A Plague of Secrets: A Novel by John T. Lescroart

Author:John T. Lescroart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thrillers, Legal, General, Mystery, Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 2009-07-15T04:00:11+00:00

22

Braun called a recess as soon as Hardy sat down. While Maya was in the restroom, Hardy pushed his chair back to the bar rail and turned around, resting his elbow on it. “Well,” he said to what he hoped was his private little fan club of Kathy, Harlen, and Joel Townshend, “I think I got a few licks in, anyway. How’d it play out here?”

“Excellent,” Joel said.

Joel had become a rather more enthusiastic partner in Maya’s defense since the arrest. Of course, this had come at the expense of a seismic shift in his worldview. Before the weekend of Dylan Vogler’s death he’d never had occasion to think that the world wasn’t at base a fair and equitable place. He’d always had enough money and social standing to remain above the little mundane headaches that most people faced constantly—household bills, fights about money or time or chores. If he wanted to go out to dinner, they hired a babysitter and didn’t care what the meal cost. If he and Maya were tired or bored, they’d go spend a night or two in Napa or Carmel to rejuvenate themselves. Their friends were people more or less like them. And other people he met tended to be polite, at least to him personally. Perhaps even more fundamentally, he never really had to prove himself to get a loan or make a connection; he got the benefit of the doubt.

And now, not just suddenly but seemingly instantaneously, all of that had ended. The properties against which he’d taken out more loans to finance other properties and ventures were no longer rock-solid as collateral. His social life, with his wife incarcerated in the county jail, essentially vanished. He found himself amazed by how completely life changed when you got accused of wrongdoing. At first he’d held to the belief that this whole affair was just a mistake and if he could just find the right person to talk to and explain everything, it would all go away. He and Maya would go back to their real life.

But by now he had come to realize that this wasn’t going to happen. He and his wife were somehow “in the criminal justice system,” and this more than anything meant that the benefit of the doubt had evaporated. No one in the system was inclined to believe anything he said. The motivations for anything he did got skewed and twisted by people who started out by considering him, if not a criminal, then at least a shady character. And once they had that mind-set, nothing was going to change.

Now he was going on to Hardy: “I like the way you laid this conspiracy these people have cooked up right out there.”

“Me too,” Hardy said. “I couldn’t believe Braun let it in, but if she was going to let me, I sure as hell was going to run with it.”

“My concern,” Harlen Fisk said, “is it’s going to turn up the heat on Glass.”

“Let it,” Kathy West declared.

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