Indefensible Read Free Page B

Meaning he could be implicated in all of their crimes, including but not necessarily limited to selling crack cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, as well as extortion, murder, kiddie porn, and prostitution, to name a few.
    â€œYou help us, we’ll help you,” Chip said to Zander.
    The idea was to have Zander inform us of the next exchange. We’d spot the contact, surveil him, pick him up at a later time (to protect Zander), and hopefully work our way up the chain to some bigwigs. Zander would walk away clean. He wouldn’t even have to tell his parents.
    Zander agreed.
    I left him and his lawyer to discuss particulars with Chip, so I wasn’t there when Zander walked out the smoked-glass front doors of the FBI building, but I bet he stood breathing in the exhaust-y afternoon air of the city, feeling awed by his freedom. Certainly, he realized it could have gone differently; he could have been up for eighteen months of three hots and a cot at Club Fed just on the possession charges—life if we’d tied him in to a conspiracy. I hope he exulted in however many hours of freedom he got before they picked him up.

C HAPTER 5
    A t the Drowntown Café near the reservoir, we talk about how to play it. I’m in shirtsleeves, my tie loosened. Dorsey and Chip are still wearing suit jackets, as guys with holsters do in public. Chip’s is a belt holster, and Dorsey has a shoulder holster with his jacket semi-intentionally pushed back, making the gun as inconspicuous as a panther in a petting zoo.
    It’s a huge advantage—finding the body the same day it was ditched, with the bad guys still thinking it’ll never turn up. We just have to figure out how to put our advantage to work.
    â€œDollars to doughnuts,” Dorsey says, “we won’t find anything on the body. Zilch. Clean as a whistle. You’ll see.”
    I’m feeling on edge. I’m irritated by Dorsey and Chip, and I want to move over one table to where Cassandra and Lizzy sit with Kenny, all of them eating strawberry rhubarb pie. I want to be with them, not with the cops. I recognize how foolish it was to bring Lizzy on this excursion, a lapse of both parental and professional judgment. I’ve always tried to keep her far from the nitty-gritty of my job, because there are evils afoot in the world that fourteen-year-old girls don’t need to know about. It gnaws at me, the stupidity—I feel as though I’ve ushered her into a sphere of danger. And I know how it happened: I was beguiled by Cassandra. Maybe Lizzy isn’t the only one pretending to have a normal family life.
    â€œI don’t know,” Chip says, “I’m betting we find a calling card: ballistics, DNA, fibers. Something.” He has a cup pressed to his face, and I realize I’m doing the same, warming my cheek on willowware, though the room temperature is in the seventies. Dorsey and I have coffee. Chip has herbal tea of some kind that he picked from a wicker basket the waitress brought over. He had engaged herat length about the different qualities of the herbal blends before choosing from the assortment.
    â€œWe could get her hypnotized, I suppose,” Dorsey says of Cassandra. “Like, maybe she saw their car parked out at the road. Something like that. You know?”
    Chip shakes his head and says, “I suppose.”
    I shrug. Dorsey shrugs. The hypnosis idea is dead. We know she didn’t see anything.
    At the other table, Cassandra and Lizzy are talking quietly. Kenny is silent.
    â€œ. . . because she’s really no witness at all,” Chip says.
    â€œShe doesn’t exist, evidence-wise. Investigation-wise,” Dorsey says.
    â€œTrial-wise,” Chip adds.
    â€œJust a bloodhound after it finds a body.”
    â€œLet’s send her home,” Dorsey says, and he’s up and at the door, beckoning someone in from the parking lot. A uniformed trooper enters. Dorsey thanks