Above the Law

by Tim Green

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Tim Green returns to Casey Jordan, the heroine of his bestseller The Letter of the Law. Now, years later, Casey has left her high-powered practice and opened a legal aid clinic. When an illegal Mexican immigrant is shot to death on a ranch outside Dallas, it makes the news, not because of the immigrant but because of the shooter, rising political star Senator Chase. The death appears to be a hunting accident, and the well-loved senator spins the disaster artfully with his tearful press conference. But then the wife of the victim steps forward with another tale-and evidence of a cover-up of epic proportions. Casey approaches the district attorney's office hoping he will prosecute, only to discover that no one wants to tangle with the senator, a powerful man on track for a presidential nomination.

Clever and ambitious, Casey isn't afraid to stick her neck out even when it's an unpopular move. But when she goes after the senator herself, suddenly everyone she is close to is a target for a man who seems to be above the law...


From the Compact Disc edition.

Release date: February 1, 2010

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 304

Sample

CHAPTER 1

HEADLIGHTS CREPT UP THE WALL BEFORE JETTING ACROSS the ceiling and blinking out. Elijandro stiffened at the familiar purr of the engine and clatter of rocks off the undercarriage as the white Range Rover descended the hillside lane. He left the sagging bed and the warmth of his young wife’s body, skirted past the crib, and eased open the front door, letting himself out into the dark of predawn.

Elijandro clutched himself and stepped gingerly across the dirt yard until he stood shivering beside the Range Rover. The hills and the thick clouds above glowed in the orange flare from some distant lightning. Damp ozone floated on the small breeze. The new leaves on the lone willow tree shifted restlessly and the window hummed down, muffled now by the rumble of the approaching front. White teeth shone out at Elijandro, but the spade-cut smile and the familiar face of not the wife, but her husband and his boss, staggered him.

“You come good to the call,” his boss said, grinning like a mask.

“The call?” Elijandro said.

“Like a tom turkey,” the boss said, grinning, then clucking like a hen with a puck, puck, puck. “The sound of this Range Rover. The sound of my wife.”

Elijandro stuttered until the boss interrupted.

“Screw her. Get your camo on, Ellie,” he said. “Kurt said you put a flock to bed in the oaks out on Jessup’s Knob and there was a big bird in with them. That right?”

Elijandro nodded eagerly and could see now that the boss wore camouflage from the neck down.

“Then let’s go get his ass,” the boss said. From the passenger seat he raised a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and took a good slug before smacking the cork home with the palm of his hand.

Elijandro peered at the western sky. “Rain coming.”

“So we’ll get wet,” the boss said. “Bird’ll come to the call rain or shine. Lightning gets ’em excited. Go on.”

Elijandro turned for the tenant house, scratching the stubble on his head, hopping barefoot through the stones, picking his way until he reached the porch.

The house had been built along with two dozen other shacks for migrant workers some sixty years ago. Like them, it sagged wearily under its rumpled tin roof, propped up off the dirt and more or less leveled on four cinder-block stacks. Being drenched in weather and heat for all those years had rendered each of the houses gray and had shrunken the slat-board siding like an old man’s bones. Unlike the others, theirs squatted in the lowland by the Trinity River, where cattle inevitably got bogged down in the muck and had from time to time to be roped and dragged free with a mule. The boss’s father was the one who had this shack sledged away from the company of its brethren by a team back in ’67. By tradition, the place went to the top Mexican, a worker trusted enough to quickly shepherd the livestock free from the muck as soon as they began to bray and before they could do harm to themselves.

With a trembling hand, Ellie scrawled a note to his wife saying he’d be back from the hunt by breakfast. Quickly, he removed his camo gear from its nail, slipping it on before he scooped up his shotgun and grabbed the turkey vest, which clattered to the floor, lumpy and awkward from pockets filled by turkey calls and shotgun shells. He bent for it, and when he rose up he saw comets of light in the corners of his vision. His heart hadn’t stopped pounding since he saw the boss’s face.

Ellie jogged out to the Range Rover, climbing into the passenger seat and smelling the familiar scent of its fine leather and somewhere the hint of her favorite perfume. His boss reversed the SUV out to the main track and headed up the hill, then ran the ridge before dipping down into the river’s wash, across a steel bridge, and up the other bank, talking all the while about his wife being a dirty slut who didn’t deserve a Range Rover and slurring his words until the SUV came to rest at the bottom of a field plowed for corn.

His boss killed the engine and the two of them sat listening to it tick down to nothing while the boss turned a shotgun shell end over end with his manicured fingers.

Ellie watched and waited until he could stand it no more. He pointed up the field toward the wooded ridge and said, “Them birds are up on top.”

His boss smiled funny at him and got out. They eased the Range Rover’s doors closed. Elijandro let the silence of predawn settle on them for a moment before he cleared his throat, cupped a hand to his mouth, and let fly the low sonorous call of a barred owl. Nothing came back at them but the echo of his call as it bounced away between the low hills.

Elijandro eyed the eastern sky. A line, pale yellow and flush with the horizon, had begun to melt away the ink of night to a navy blue promising day. The storm would come from the other side of the knob, where the flicker of lightning continued to illuminate the oncoming clouds.

Elijandro cleared his throat, then tried again.

Halfway through the call, the big tom erupted from the top of the knob with a gobble that sent a surge of blood through Elijandro’s heart. He grinned at his boss and in the dark saw his boss’s teeth. His boss raised his shotgun in one hand as though victory were already theirs, and together they pulled camo masks down over their faces.

“Let’s go kill him,” his boss said.

Elijandro set off into the woods, keeping just inside the trees and following the edge of the field up toward the top. By the time they were fifty yards from the far end of the field Elijandro could hear his boss’s labored breathing. He directed his boss to the base of a big oak close enough to the edge of the woods for a good clean shot and slipped out into the field, the newly turned dirt damp and sucking at his boots. He set the decoys, crouched, spun, and darted across the soft ridges of dirt toward the spot where he’d left his boss. He found an old stump in a clump of bracken not twenty feet from where his boss sat, but closer to the decoys so that his call would better match their location. He settled in, resting the lower part of his back against the trunk, and glanced over his shoulder at his boss, who gave him a thumbs-up.

Elijandro popped the diaphragm call into his mouth and began turning it over with his tongue to soften it, then settled into the silence, absorbing it and the grand expanse of the brightening sky. He took deep breaths of the crisp air, his mind clearing itself of the people he worked for, his responsibilities on the ranch and to his own little family. He loved to guide turkey hunts, not for the kill but in order to participate in the birth of a new day.

The horizon below glowed golden now and the smaller stars began to blink out. A breeze stirred and overhead the dark roiling clouds at the edge of the storm front crept toward the coming dawn as if racing the sun to its rise. Thunder rumbled. A song sparrow peeped nearby and fluttered past Elijandro’s head, finding a high spot on the stalk of bramble to clear its throat and offer up the first song of the morning. After that, the other birds woke, too. First slowly, like an orchestra tuning its instruments, but growing in number and volume until they produced a crescendo of chirping and trilling and whistling that ignored the coming storm entirely.

The time had come. Elijandro cupped his hand to his mouth and uttered a sharp hen cluck, then a staccato of high-pitched clucks as he twisted his hip and slapped his hand in a flutter against his rump: the sound of the first hen flying down from the roost. He heard the answering cluck from a real hen awakening on the ridge, then he called to the tom, a raspy, longing sound that rose and fell. The gobble of the big bird was so immediate and so close that Elijandro started and grinned and couldn’t help but glance back to see if his boss was ready. The birds weren’t on the top of the ridge, but much closer, immediately inside the woods at the end of the field.

His boss had been on enough hunts to know what it all meant and he fumbled with his shotgun, raising it and resting it across his knees, ready to shoot. Elijandro called again, and again the dawn exploded with the vibrant gobble of the trophy bird. The clouds began to spit fat drops of rain and the current of air became a steady breeze. Thunder clapped and the turkey gobbled angrily back at that. Two real hens flapped, clucked, fluttered, and then floated down from the high oaks toward the decoys, gliding in and milling among them, calling now themselves. The tom went crazy, gobbling at his hens and warning the storm clouds to stay away.

Elijandro brimmed with glee and excitement. He bit his tongue to keep himself from bursting into laughter as the big bird barked and pounded his wings against the air and drifted from the sky like a dirigible coming to land among his flock. Puffing out his feathers in full strut, clicking and drumming and fanning his tail, he appeared to be five times the size of his mates. More hens poured down from the trees like a pack of hussies.

The tom, an enormous ball of feathers no more than twenty yards from the edge of the field, slowly turned away and Elijandro knew his boss had the perfect chance to raise his gun and aim, then wait for the naked head and neck to reappear since the thick feathers of a turkey were better than a Kevlar vest. Thunder rumbled again and lightning flashed. As the tom rotated back and his head came into view Elijandro held his breath, anticipating the gunshot.

It came, but in an odd way. Elijandro felt the roar of the gun. Something flew out and away from above him, a dark chunk of bark, but then he realized there was no tree trunk above him and he reached for the top of his head as he felt himself tilting sideways and spilling toward the ground. The spit of rain became a faucet, water spilling down his face as if he were directly under the spigot. It didn’t hurt, but as his fingers came to rest on the spot above his brow, he realized the firm fruit he felt protruding from a jagged capsule was his own broken skull and brains.

The liquid streaming down his face was a torrent of blood.

His body rested against the ground and it annoyed him that he couldn’t remove his hand from the mess that had been the top of his head. His eyes focused in and out, like a quick zoom, then fixed on the flock of birds struggling up into the air, away from the danger, frantic for the safety of the woods. Elijandro saw the big Tom among them, dragging his long beard as he disappeared into the trees all in an instant. It was the same instant that the day was born.

The sun appeared bright in Elijandro’s eyes, blinding him and washing over him until all was lost.

CHAPTER 2

UP MAPLE AVENUE HALFWAY TO LOVE FIELD WAS A SUNOCO filling station. One day, one of two partners disappeared with all the money he could carry. The weather-worn building sat empty long enough to lose half its windows to vandals and the cinder-block south wall facing the street caught a new shellacking of graffiti every other week. The pumps stood like upright corpses, dead to the world beneath a metal roof built to entice patrons in out of the sun or a thunderstorm to fill up.

When Casey rounded the corner she wasn’t surprised to see every bit of the shadow under the roof occupied. From the rectangular crowd, a single line of people connected the pump area to the filling station like a human umbilical cord. It was 8:57 in the morning and people knew Casey’s clinic opened at nine. Monday was the day they interviewed people for new cases. Like a school of fish, they turned in a single motion when her Mercedes rocked up over the lip of broken asphalt from the street, groaning and yipping on shocks gone bad twenty thousand miles ago.

She pulled around to the back of the building, thankful she’d laid down the ground rules over a year ago, when she first moved into the neighborhood. Unlike the shoppers at Neiman Marcus, these people had a quiet dignity and respect for others that superseded even their own tragic lives. They would wait for her to open the front door for business.

As she unlocked the back door, she heard a muffled flush from the exterior bathroom she shared with her clientele. The doorknob rattled and an overweight woman with long dark hair hanging from the fringes of a dirty white cowboy hat let herself out with a red-faced frown, hurrying around the corner to regain her place in the line.

Casey gave her Mercedes a fleeting look. Hubcaps and hood ornament had been stolen in her first week on Maple Avenue, and without the protection of a garage, the Texas sun had overcome German engineering, blistering the midnight-blue paint in several places, giving the car a leprous quality. Inside the filling station she bolted the door behind her and flicked on the AC unit in the boarded window. The burst of rank air that ran until the unit got going made her seek refuge in the outer room. There she breathed deep the smell of fresh-made coffee, then poured a cup.

Casey had known from the little red Fiesta out back that her two associates, Sharon Birnbaum and Donna Juarez, had beaten her to the clinic, but the coffee was proof positive. Casey sighed and surveyed the little storefront room where people had once purchased unhealthy snacks and paid for their fuel. It now served as the reception area for the Marcia Sales Legal Clinic for Women. The old single-bay garage, partitioned into three offices and a conference room by a friend from Habitat for Humanity, was where the women sat, as would a third associate if they could ever find another lawyer willing to work so hard for so little.

Casey’s lawyers sat waiting at the plastic picnic table in what they called the conference room, poring over some documents, each with a laptop in front of her and each clutching her steaming coffee with two hands.

“Full slate this morning,” Casey said, nodding toward the garage door and the crowd she couldn’t see through a sheet of plywood put up over the broken glass. “Sharon, you’ve got court at two, right? Let’s skip the meeting. Just remember, don’t get into it with traffic violations. Tell them to check the guilty box and pay the fine. We’ll get going as soon as Tina gets here.”

Tina served as the clinic’s interpreter.

“We can start,” Sharon said.

“Right,” Casey said. “I can start when Tina gets here.”

“You gotta learn the language.”

All three of them turned. In the doorway stood José O’Brien in faded jeans, wearing a denim shirt over his white tank top to cover the Glock he carried under his arm and the little nickel-plated snub-nosed .38 he kept tucked into the back of his pants.

“When I went to school,” Casey said, pushing a wayward lock of long red hair behind her ear, “everyone took French.”

“Je suis désolé,” he said, telling her he was sorry.

“How do you know French?” she asked.

“School,” he said. “No need to relearn Spanish. My mother said English didn’t make any sense. I got all the Spanish I needed from the cradle on.”

“Yeah, but think about the number of people I could help in the time it would take me to learn,” Casey said.

José smiled at her in his easy way, white teeth flashing like small blades, and shrugged. His long dark eyelashes fluttered with their bashful tic. It was hard for Casey to imagine how he’d gotten the reputation he had when she saw that handsome, winning face with big liquid brown eyes that misted over at times when other men might stare blankly or look away. An ex-cop who’d become the youngest homicide detective in Dallas PD history, José had given up the force after just eight years to become a private investigator and satisfy his young wife’s demands for more time and money.

With the same determined zeal, he built a ten-person investigation firm that catered to wealthy divorce candidates looking for angles. Three years into it, his own wife played an angle, taking him for nearly a million dollars and half his income until their daughter reached eighteen. José sold the business and became a one-man show, working for just enough money to pay the rent and his greedy ex-wife, and, recently, giving the rest of his services away to Casey’s legal clinic, which desperately needed an investigator.

José was just over six feet with arms that tested the limits of his shirtsleeves and the wide V-shaped torso of a linebacker. The cops Casey knew still talked about his time as a patrolman on the street and the way the sight of José in blues would send gangbangers scrambling for cover. One story had him snatching a chrome-plated .45 right out of the hand of a drug dealer and beating him senseless after he’d threatened to kill José and his partner.

“And,” José said, “this place wouldn’t be the same without Tina.”

On cue, Tina, a small dark girl with waves of kinky black hair, appeared blushing beside José and apologized for being late.

“No worry,” Casey said. “We’re going to skip the meeting and open the floodgates. Is Stacy here yet?”

“Waiting for all of you!” Stacy Berg shouted from the other side of the wall. “And the line’s not getting any shorter.”

“So, here we go,” Casey said.

José gave Casey an unusual look and angled his head toward her office, disappearing that way himself. Casey got up from the plastic table and walked past Stacy, who sat behind the filling station counter, ready to direct the human traffic that came in the door.

“Before you send me anyone,” Casey said, “I need five minutes with José.”

“You and every red-blooded woman on the planet,” Stacy said, eyeing the investigator as he disappeared into Casey’s office.

Casey followed him in and closed the door.

CHAPTER 3

ISODORA HEARD THE CAR. SHE’D OPENED THE WINDOWS after the short storm gave way to glaring sun in hopes of capturing the small breeze. She wondered why Elijandro hadn’t returned in the Range Rover. The hands of the clock showed ten before noon and she smacked her dish towel against the metal sink, twisting her frown into a snarl. She hated when he did this, leave her a note that said he’d be back at one time and then arrive four hours later. She took the carton of juice from the refrigerator for the second time and set it down amid the stagnant breakfast things, then went to the door.

Shading her eyes, she studied the car as it materialized from its cloud of dust. When she saw the rack of lights and the police emblem, her stomach turned. Behind her the baby stirred in the crib, giving off a little groan and a small sigh that faded into sleep.

Isodora knew the tall police chief from before the baby was born, when she worked in the big house. Whether it was the ambassador from Brazil or the singer Toby Keith, whenever Elijandro’s boss had important guests, Chief Gage would be there with his bolo tie and icy blue eyes, drinking whiskey with just a single cube of ice. Isodora remembered the senator’s wife, too, a skinny blonde who laughed like a hyena. The police chief fixed the hat on his head and knit his thick brows so they showed over the rims of his mirrored sunglasses. He scuffed the heels of his cowboy boots in the grit, leaving a small trail that Elijandro would call a man track.

“I got some bad news for you, missy,” the police chief said.

Isodora tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She shook her head and turned her face as if bracing for a slap.

“There’s been an accident,” he said. “I’m sorry, but Ellie’s dead.”

“No,” she heard herself say, “I have breakfast for him. I know he’s late.”

The porch creaked under her feet and somewhere out back a calf bawled for its mother. A hiccup escaped her and she pressed her fingertips to her lips, her face flushing with embarrassment, and still she shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” the police chief said.

“I’ll put the eggs on,” she said, opening the screen door and slipping away from him.

She moved through the tiny space, removing the box of eggs from the fridge and cracking them into the pan and lighting the stove, still hiccupping.

“Missy,” the police chief said, his voice following her through the screen door, “I need you to come with me. There’s some papers you need to sign.”

Isodora kept right on cooking. She ignored the police chief, and after a time she stopped hearing his words over the crackling eggs. She didn’t hear him enter, and when he touched her shoulder, she shrieked and cringed.

“You got to at least sign this,” he said, looking at his watch. “Sign it, and I’ll leave you be for now, but when I come back later, you and the baby will have to come.”

She put the spatula in her left hand and signed the paper with her trembling right hand, anything to have him go. He looked at the paper and nodded and she turned back to her work.

When the sound of his car disappeared over the hill, she put out her breakfast the way she knew Elijandro liked it and sat down to wait, staring blankly out the window, hiccupping all the w. . .