Burden of Truth (Cass Leary Legal Thriller Series Book 1)

by Robin James

  I felt the outlines of Eric Wray’s dollar bill in my pocket.

  “I’ve known Dan since kindergarten,” he said, the emotion leaving his voice. His words began to rush out of him, as if he’d rehearsed them a thousand times in his head. I realized with cold stillness that he probably had. “I met him the same day I met Jack LaForge’s little brother Grady. That kid was a bully. He knocked Dan down on the playground. Found a couple of his buddies to try and keep him there. I don’t like bullies. So I punched Grady’s teeth out. Wasn’t much of a problem. They were loose to begin with.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I giggled at that.

  “You were a good friend to Dan,” I said. “He told me that.”

  Eric stared at that graffiti-stained spot in the snow. “Thirty-three years. Sean is my godson. If Wendy and I ever had kids, Dan would have been the first one’s godfather. We hunt together every November, except not this one, of course.”

  They hunted together. Bits of the trial echoed in my mind. The coroner’s testimony. A standard hunting knife. Of course, I’d seen one just like it in Eric’s belt that night at Mickey’s when he disarmed Joe.

  “That night,” I said. “June 22nd. Dan got drunk at Mickey’s. Is that when he told you about Aubrey and Coach D? He doesn’t even remember it. Someday, he might.”

  Eric dropped his head. Unlike me, he wasn’t wearing gloves. The skin over his knuckles had turned red from the cold. He squeezed his fists in his lap. Finally, his breath steady, his voice nearly toneless, he looked me straight in the eye.

  “Yeah. He was going to kill him.”

  I took a breath. “I know.”

  Eric set his jaw to the side, regarding me. He didn’t nod, exactly, but there was an almost twinkle in his eye. “Dan was going to kill Larry Drazdowski. He knew no one would believe Aubrey’s story. He knew she was trying to figure out a way to bring him down. He was drunk out of his mind. I almost didn’t believe him. But I know that man.”

  Eric looked back out at the snow. “He told me he bought a gun. He wouldn’t listen. I promised him I’d figure out a way to help. Then …”

  “You followed her,” I said. “You left the bar and followed Aubrey that night?”

  “No,” he said. “I followed him. That fucking monster. What Dan told me … I just lost it.”

  The puzzle pieces had begun to take shape the night of the verdict in my conference room. Hell, maybe even before that. It was a small department. Only a few people would have had access to the security footage on that property shelf. Then there were little snippets of things Dan had said. He’d been the one to tell me he saw Eric that night. Dan was so drunk he had no idea what he’d said.

  “She didn’t come home that night when she was supposed to,” Eric said. “Diane called Dan. He was in no condition to drive. I couldn’t let him do it. I asked him to trust me. I was going to be the one to get the evidence Aubrey needed. I promised him that.”

  I sat back hard against the bench.

  “She wasn’t home. She was supposed to come straight home. I said I’d go looking for her. I took Dan’s keys and gave them to the bartender. I left him there. God, it was just dumb luck I drove by the park.”

  “And you saw Larry’s car.” My pulse skyrocketed.

  “I saw Larry’s car. He wasn’t on the swings though. He was over there. Right by that stupid shamrock statue.”

  “He admitted it,” I said, my tone dropping an octave.

  Eric shook his head. “He didn’t deny it. He actually tried to fucking shake my hand. I told him I knew who he was and what he’d done to Aubrey. I swear to God I didn’t know about your sister. He stood there, smiling; he told me to my face that I’d never be able to prove a goddamn thing.”

  “You’re done, Larry. It’s over.” Eric went somewhere else in those few moments. He was there beside me, but his eyes glazed over as if he saw a scene from a movie playing behind them.

  Eric was tall, but even at six foot three, Drazdowski would have had a good two inches on him and maybe forty pounds. But I wagered Eric was the better fighter. He’d honed his skills against street thugs and drug dealers who actually wanted him dead back in his beat cop days.

  “He got scared,” Eric said. Still, he wouldn’t look at me. He stared at a point in the snow. “Something changed in his face. He read mine, maybe. He knew I wasn’t bullshitting. He finally faced somebody who wasn’t afraid of him. God, that felt so good.”

  “Come on,” he told me. “What the hell are these girls telling you, man? You think I’m some kind of pervert? Look, I’m no saint. But, in case you haven’t checked, Aubrey Ames is nineteen years old. Yeah. Maybe it’s not the smartest thing to get mixed up with her, but you know how it is. She wants it. Believe me. She begged for it. Just tonight even.”

  I thought I might be sick. I gripped the edge of the park bench as Eric continued.

  “I’ve been around enough men like Larry Drazdowski. He believed the shit he was saying. And he’d never stop. I knew it. God. In my soul, I knew he’d have to be stopped. I grabbed him then. I told him if he touched that girl or any other one again … I’ll fucking end you!”

  Eric went very still but for a tiny tremor in his right hand. His fingers opened and closed. I could almost see the handle of the knife fall into his hand.

  “Eric?” I said, afraid to break the spell.

  Eric turned to me; his eyes had gone blood red. He blinked back tears. He continued in that odd narrative, repeating Larry’s words verbatim and crossed with his own. “He said … oh God. He said … It sure as shit worked on that piece of ass you married. Wendy. She was one of the sweetest. Like a ripe peach. She begged for it too. She ever tell you that? Nah. That wouldn’t have been her style. But man, the way she filled out that cheerleader skirt. Swish. Swish.”

  The bottom dropped out of my heart.

  “The shit he said then … he said he got there before I did. He asked me to ask her how my wife spent her eighteenth birthday. And he … he knew things. She has a birthmark on her thigh. He … God, Cass, it was like my blood turned to fire. He kept talking, every word just hit me, like he was bludgeoning my mind with them.”

  “Kind of like a heart, right? Oooh, and those freckles near her nipples …”

  I put a hand over my mouth.

  “He wouldn’t stop. He would never stop. Wendy. She was hurt. Crying. I found her running on the side of the road on her eighteenth birthday. She was supposed to be having a slumber party with her friends. Girl drama. That’s what she said. I’d been so stupid to believe it. God, I was just a damn kid myself. Nineteen. Self-absorbed. I was trying not to flunk out of college.

  “She never told me. That was almost twenty years ago and she never told. How many more girls had there been since then?”

  I put a hand against his cheek. A tear fell from Eric’s eye. But he was far from done.

  “Larry said I couldn’t do shit. He told me how he could fuck up my world and threatened to have me bounced back down to the street. He thought that even mattered to me.

  “I couldn’t make her happy. God. Wendy. I could never make her happy. I thought it was me. It was me. Why didn’t I stop it? Why didn’t I see it?”

  “You couldn’t. No more than I could with Vangie,” I said, but Eric was too far gone for me to reach just then.

  “He made a move on me,” Eric said. “I can tell myself he was going to throw a swing. Maybe he would have. But … I just knew there was only one way to stop that fucking monster from hurting another little girl again. I would never let him get the chance.”

  “Your knife,” I said.

  He nodded. “I always keep it with me.”

  He slid it out of his belt loop now; the blade gleamed in the sun.

  “Eric …”

  “Not this one,” he said. “No one will ever find the one I ended his life with.”

  “Good,” I said sharply.

  I was too stunned to wipe away my own tears. When I looked back on it
, I wasn’t even sure who I was crying for. Aubrey, Vangie, Wendy Wray, or Eric himself.

  “I swear to God I didn’t know Aubrey had met him in the park that night,” he said, his voice shaking. “I didn’t know she’d sent those text messages to him. I didn’t know she’s the one who asked to meet him there. I got there well after she’d left.”

  “And after Benny Hyde saw him. How did you figure out he’d been there?”

  “I ran into him a couple of nights before the trial started. He started babbling about why he wasn’t going to get his big moment. I thought he was just blowing smoke like he always does. But then he said something about the swings.”

  “That night at Mickey’s,” I said. “You were confronting Bowman about it.”

  Eric nodded. “It kept unraveling. The more I tried to contain it, the worse it got.”

  “She up and confessed on us,” I said, a bitter smile forming on my face.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She came to the same conclusion I had. Her dad was going to kill that bastard. She thought he had.”

  “You gambled,” I said. “Jesus. The jury. You know it could have gone either way. Eric, you let that girl twist in the wind for months?”

  When he dropped his head, a tear fell from the bridge of his nose.

  “I wasn’t going to let that happen. I swear to God.”

  I believed him. I still had plenty of anger. But, I believed him.

  He shook his head. “You saved her. You had the jury. What your sister said. They were looking for a reason to set her free. God, I’m sorry for that. I never meant to have Vangie dragged through this too. But, I was planning to step forward. I know that sounds convenient for me to say now, but it’s true. If Bowman had just done his job. If he hadn’t suppressed evidence… It just kept spiraling.”

  “Still,” I said.

  “I would never have let that girl go to prison for what I did. Never.”

  “They won’t stop looking though,” I said. “I put it together. Someone else might. Someone with an ax to grind, like Bowman, maybe.”

  Eric shook his head. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. Right now, nobody wants to touch this investigation. Public opinion against Coach D has turned. Most people, including the department and the prosecutor’s office think he got what he deserved. Jack LaForge wants his boss’s job next election cycle. He can’t afford another failure. I’ve seen this happen before. It’s going to fade away. They’re focusing on building indictments on anyone involved in the cover-up.”

  Silence fell between us as I considered Eric Wray’s words. He was right, of course. I don’t know how long it lasted, but the wind kicked up again and I couldn’t feel my feet.

  “I used to think right and wrong was like two sides of a coin,” I said. “Then I went to Chicago. Big dreams. Big career. Big money. I was seduced by it. I mean, me, Cass Leary, from the east side of the lake. I had everything. I was someone. And nobody there knew where I came from. Then one day I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize my own face. I found myself doing things for people that I knew were wrong. And it didn’t happen all at once. It happened little by little. One line crossed, then another. Until finally, the burden of it all caught up with me and I couldn’t breathe. But by then, it was too late to get out. Too late to turn back. At least, that’s what I thought. Until now.”

  “I was wrong,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “That’s not what I’m telling you,” I said. “I’m telling you that I can finally look in the mirror and know who I am again. And I can look at you and tell you I understand. I think maybe you’re a good man, Detective Wray. You’re not a perfect man. I’m telling you there’s evil in the world and sometimes we have to touch it to end it. And I think we both know Larry Drazdowski was getting ready to move on to the next girl, and the next after that. And maybe someday, he would have been caught. But it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.The Kevin Sydneys of the world were working too hard to cover it up.”

  His shoulders slumped, with relief or defeat, I wasn’t sure. But I did recognize the lifting of that burden. I had felt it once myself, not too long ago.

  “It’s what I tell her,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Wendy,” he said. “When I sit by her bedside at Maple Valley. I don’t know if she can hear me. Probably not. The doctors say she was deprived of oxygen too long. But I tell her every time. He’s gone. That monster is gone. I killed him for her. And I’m so fucking sorry I wasn’t there to keep him from hurting her in the first place. Everyone thinks I’m a sucker for doing it. I know what she was. What she did, sleeping around on me. It was all but over between us. But the thing of it was, it’s not her fault. She was broken before she even married me. And I was broken after. This job. I wasn’t there for her. I just didn’t realize how far back.”

  I put a hand on his back. His muscles bunched, solid as granite.

  “I think you did the best you could. And maybe she can hear you. No matter what those doctors say, don’t stop telling her.”

  This time, his smile was genuine and deep. He touched my face and even in the cold, Eric Wray’s skin burned through mine. As I stared into his piercing blue eyes, I believed he had the soul of a good man. I just hoped he wasn’t too far gone to believe it.

  “I think you did the best you could too,” he said. “And I think it’s time for you to get the hell out of the cold.”

  He rose slowly, staring down at me. “See you around, counselor.”

  “See you around, detective,” I answered back.

  Then Eric Wray made the slow walk up the hill toward his car. I slid my hand in my pocket, crunching his dollar bill in my mitten. My retainer. His assurance that his darkest truth would never leave my lips. The feel of it warmed me as I made my way out of Shamrock Park.

  Up Next for Cass Leary

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  Cass takes the case that could rip her family apart. Her sister Vangie stands accused in the double homicide of an affluent, Ann Arbor couple. The only witness, is their six-year-old daughter, the child Vangie gave up for adoption. Now, the child is missing. All the physical evidence points to Vangie’s guilt and Cass knows she’s been keeping secrets. But, is she truly capable of murder?

  Turn the page for details on how to grab a free, exclusive copy Crown of Thorne, the bonus prologue to the Cass Leary Legal Thriller Series.

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  About the Author

  Robin James is an attorney and former law professor. She's worked on a wide range of civil, criminal and family law cases in her twenty-year legal career. She also spent over a decade as supervising attorney for a Michigan legal clinic assisting thousands of people who could not otherwise afford access to justice.

  Robin now lives on a lake in southern Michigan with her husband, two children, and one lazy dog. Her favorite, pure Michigan writing spot is stretched out on the back of a pontoon watching the faster boats go by.

  Sign up for Robin James’s Legal Thriller Newsletter to get all the latest updates on her new releases and get a free bonus scene from Burden of Truth featuring Cass Leary’s last day in Chicago. http://www.robinjamesbooks.com/newsletter/

  Also by Robin James

  Cass Leary Legal Thriller Series

  Burden of Truth

  Silent Witness

  Devil’s Bargain

 

 

 
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