Free No Mercy by John Gilstrap

circumstances, they could sift through his notes and such and come up with what happened."
    Jonathan shook his head. "Let the cops do that. We've got our own evidence to work on."
    Venice's eyes widened. "So you're not sharing this with the police either?"
    "Of course not. If Tibor had wanted them involved, he would have sent the chip to them. I can't disrespect his final wishes like that."
    Dom winced. "The man is dead, Dig. Don't desecrate that."
    Jonathan conceded. "I apologize. But we're still not sharing with the police." A new thought stirred in his head. "How did the chip come to us, Ven?"
    She shrugged. "In an envelope."
    "Just like a regular letter?"
    "Yep. In fact, there was a letter with it. It was just another salvo in y'all's lawsuit."
    "Do you still have it?"
    Venice pulled the envelope out a larger evidence envelope and handed it over.
    Jonathan saw that his address was laser-printed on the front. "How about that? Running for his life, he took time to type an envelope."
    Dom scowled. "I don't think so."
    "Neither do I."
    "He must have had it filled out already," Venice said. "Why would he do that?"
    "Maybe he was expecting things to go wrong," Dom offered.
    Jonathan didn't think they had it. "Let me see the letter that was with it." Venice handed it to him. She was right; it was just another letter like all the others in the ongoing lawsuit, clarifying one of the finer points of discovery. These things were supposed to go through the lawyers, but Tibor was always on the lookout for ways to keep his fees low.
    "You know what?" Jonathan thought aloud. "Ellen told me on the ride home that Tibor had been on his way to the post office when he got sidetracked onto his mystery trip. I think he didn't intend to mail this chip to me at all. I think he wanted to get rid of it, didn't have any time, and just happened to have this letter in his pocket, probably already stamped. If he'd lived, maybe he would have tried to get it back unopened or something."
    Venice's eyes got big. "That's it. The killers knew there was a tape--'Steve' told them as much. If the killers couldn't find it when they found him, and if Tibor didn't give it up to them, they might have assumed he'd maen without the lie."
    "Thank you, Deputy," Venice said. "That's good to--"
    The click of the dead line clipped her last words. She killed the speakerphone and glared at Jonathan. "You didn't have to be such a jerk," she said.

    It took twenty minutes for the e-mail to arrive from Deputy Semen, no doubt a bit of petulance from a pissed-off cop. Jonathan was surprised that the guy hadn't fought back a little harder. He was, after all, the one who had the information they wanted, and any impropriety they laid on his doorstep would implicate them, too. Had the positions been reversed, Jonathan would have recognized the bluff.
    The photos of the body came as attachments to an e-mail, a total of five of them. Venice hung close to Jonathan's shoulder as he clicked on the first image, but as soon as it materialized, she looked away and busied herself with straightening a stack of papers on her desk. Even Jonathan had trouble looking at it for more than a few seconds.
    Jonathan had seen far more horrifying sights than this on battlefields, and while he'd never gotten used to it, dismemberment was oddly natural to the environment of warfare. The same images, though, in the context of home soil, triggered revulsion and anger. When soldiers killed soldiers, the underlying nobility of the conflict dulled the edges of the horror. That such defilement could be an end unto itself, as it clearly was in these awful photographs from Kentucky, left him feeling empty and sick.
    Jonathan thought about poor Thomas Hughes, and the additional emotional damage that his father's fate would heap upon him. He didn't like feeling such empathy for a case that was supposed to have been locked away in his cerebral filing cabinet by now. It made viewing Stephenson Hughes's vivisected