Free Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller) by Joel Goldman Page A

slackened, and what little color he had melted away, his eyes fluttering. She expected that, but not the small smile that leaked from the corners of his mouth, as if he was telling himself, I told you so . He was revealing pieces of himself, but she didn’t know what they meant.
    “And a few months after that, we’ll have a preliminary hearing. That’s when the prosecutor will put on enough evidence to convince the judge that you should stand trial. And six months to a year from then you’ll go to trial unless we make a deal.”
    Jared perked up. “What kind of deal?”
    “Too early to say, but it would probably mean pleading guilty to a lesser offense to avoid the death penalty or life without parole. Something that would give you a shot at eventually getting out.”
    He shook his head. “They ain’t ever lettin’ me out.”
    Alex cocked her head. “Why do you say that?”
    “’Cause that’s the way it is.”
    “Innocent people confess to crimes they didn’t commit more often than you could guess. It happens for all kinds of reasons. And someone who’s been to war and who ends up living on the street may be even more likely to do that just because of all the stress you’ve gone through. I’ll come back after court and we’ll go over everything that happened. And I’ll dig into everything the police did to get you to confess. If there’s a way to keep your confession from the jury, I’ll find it.”
    “I hear you,” he said, his chin down. “But . . .”
    Alex leaned toward him, holding her breath, waiting to see if he would recant his confession. Jared looked away, saying nothing. Alex pressed him. “But what?”
    He leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and let it out. “It don’t really matter anymore.”
    “What doesn’t matter?”
    His eyes were red and wet. “All of it. Everything. I been headed here a long time, and now that I am here, it don’t matter anymore.”
    Her clients rarely told her the truth, especially the first time she met them, even when they were confronted with persuasive physical evidence, like DNA and fingerprints. The street-smart ones who’d spent their lives perfecting the arts of deception and denial would tell her without flinching that they knew it looked bad but it wasn’t them, that the eyewitnesses were liars and the lab tests were wrong, that they’d been at their mother’s house watching television when the crime occurred. When she’d tell them to get real, they’d ask what kind of deal they could get, not admitting their guilt but offering to testify against somebody. Who? she’d ask. Anybody, they would say. Whatever it took.
    Jared Bell told her something she didn’t hear very often from her clients. He was where he belonged. Maybe because he was guilty and nothing he could do would change that or maybe because he was innocent and nothing he could do would prove that.
    “Well, it matters to me,” she told him.
    On her way out, Alex stopped to talk to Calvin Lockett, one of the corrections officers. Alex had cultivated a friendship with him, making it a point to ask about his family, sharing news of hers. It had paid off more than once when Calvin let her know about an inmate too eager to testify against one of her clients.
    He had worked the jail for twenty years, using the time to become an unofficial jailhouse psychologist, adept at diagnosing what he called an inmate’s roots, the tangle of bad breaks, bad judgment, and plain meanness that put them in his charge. He grew up poor and black like many of them, puzzling about how he ended up on the other side of the steel bars. Rail thin and graying, he watched over the inmates, shaking his head and clucking his tongue.
    “Hey, Calvin,” Alex said. “How’s it going?”
    “Same old, same old.”
    “I’ve got a new client, Jared Bell. What’s your take on him?”
    “Boy’s a midnight screamer. Wakes everybody up with all his racket.”
    “Nightmares, huh? Any idea what