Free Afraid of the Dark by James Grippando

prosecutor, “may I talk to you privately for a minute?”
    Jack and Neil exchanged glances. “I’ll meet you downstairs,” said Neil. He closed up his briefcase and headed for the exit, leaving Jack alone with the prosecutor.
    “Here’s the deal,” said McCue. “Wakefield pleads guilty to both counts—first degree murder and attempted murder—and I won’t seek the death penalty. Life without parole.”
    “That’s not much of a deal.”
    “We’re talking about a teenage girl brutally murdered and a cop who was blinded trying to save her.”
    “You should be pitching this deal to Neil Goderich.”
    “I’m not offering it to him. In fact, I’m only giving it to you because—”
    The stop was abrupt, and as the silence lingered, the reality washed over Jack, making his blood boil. “Because my fiancée asked you to?”
    McCue didn’t answer, and his body language was anything but a denial. Jack glanced across the courtroom toward the lawyer for the Department of Justice—the same agency that Andie worked for. She averted her eyes.
    “I’ll give you until Monday,” said McCue. “After that, it’s the death penalty. No more deals. No more favors.”
    Jack took a deep breath as he stood and watched the prosecutors leave the courtroom, and he wasn’t sure who made him more angry: the arrogant assistant state attorney with his Washington ringer or the meddlesome new blonde who had stopped wearing her engagement ring.

Chapter Eleven
    O n Saturday morning Jack found himself surrounded by a sea of spandex. Headed for CocoPlum, one of south Florida’s tony waterfront communities, he was stuck behind hundreds of cyclists—a side-by-side wall that stretched across three lanes and moved at the mind-numbing speed of eleven miles per hour. Cartegena Circle—a suburban south-Florida version of the vehicular insanity surrounding the Arc de Triomphe—was not just the meeting place of choice for weekend warriors on wheels. It was quite possibly the world’s greatest concentration of bulging blobs of jelly who had absolutely no business wearing form-fitting clothing.
    Jack was inching around the circle in his ten-year-old Saab convertible with the ragtop down, practically riding on the rear bumper of a new Maserati—so new, in fact, that it had a temporary tag. Bullet gray with dark tinted windows. Chrome wheels so shiny that they couldn’t have left the showroom floor more than two hours ago. Jack wondered how anyone could plunk down a quarter-mill on a new Maserati in the post–hold-on-to-your-ass-cuz-I-just-lost-mine economy. The answer was splashed across the back window in block white letters: FLORIDAFORECLOSURES.COM .
    Talk about a sign of the times.
    Jack steered into CocoPlum, stopped at the guard house, and rolled down the window. “I’m headed to the Mays residence,” he said.
    The guard jotted down his license plate number and offered quick directions. Jack followed the line of tall royal palms toward the water.
    Last night’s phone call had come as a total shock. Jack still hadn’t decided to try the case. Even if he had, never in a million years would he have guessed that his first interview would be the victim’s father. Then again, never in a billion years would Jack have thought that Chuck Mays would call and insist on meeting him—alone. Jack was fully prepared for an angry lecture on why he shouldn’t stoop to defending the man who had murdered McKenna Mays.
    Jack pulled into the driveway of a tri-level Mediterranean-style mansion. The new Mays residence was far more impressive and in a much pricier neighborhood than the one that had burned to the ground. The eight-bedroom waterfront estate hadn’t risen from the ashes with just insurance proceeds. In the past three years, Chuck Mays had made a pot of money in the data-broker business with a service that delivered billions of dossiers to police, private investigators, lawyers, reporters, and insurance companies. Success was relative,