Hear No Evil Read Free

the picture, Theo. What do you think I should do?”
    “Simple. Take her case. If you get into it and find out she’s guilty, resign.”
    “That’s dicey. Once a murder case gets going, you can’t just withdraw. The judge won’t let you out if the only grounds you have for withdrawing are that you suddenly think your client is guilty. If that were the standard, you’d have lawyers dropping out in the middle of trial every day.”
    “Then you gotta find a way to convince yourself that your client is innocent before you take the case. How about asking her to take a lie detector test?”
    “I don’t believe in them, especially with someone as emotionally distraught as she is. Might as well flip a coin.”
    “So, what are you telling me?”
    “Bottom line, she could be indicted tomorrow, for all I know. I need a quick answer, and, as usual, there is none.”
    Theo took the drink from his friend’s hand, placed it on the bar, and pushed it aside. “Then get off the fucking bar stool, go home, and read that investigative report. Read it the way you’d read it if that boy was just another boy.”
    His tone was stern, and Theo wasn’t grinning, but Jack knew the words were coming from a friend. Jack rose, then laid a five on the bar to cover the two drinks.
    “Hey,” said Theo. “I wasn’t kidding.”
    “I know.”
    “I mean the tab, genius. Till you find that sense of humor, I’m charging you double, remember?”
    Jack reached for his wallet and threw another bill on the bar. “Thanks for teaching me a lesson,” he said with a chuckle. But as he zigzagged through the noisy crowd and headed for the exit, passing one pointless conversation after another, he couldn’t help but wonder what all the forced laughter was about, and his smile faded.
    He wished Theo were right. He wished to God everything were funny.

3
    T he following afternoon, Jack was on the fifth floor of the U.S. attorney’s office in downtown Miami. He’d been up most of the night combing over a copy of the NCIS report Lindsey Hart had left with him. Jack had never seen an investigative report from the Naval Criminal Investigative Services before, but it was similar to scores of civilian homicide reports he’d examined over the years, with one major exception: the blacked-out information. It seemed that something—sometimes an entire paragraph, even an entire witness statement—was excised from each page, deemed by Naval Command to be too sensitive for civilian eyes.
    Jack’s first thought had been that the NCIS was withholding information from Lindsey because she was a murder suspect. He phoned a friend in the JAG Reserves, however, and discovered that it wasn’t all that unusual for the family of slain military personnel to receive highly redacted investigative reports. Even when death was unrelated to combat—be it homicide, suicide, or accident—survivors didn’t always have the privilege of knowing exactly what their loved one was doing when he died, whom he’d last spoken to, or even what he might have written in his diary just hours before a 9 mm slug shattered the back of his skull. To be sure, the military often had legitimate needs for secrecy, especially at a place like Guantánamo, the only remaining U.S. base on communist soil. But it was Jack’s job to be skeptical.
    “You know I wasn’t being cute on the phone, right, Jack? I really do have absolutely nothing to do with the Hart case.”
    Gerry Chafetz was seated behind his desk, hands clasped behind hishead, a posture Jack had seen him assume countless times when Gerry was his supervisor. Back then, they’d toil late into the evening, arguing over just about everything from whether the Miami Dolphins had won more football games wearing their aqua jerseys or their white jerseys to whether their star witness was a dead man with or without the federal witness protection program. Jack sometimes missed the old days, but he knew that even if he’d stayed, things could