Read Online Guilty as Sin by Joseph Teller - Free Book Online Page A

feeling…”
    â€œPlease don’t tell me you’ve got another innocent defendant,” his wife begged. Not too many years back, she’d lived through one of those with him. Or if not exactly with him, under the same roof. Jaywalker’s obsession with trying to extricate a young man mistakenly accused of a series of knifepoint rapes had taken a tremendous toll on their marriage, their daughter and their bank account.
    â€œNo,” he said. “Actually, he’s as guilty as sin. But still…”
    His wife said nothing. They’d been married long enough by that time for her to stay away from the but still part.
    But still…
    Â 
    Later that night, his wife and daughter tucked into bed, Jaywalker sat at the kitchen table, scribbling thoughts on the back of an envelope. By the time he was finished, it might not have been the Gettysburg Address he’d composed, but he was looking at a fairly impressive list of pretty unusual developments in the way in which the criminal justice system had chosen to deal with Clarence Hightower.
    First there was the fact that Hightower had never been charged in connection with the sales Alonzo Barnett had ended up making. According to Barnett, the guy he’d introduced Hightower to would deal with Hightower and his customer only through Barnett. This was hardly unusual. After all, the guy knew Barnett, not them, and this had been his way of insulating himself. But the acting-in-concert law being as broad as it was, surely Hightower could have been accused of sale, too. Only all they’d charged him with had been possession. Then again, he hadn’t actually been present at the sales, and perhaps the cops hadn’t known the full extent of his involvement. Maybe he’d just been lucky, was all.
    Then there’d been the fact that despite his having been on parole, Hightower hadn’t had a detainer lodged against him following his arrest. But stuff like that happened all the time, Jaywalker knew. It was a big system, and people messed up.
    Next was the fact that they’d let him plead down froma misdemeanor to a violation. Not that Jaywalker himself didn’t get dispositions like that for his own clients every day. But usually not for those with horrendous records who owed parole time. Still, Jaywalker’s conversations with the two assistant district attorneys who’d been involved had been unremarkable and hadn’t left him with the feeling that either of them had singled Hightower out for special treatment. Maybe the stars had just aligned favorably for Clarence Hightower in court.
    A bit more interesting was the fact that Hightower had never had his parole revoked for the possession arrest. True, he’d ended up pleading guilty to a violation, and a nondrug one at that. Which was exactly the sort of disposition Jaywalker would have tried to get him, had he been the lawyer. So once again, nothing too out of the ordinary.
    But what about the early termination of Hightower’s parole? Sure, Ralph Anunziatta had been happy to have one less guy to supervise. But hadn’t he said he’d wanted to revoke Hightower, only to be overruled by some superior? So Anunziatta had had to settle for writing it up as a technical violation and continuing parole. Okay up to that point, arguably. But then the guy gets terminated early? Sure, it was just before Christmas, but no one had ever accused the Division of Parole of playing Santa Claus. And on top of everything else, now it seemed that Hightower had disappeared off the face of the earth.
    Why did any and all of this matter to Jaywalker? Well, back in his DEA days, there’d been a couple of times when he and his team had arrested a midlevel dealer known to have an upper-level source of drugs. So what they’d done was offer the guy a deal right on the spot. “You promise to cooperate with us and give us your connection,” they’d tell him, “and