“Password is Billy Bob Wants His Balls Back. Capitalize every word and put exclamation points in between them, with a five at the end. Are there extra clothes still in the drawer?” he asked as Henry ran off to start the process.
Jackson started keeping an extra set handy in his early days, when he and Ellery had both worked at the area’s biggest criminal-defense firm. Even though he hadn’t been on the street in seven weeks, he was pretty sure he still had some old clothes in Jade’s office.
“Ugh. Yes. I was going to make you take them home and replace them with something decent,” she muttered.
Jackson took a deep breath and tried to remember his new-and-improved Jackson resolution, and part of that involved not wearing clothes rotting off his body out of sheer perversity.
“I wasn’t supposed to be back,” he told her, rummaging. He found them, folded neatly, behind six reams of copy paper and a case of pens. “I’ll try to remember some of my newer stuff when I come back in tomorrow.” He looked up and found everybody staring at him. “Yes,” he snapped. “I’m coming in tomorrow. Kryzynski’s in the hospital, and someone tried to break into our office, and we’ve got a seventeen-year-old kid in jail about to be tried as an adult and another kid whose life might be ruined because someone was trying really hard to make it so. This is no time for me to extend my vacation.”
Ellery gave a reluctant nod. “Fair,” he said. He grimaced. “I don’t suppose we can ask you to be careful?”
Seven weeks of recovery, but Jackson hadn’t been the only one recovering. Ellery had been pulling his tattered faith and hope for Jackson back around his own heart, trying to sustain himself for living with Jackson and all his copious damage.
“Of course you can,” he said gently. “I’ll have Henry with me. You heard him at lunch today. Man, that kid’ll make sure I eat right, take my vitamins, don’t walk into any gunfights. I promised you all.” He looked at Jade and Henry and even Galen, who was leaning on the doorframe to his office, taking in the show. “Life just got good. Don’t want to check out yet.”
He remembered Kryzynski, squeezing his hand with a pain in his chest not unlike the thing that Jackson’d been recovering from for seven weeks. “But that doesn’t mean we’re getting any sleep until we know who did this to our friend.”
“Truth, brother,” Henry said gravely.
Jackson nodded and turned toward the bathroom. God, he needed a breath to himself.
And he needed to wash the goddamned blood off his hands.
Two Fish, One Pond
JADE HAD canceled everybody’s afternoon appointments because she was a powerhouse of efficiency, and Ellery wouldn’t have been able to afford her if she hadn’t been devoted to Jackson.
When Jackson emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, wearing a tattered black T-shirt that read My Way or My Way in bright pink letters, and a pair of jeans so transparent they were mostly indecent, everybody else had set up in the conference room, and Ellery was passing copies of the files and the police reports around the table.
“Jade has scanned copies of these and sent them to Crystal, and she’s giving them to our old firm—”
“Feisty, Llama, Hamster and Clopper,” Jackson inserted, and Ellery rolled his eyes for form. The actual name of the place was Pfeist, Langdon, Harrelson and Cooper, but since they’d fired Ellery for doing the right thing—and Jackson and Jade had quit in protest rather spectacularly—Jackson refused to use it. Ellery had understood the firm had made a business decision. A defense attorney with a well-developed moral compass was not going to make them as much money as one who would just plead people out whether they were guilty or not. Jackson and Jade held grudges.
“Yes,” Ellery returned blandly. “Feisty, Llamas, Hamsters and Cloppers now hold our future in their hooves. Or paws. Or whatever. Anyway, I also sent copies to my mother.”
Jackson looked panicked. “Did you instruct her not to come over?”
“She lives in Boston, Jackson. She’s not just going to hop a flight over because I sent her an email.”
Jackson shook his head. “She will too. She’s been out three times in the last year. We can’t get rid of her!”
“She was out to help take care of you,” Ellery said patiently. “I had to go back to work, remember?”
Jackson shook his head. “Next time, you stay home and let Lucy Satan defend criminals. She’s terrifying. She’ll scare them straight.”
Ellery gritted his teeth and refrained from telling Jackson that his mother’s name was Taylor. It never worked. Jackson’s uneasy relationship with Ellery’s mother seemed to include both affection and exasperation, equally mixed, and Ellery wasn’t going to solve it now.
“Well, she has her own firm,” Ellery said, “and we’ve got a job to do.”
Jackson sobered. “Got it. Okay, so we have five sets of eyes here and a lot of highlighters. Yellow highlighter for connections you see between the two cases and blue for inconsistencies. Everybody gives a twenty-minute review, and then we compare notes.” He glanced at Ellery. “You good with this?”
Ellery gave a faint smile. God help him if he wasn’t, since Jackson had just captained the meeting with ease. But it was a good plan.
“Ready if you are,” he said, picking up his highlighter.
“Go,” Jackson said, taking a set and a file from Jade.
Exactly two minutes of silence passed before Jackson said, “Motherfucker!” at the same time Ellery said, “Are we serious here?”
They locked eyes, and Ellery nodded. “You saw it?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Anybody want to share with the class?” Galen asked, voice sandpaper dry.
“For the record,” Jackson said, “the two incompetent and/or corrupt flatfoots on the Townsend case were the same potatoes who just tried to grill me downstairs.”
“So which are they?” Henry asked. “Corrupt or incompetent?”
“I’m guessing a little of both,” Jackson murmured thoughtfully.
“We just watched them botch evidence,” Ellery said. “And that was for another cop. But they’d have no way of knowing they were helping someone they knew.” He took a breath, his eyes going to the police report. “Unlike this, where it’s so obviously a setup. I’m with Jackson here. Someone bought off a couple of low-level cops who weren’t getting promoted anyway.” He looked at Henry, who had been on Jackson’s computer scanning the prints. “By the way, have we gotten any hits?”
“Still running,” Henry said. “We don’t have the giant server that they do at the FBI or the police office. It’s gonna take a while.”
“Gotcha,” Ellery said. “I have no idea what you guys are doing. It’s like with Crystal back at Fingerling, Hamster, et al.” Everybody was so grim, he felt like he had to play that game too. Jackson gave him a wink to let him know he’d done okay. “Anyway, fingerprints could help, even if they won’t be under chain of evidence.”
“I can’t believe they wouldn’t even look for a guy running down the street with a bloody goddamned knife,” Jackson muttered, then frowned again and uncapped his highlighter, hitting the page with unnecessary force.