Free Deadlocked by Joel Goldman Page A

people. They were the bred-to-succeed type who would have sent Nick to private school, lived in a big house, and traveled. At least he knew what they looked like.
    Mason didn't even have a current picture of Whitney King. He knew nothing about him except that his life was the opposite of Ryan's. He was acquitted, though Mary and Nick claimed he was guilty. He was alive while Ryan was dead. The rest was a one-dimensional yearbook summary. Whitney had been a decent student at St. Mark's, a parochial school on Main between Westport and the Plaza. He was a basketball player who had never been in trouble before that night. He could have been anybody.
    Brandon Potter, King's lawyer at the trial, had been in his prime then, more committed to the courtroom than the pint of scotch he now carried in his briefcase. Even then, Potter had been expensive. Mason guessed that the defense ran at least a quarter of a million, plus the expert witnesses who had testified that the fatal blows were struck by someone taller and stronger than Whitney, someone fitting Ryan's build. So the King family had money and, Mason knew, defendants with money spend less time in jail than those represented by public defenders.
    There was nothing in the little he knew about King that explained the murderous rampage against Graham and Elizabeth Byrnes. He had to say the same for Ryan Kowalczyk. Working-class family. Same good grades. Same school. Same basketball team. No red flags like torturing small animals, pulling the wings off of flies, or even sending threatening e-mails in the middle of the night.
    Juries want to know what happened and who did it. Those answers often came more easily than the one they most wanted to know in a case like this one. Why? Why did one or both boys—good boys from good families—go crazy and kill those people? If Mason could answer that question, he'd have a chance of getting his clients what they wanted.
    Normally, he would have told Mickey to run an Internet search on all three families, the Kings, the Kowalczyks, and the Byrnes, picking up data on houses, cars, and neighbors, the dull stuff that sometimes led to the good stuff. Mason promised himself that he'd get around to that, picking up his phone instead. Rachel Firestone answered on the second ring.
    "Buy you dinner," Mason said.
    "Wouldn't blame you if you did. Company like mine is hard to come by. Especially for a man."
    Rachel was a reporter for the Kansas City Star, a self-described lipstick lesbian who gratefully extended the term sister to describe her close relationship with Mason. She and Mason had an understanding about what was on and off the record that let them both do their jobs.
    "Company like mine comes at a price," Mason said.
    "No free lunches or dinners, huh? What do you need?"
    "Background on Whitney King."
    "Name's familiar. Wait a minute. The other kid, what was his name, Kowalczyk or something like that? They were tried for murder. One was convicted, the other got off. Which was it?"
    "Kowalczyk was executed the other day. That help any? Or are you only covering the society pages these days?"
    "Easy, cowboy. You're the one that wants the freebie here," she told him. "What's the story and when can I write it?"
    "Bring me the freebies and I'll lay it out for you. There's a new place at Eighteenth and Vine I want to try. Camille's. Meet me there at seven."
    "The Jazz District," she said. "A straight shot east on Eighteenth from the paper. Even I can't get lost. See ya."
    Mason thumbed through the day's mail, stopping at a thin envelope with his name written on it in Claire's sharp-edged script. A time-yellowed news clipping from the Kansas City Star was inside. The photograph above the story was a grainy, black-and-white of a car dangling from the back of a tow truck, its front end mangled, the passenger side caved in, the windows blown out. In the background, a gash in the guard rail cut by the car on its way into the gully below. Wet pavement