2nd Chance - James Patterson [77]
“Thank God for Marty,” Jill exclaimed.
“Yeah, good old Marty.” I sighed. “My dad.”
Sensing my ambivalence, Jill leaned forward. “He didn’t hit anyone, did he?”
I took a breath. “Coombs. Maybe someone else.”
“Was there blood at the scene?” asked Claire.
“We’ve been over the house. It was rented to this small-time punk who’s disappeared. There was evidence of blood in the driveway.”
They stared back in silence. Then Jill said, “So how’d you leave it, Lindsay? With the department?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t. I kept my father out of it.”
“Jesus, Lindsay,” Jill shot back, “your dad may have shot someone. He stuck his nose into a police situation and fired his gun.”
I looked at her. “Jill, he saved my life. I can’t just turn him in.”
“But you’re taking a huge risk. For what? His gun is properly licensed. He was your father, and he was following you. He saved you. There’s no crime in that.”
“Truth is”—I swallowed—“I’m not sure he was following me.”
Jill shot me a hard look. She wheeled her chair closer. “You want to run that by me again?”
“I’m not sure he was following me,” I said.
“Then why the hell was he there?” Cindy shook her head.
All their eyes fell on me.
Piece by piece, I laid out the exchange with my father in the car after the shooting. How after I confronted him, my father had admitted to being a material witness twenty years ago in Bay View. “He was there with Coombs.”
“Oh, shit,” Jill said with blank eyes. “Oh Jesus, Lindsay.”
“That’s why he came back,” I said. “All those uplifting conversations about reconnecting with his little girl. His little Buttercup. Coombs was threatening him. He came back to face him down.”
“That may be,” said Claire, reaching out for my hand, “but he was threatening him with you. He came back to protect you, too.”
Jill leaned forward, her eyes narrowed. “Lindsay, this may not be about protecting your dad from getting involved. He may have known Coombs was killing people and not come forward.”
I met her eyes. “These past weeks, having him back in my life, it was like, all of a sudden I could put aside the things he had done, the hurt he caused, and he was just a person, who made some mistakes but who was funny and needing, and who seemed happy to be with me. When I was little, I dreamed of something like this happening, my dad coming back.”
“Don’t give up on him yet,” Claire said.
Cindy asked, “So if you don’t think your father came back for you, Lindsay, what is he protecting?”
“I don’t know.” I looked around the room, my eyes stopping at every face. “That’s the big question.”
Jill got up, went over to the credenza behind her desk, and hoisted up a large cardboard box file. On the front was marked, “Case File 237654A. State of California vs. Francis C. Coombs.”
“I don’t know either,” she said, patting it. “But I’ll bet the answer’s somewhere in here.”
Chapter 94
AS SOON AS SHE GOT TO WORK the next morning, Jill opened the case file and waded in. She told her secretary to hold all calls and canceled what only yesterday had seemed an urgent meeting on another murder case she’d been working on.
With a mug of coffee on her desk and her DKNY suit jacket slung over her chair, Jill lifted out the first heavy folder. The massive trial record—pages and pages of testimony, motions, and judicial rulings. In the end, it would be better that she didn’t find anything. That Marty Boxer ended up being a father who had come back to protect his kid. But the prosecutor in her wasn’t convinced.
She groaned and started reading the file.
The trial had taken nine days. It took the rest of the morning for her to go through it. She sifted through the pretrial hearings, jury selection, the opening statements. Coombs’s previous record was brought out. Numerous citations for mishandling situations on the street where blacks were involved. Coombs was known for off-color jokes and pejorative remarks. Then came a painstaking re-creation of the night in question.