The Justice Game (33 page)

    The car started fishtailing, and Jason overcorrected, fighting back a surge of panic. LeRon reached out an arm to brace against the dashboard, shouting expletives. The car skidded, hit the shoulder, and flipped—once, twice, who knew how many times?

    The world spun and tumbled, turning violent and chaotic as if some giant had picked up the car, shaken it around, and thrown it against a tree.

    
The tree.
Jason saw it coming for a split second—nothing but a flash in his peripheral vision during one of the flips—and then felt it. The car slammed against it, metal crashing, shearing, practically exploding, Jason’s head bouncing violently against a doorframe, followed immediately by a jolt and the smell of smoke.

    
Air bags?

    Within a split second, almost instantly, everything was quiet. Jason moaned—his head spinning, his subconscious screaming danger. Was he even alive? There was pain that said he was. A shoulder. His right leg. He could taste blood in his mouth.

    His chest. It felt like somebody had crushed his rib cage.

    He struggled for breath. He fought back darkness.

    He was hanging nearly upside down, his weight on one shoulder and his neck, the whole front seat of the car crushed. The driver’s-side window was pinned against the ground. There was no way out.

    “LeRon?” he said. It came out as a whimper. “LeRon?”

    He tried to twist around, pain shooting through his body. He had to see his friend. A surge of adrenaline-fueled panic blew away some of the cobwebs. The smoke—was the car going to explode?

    He twisted enough so he could see LeRon. His friend was not moving. His neck was wrenched around at a horrible angle, as if some superhuman force had twisted it like a bottle top. LeRon’s eyes were open, staring… lifeless.

    “No!” Jason tried to reach out to him, but the darkness was winning, overwhelming Jason, clouding his thoughts.

    He needed to get out, must get away from the car and get LeRon help… but he was trapped. He couldn’t focus. He started sinking deeper, faster, into a black hole of unconsciousness.

    Somehow, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell. He flipped it open and speed-dialed his dad. Jason was fading fast, gasping for breath. He spoke in chopped sentences. His dad said something—get away from the car? don’t move your friend?—the instructions were lost in the whirlpool of thoughts Jason could no longer control. He mumbled something about the off-ramp, exit 6, a tree. The phone dropped from his hand.

    The pain receded and the panic died, replaced by an oozing darkness and a sense of overwhelming loss.

Jason awoke in the hospital, his mind woozy from pain medication and trauma, his father sitting next to his bed. Jason stared at him for a moment, allowing the world to come into focus again. His father’s face was drawn, his eyes bloodshot.

    “LeRon?” Jason asked.

    His father shook his head.

    The pain medication blunted the grief, keeping Jason from lashing out or shouting. Instead, he closed his eyes, sadness seeping through every fiber of his being. He felt his life had changed forever.

    Immediately the questions started flowing.

    
Why did LeRon die?

    
Why did I survive?

    
Who wants to live like this?

    When he opened his eyes again, his father had not moved. Jason felt tears rolling down his cheek, soaking into his pillow. His father leaned forward, glancing toward the door.

    “You weren’t driving,” he whispered.

    
Huh?
Jason furrowed his brow, trying to comprehend.

    “I called the accident in to Officer Corey, who was patrolling that area. Then I called 911.” His dad edged a little closer to Jason’s bed. “Matt Corey is a friend. He managed to get you both out of the vehicle before the paramedics arrived.”

    Jason shook his head. At least he tried to shake it. Small shakes. Adamant.

    He wasn’t going along with this.

    “Listen to me,” his father said sharply. “We’ve already lost one life. I’m not going to lose another.”

    Jason stared back. Even in his drug-induced state, he knew he had to fight this. He had already done enough damage to LeRon’s family.

    “Matt Corey put his career on the line for
us,
” Jason’s dad said emphatically. “If you don’t handle this right, you’re not just tossing away your life. You’re ending the career of a great and selfless cop.”

The hardest day of Jason’s life was the day of LeRon’s funeral. Jason showed up with his broken right leg in a cast and his left arm in a sling—nursing a broken collarbone, a compound fracture of his tibia, two cracked ribs, and a serious concussion. He used a crutch under his good arm to walk.

    He was showered with kindness and love by LeRon’s family.

    The physical pain was nothing compared to Jason’s broken spirit. During the investigation, he had nodded along as Officer Corey described the scene, even when Corey talked about prying Jason out of the passenger seat. Jason gave vague details about the events of that night—claiming that the last thing he remembered was being at the tennis court parking lots. He had downplayed the amount of drinking he had done. There was no mention of drugs.

    At the funeral, Jason watched in horror as LeRon’s mother sobbed uncontrollably in front of the casket. He cried quietly as LeRon’s dad eulogized his son, bringing the large crowd to laughter and tears and eventually to their feet as they applauded a life well lived.

For the next few months, suicide was never far from Jason’s mind. Nor was confession. On at least three separate occasions, he drove to the parking lot of LeRon’s church but couldn’t muster the courage to go inside and talk to LeRon’s dad about what had really happened.

    The accident changed him. He vowed never to touch a drop of alcohol again. He became more cynical, less social, at times despondent.

    It also served as the tipping point in an already strained relationship between father and son. Jason’s dad thought Jason should be grateful for a second chance at life. Instead, Jason felt resentment toward an officer of the law who would abuse the system and pressure his own son to lie about a matter of life and death. And he felt ashamed for his own part in the deceptive scheme.

    As time wore on, it became harder for Jason to think about setting the record straight. It would destroy both Officer Corey and Jason’s own dad, and what would it help? Would LeRon’s parents really find any relief in knowing that their son wasn’t driving? It wouldn’t bring him back. Jason would probably go to jail, which in some ways might be an improvement—the guilt he already carried seemed more suffocating than any jail cell.

    For months, remorse and shame stalked Jason, hanging over every waking moment, lurking in his nightmares, and reasserting their stranglehold the moment he woke up to face another tortured day. He rationalized his way through life, convincing himself each day that it was too late to turn back now.

    He went to LeRon’s grave and asked for his friend’s forgiveness. He left with the same weight on his shoulders he had brought there.

Two years later, during his sophomore year in college, Jason decided to pursue a career as a lawyer. Maybe it was a sense of guilt that he had survived the accident and LeRon had not. LeRon had wanted to be a trial lawyer, the next Johnnie Cochran. Maybe he would have been.

    Jason couldn’t bring his friend back. But he could at least honor his friend in some small way. Perhaps this accounted for Jason’s willingness to take on criminal defendants as clients. That’s certainly the type of law LeRon would have practiced.

    LeRon’s style would have been very different from Jason’s. LeRon argued out of passion; for Jason it was mostly theater. But maybe someday Jason would find himself sitting at his counsel table, defending someone who faced the full wrath of the state, and realizing that this is exactly what LeRon would have done.

    Jason would be switching seats again.

    But this time, he would make his good friend proud.

Jason stayed awake the entire night after receiving the e-mail from Luthor. He paced around his small apartment over the boathouse. Eventually he went outside and sat on the bulkhead, staring at the bay.

    Mostly, he asked questions.

    What “proof” could there be about the accident? It was ten years ago. Maybe some investigator at the time could have reconstructed the accident based on the damage to the interior of the automobile, the blood in the car, the injuries sustained by Jason and LeRon—that type of thing. But the car had been hauled to the junkyard and the case file closed. There could be no evidence left.

    Unless Matt Corey had preserved something. But why would he do that?

    The prospect of a lie-detector test popped into Jason’s mind and caused his pulse to pick up speed. As a lawyer, he knew he couldn’t be required to take a polygraph. But what if somebody raised a question about who was driving and suggested a lie detector to put the issue to rest? What reason could Jason give for refusing?

    Did Luthor really want Jason to win the Crawford case? If so, why had he threatened blackmail? If you want somebody to win, you call them in the full light of day using your real name.

    Jason had looked up the résumé of former Atlanta chief of police Edward Poole. The man’s credentials were impressive. And Jason could use an expert witness to testify about the black market for guns, someone to explain that criminals like Jamison can obtain guns regardless of whether stores engage in illegal straw sales. But did Jason dare use someone suggested by Luthor?

    What was Luthor’s real agenda?

    As the darkness of the cool spring night gave way to the first hint of sunrise, Jason began focusing on the most important question of all.

    Whom could he trust?

    Certainly not Rafael Johansen. In fact, it occurred to Jason that both the Case McAllister memo leak and the e-mail from Luthor had occurred not long after Rafael joined the team.

    The more he thought about Rafael and the amount of dirt Rafael always managed to dig up on the jurors for the Justice Inc. trials, the more Jason became suspicious of his own investigator. He decided to limit Rafael’s access to the files. The man could conduct his juror investigations at arm’s length—Jason didn’t need him around the office. He thought about firing him the next day but knew he needed Rafael’s skills to properly select the jury in the Crawford case.

    Besides, Jason believed in the principle of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. He wouldn’t fire Rafael until a week or two before trial, until Rafael had completed his investigative profiles on each of the jurors.

    What about the others? Could Jason confide in Matt Corey? Andrew Lassiter? What about Case McAllister? Or Bella? What did he really know about
her
background? For that matter, could Jason even trust his own father?

    Maybe he was just dog tired. Maybe it was the gut-wrenching prospect of his past finally catching up with him. Maybe he was just being paranoid.

    But right now, Jason Noble didn’t know
anybody
he could trust. He would play it the way he had always played it—alone. He would buy some time by meeting with Poole and listing him as an expert. Jason could always withdraw that designation later if something came up.

    But he had a sickening feeling he had not heard the last from Luthor. Figuring out a strategy to win this case could well become the least of his worries.

    Before heading to the bathroom for a shower, Jason he checked the Kryptonite blog. He had a feeling he would be doing this the first thing every morning and the last thing before going to bed at night for a while. Just like he would open every e-mail addressed to him with a nagging sense of dread and uncertainty.

Kelly Starling spent the three months prior to trial in what she called “the zone”—an adrenaline-laced focus that allowed her to work fourteen-hour days for weeks on end. She was billing nearly thirty-five hours a week for her paying clients and spending another forty hours on the Crawford case. She reduced her morning swims to four times a week, ate meals at her desk or in her car, and could barely find time to go to the dry cleaner. E-mails piled up in her inbox, and phone messages from her dwindling list of friends went unanswered.

    Kelly’s life had been pretty much reduced to keeping the plates spinning for her other cases while focusing on the single most important case of her legal career.

    Judge Shaver’s confirmation hearings remained stalled. He checked in with Kelly occasionally, ostensibly calling for an update on her high-profile case, encouraging her like a proud dad. But the phone calls always contained a nebulous question or two—
“
Any new developments? Have you heard anything from our mutual friend? Any settlement negotiations, or are you still planning to go to trial?”

    Each time, Kelly assured him there were no new developments. She was beginning to think she might never hear from Luthor again—that he (or she) just wanted to ensure that the case would go to trial.

    Luthor certainly wasn’t much of a pen pal. And without more frequent contacts, Kelly had given up trying to figure out who it was. How could she draw out information if the mysterious Luthor never bothered to contact her?

    For three months, she focused on getting ready for trial. Blake Crawford was counting on her. She couldn’t let speculation about Luthor distract her from the task at hand.

    Even Luthor seemed to understand this. For three months, Luthor was silent.