids grew heavy and he dozed. Forcing himself awake, he went outside and found the dogs curled up on the deck. They scampered into their pen, and he gave them fresh food and water. He watched while they lapped out of the same dish. In a few minutes, they barked a good-night farewell and disappeared into the doghouse. Mac went to his bedroom and crawled into bed.

  He woke up sweating and gasping for breath at 3:00 A.M. It was the usual nightmare. It began in different forms but always ended the same. Tonight it started in peace on a beautiful fall afternoon. Mac, Laura, and their two sons were walking around a lake. Mac looked at his boys and remembered another day, many years past, when they had taken off their shoes and waded into the cold water to catch tadpoles with paper cups. The dark mud squished under Mac’s feet, and the tadpoles zigzagged crazily back and forth near the surface of the water. Laura sat on the grass and watched.

  The scene shifted. Snow on the ground. The lake deserted. Mac in a hurry to get home. They were all in the four-wheel-drive vehicle. Even asleep, he knew what was coming, but in his unconscious state he could not stop the projector from flashing the scenes that came before his eyes. He looked at the boys sitting in the backseat. They were watching out the windows as flakes fell. He glanced at Laura, who smiled, reached out, and laid her hand on his shoulder. His heart beat faster, and he tried to turn his head away from the pictures that started coming more rapidly. The line between dream and reality blurred. Mac gripped the steering wheel and slammed his foot down on the brake pedal. Blackness descended. Mac didn’t see the horror but felt its presence and knew what lay behind the veil. In the dream, he screamed. In his sleep he moaned and woke up. Immediately, his hand went to Laura’s side of the bed and came up empty.

  Splashing his face at the bathroom sink, he tried to wash away the guilt and grief neither water nor time could erase.

  Several hours later, the morning sun flooded the bedroom with light. Mac rolled over for an extra few minutes of semiconsciousness before stumbling into the kitchen to fix a cup of black coffee. After a few sips the phone rang.

  “Hello,” he mumbled.

  “Has the sun come up in the far north?” a deep voice asked.

  “Barely,” Mac answered. “I’ve not finished my first cup of coffee.”

  “I’m way ahead of you. Peggy fixed my favorite breakfast—I’ve already eaten three fried eggs, a couple of sausage patties, and several biscuits. I wanted to come out to see you this morning. How about breakfast in bed?”

  “A single sausage patty on a flaky biscuit would be nice.”

  “The delivery truck will leave as soon as I put in a quart of oil.”

  Mac took a bigger gulp of coffee and came fully awake. “Ray, could you bring your chain saw and splitting maul? I was going to cut some firewood this morning.”

  “I’ll wear my woodcutting overalls.”

  Mac and Ray Morrison had known each other since Mrs. Warlick’s second grade class. They played next to each other on the offensive line for the high school football team and during the summers fished for rainbow trout in the cold water of mountain streams. After graduation, Ray married Peggy and joined the Marine Corps. After a few years in Korea and a tour of duty during the earliest days of the war in Vietnam, Ray returned home and moved to a neighboring county where he worked as a deputy for the local sheriff ’s department. He rose through the ranks and eventually ran for sheriff himself. He lost the election and moved back to Dennison Springs. Mac encouraged him to try his hand as a private detective, and within a few years, Ray was making plenty of money without the political hassles of being a county sheriff. Mac paid him a modest monthly retainer to ensure that no one on the opposing side of a case hired him before Mac could give him a call for help.

  Wood splitting would go a lot quicker with Ray on the end of a maul. Mac put on his own work clothes and poured another cup of coffee. In a few minutes he heard the sound of Ray’s truck coming up the driveway. Without knocking, the big man walked in the door from the garage.

  “Here’s your birthday present,” he drawled, handing Mac a brown paper sack.

  Mac held up the bag. “You know it’s not my birthday. My birthday is in June.”

  “In case I forget, consider this your birthday present.”

  Mac took out four biscuits and sausage wrapped in wax paper. The pungent aroma filled the kitchen. “I thought I said one,” he said.

  “That’s right. One for your birthday present. The other three are in case I get hungry while we’re chopping wood. You never have much to eat around here. I bet you ate a sandwich for supper, didn’t you?”

  “Good guess. You should have gone to law school.”

  “And take a cut in pay?” Ray asked, wide-eyed. “Not me.”

  Mac bit into the biscuit. It was slightly crunchy on top, soft inside, with just the right baking-soda tingle. The sausage was crisp and cooked to perfection.

  “Tell Peggy this biscuit was almost too good to eat. Do you want another cup of coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  The two men sat in the living room, looking out the big windows for a few minutes until their cups were empty.

  Mac got up and stretched. “Ready?”

  “Let’s do it,” Ray responded. “One of my grandsons has a junior league football game at one-thirty, and I want to give you an honest day’s work before I have to leave.”

  Mac drove his old brown International Harvester pickup truck around to the back of the house. The truck had a small winch on the front, which came in handy if the truck slid off the road into a ditch or got stuck in the mud. This morning the two men used the winch to drag dead trees out of the woods to a flat spot near the house where they could be sawed and split. Once they collected a half-dozen trees, Mac and Ray started cutting up the logs into twenty-four-inch sections with chain saws. Flo and Sue barked excitedly at the angry buzz of the saws and ran back and forth from the house to the woods. In an hour and a half, a respectable pile of cut wood lay on the ground.

  Mac motioned to Ray, who flipped the kill switch on the saw. “Let’s take a break before we split it.”

  They sat in rocking chairs on the deck and drank cold water. Ray popped an entire sausage biscuit in his mouth like a soda cracker.

  “Are you feeling any older?” Mac asked, wiping his forehead with a red bandana.

  Ray swallowed the biscuit and took another gulp of water. “Well, if I remember correctly, I’m about three months older than you are, but you don’t have to rub it in.”

  “You look it on top,” Mac said, eyeing the few stubborn strands of black hair clinging to the top of Ray’s balding head.

  “I’ve had my head in too many tight spots, that’s for sure. But, to answer your question: When we all get together at Thanksgiving and Christmas and I see my kids and how old they look and my grandkids and how they’ve grown—” Ray stopped when he saw the look in Mac eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Mac. That was stupid of me; I wasn’t thinking.”

  Mac shook his head. “I asked, didn’t I? I know what you meant. I’ve just been thinking recently.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Of the legal wars?”

  Mac paused, “Maybe.”

  Ray was silent for a moment. “You’ve been keeping to yourself for several months. That’s one reason I called this morning. Peggy and I are worried about you.”

  “I’m not looking for sympathy.”

  “It’s not that. It’s being a friend.”

  A pair of bluebirds swooped down into the backyard and captured some insects stirred up by the woodcutting activity. Part of Mac wanted to tell Ray about the desperate debate that had been raging in his mind. About the loneliness, the nightmares, the bullets, and the pills. But entrenched masculinity kept h
is lips sealed. Even with a friend of fifty years, he couldn’t bare his soul.

  “Maybe I need a challenge,” he said.

  “What kind of challenge?” Ray asked.

  “Something to get my adrenaline going.”

  They rocked in silence.

  Ray broke in. “I have an idea.”

  “What?”

  “Have you considered rock climbing?”

  Mac sat up in his chair and laughed. “Only if we did it together.”

  Ray patted his ample stomach. “It will take a big rock. One with steps and handrails already cut into it.”

  “I have a better idea,” Mac said. “I could quit practicing law and work for you as your bodyguard.”

  “You’re not broad enough,” Ray grinned. “You couldn’t shield me from a bullet unless it was coming at me dead center.”

  “Well,” Mac said slowly, “Maybe you could protect me.”

  “How?”

  “From myself, by making me laugh. Come on, let’s get to the wood.”

  Mac found splitting wood therapeutic. There was a swift finality to it. Stand the log up; take aim; swing the splitter over his head; strike with all his might; two pieces of wood fall apart. End of story. He was always amazed that a single, well-placed blow could split a substantial piece of wood in two. Mac used a twelve-pound maul with a fiberglass handle. Ray had a monster eighteen pounder with a steel handle that shook the earth and shattered logs as wide as thirty inches across with a single hit.

  When they were in their twenties, Mac and Ray could split wood all morning with a couple of fifteen-minute breaks. Now they worked steadily for ten minutes and leaned on their mauls for five. Even so, by noon the light-colored inside of the split wood covered the clearing.