Free Chasing Justice: A Matt Royal Mystery by H. Terrell Griffin Page B

law clerk.
    I would need an investigator. There were too many questions that needed to be answered, and although the state attorney was supposed to provide me with much of the information I’d need, I was afraid that George Swann would be a master at the game of hide the ball. It was unethical, of course, but, too often prosecutors forgot their charge to see that justice was done rather than the need to win at all costs.
    J.D. had introduced me to a Sarasota police detective named Gus Grantham, with whom she’d worked in Miami before he moved to Sarasota PD a few years before. J.D. and I had gone to dinner with him on several occasions. He had recently retired, gotten his private investigator’s license, and opened an office in a building across from the Ringling School of Art and Design on North Tamiami Trail. I decided to give him a call the next morning.
    I needed to find out more about my opponent. I Googled Swann and found several articles about him and his trials that had run over the years in the Florida Times-Union ,the Jacksonville newspaper. He’d been a climber, starting out in the misdemeanor division when he graduated from law school at Florida State University. He’d moved up quickly to the felony division and within a few years was trying murder cases. He’d been with the state attorney’s office for thirteen years, was thirty-nine years old, and a native of Orange Park, a suburb of Jacksonville. A few of the articles about his murder cases mentioned the names of his opposing counsel, usually a member of the public defender’s staff. I made a mental note to call a couple of them.
    I did a quick survey of the case law, updating my digital library, downloading a few recent cases, and cataloging them by subject matter. They’d be close at hand if and when I needed them.
    I was restless, my mind churning, gnawing at the case I’d taken on. There was so much to learn, so much to do, so much riding on the decisions I made, the strategies I relied on. I was probably closer to Abby than a lawyer should be to his client. There were so many reasons I should not handle this case, but while our system of justice was the best in the world, it wasn’t foolproof, and I had come to the conclusion, perhaps unsupported by facts, that Swann and Lucas were glory hounds who would not be above manipulating the process to score a win, no matter the guilt or innocence of the defendant.
    My problem with the practice of law was that I was an idealist. I thought the law should be somehow immaculate, above the machinations of mere mortals. Yeah, I know, that’s kind of stupid, and I had not been a lawyer very long before I began to see how outrageous my expectations had been. It was a rat race and the rats were the lawyers who plied their trade in the courtrooms all over the country. Winning, not justice, was the name of the game, and I became one of the rats. Alcohol consumption made it easier to go to work every day, and I began to exist in a haze of good bourbon. I had once been a proud soldier, an officer leading a group of men who were the best fighters in the world and the most honorable people I’d ever known. Honorable men in the honorable profession of soldiering. Then I went to law school.
    The terrible contradiction of the law was that it was peopled for the most part with idealists who had to lower their sights to survive in the real world of daily practice. Most of the lawyers I knew were honest, forthright, and hard working. But there were enough of the other kind that the practice lost its allure for me.
    My wife Laura, the only woman I’d loved before I met J.D., worked hard at our marriage, but finally gave up in the face of my intransigence. She left me, got a divorce, and remarried. I woke up one morning a couple of years later, looked around my empty house, said the hell with it, sold everything I had, and moved to Longboat Key to start over. It was the best decision I’d made in a long time.
    Maybe it