Until Proven Guilty Read online

  Until proven guilty

  Rachel Sinclair

  Copyright © 2019 by Debra Moore

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by Rachel Sinclair

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Also by Rachel Sinclair

  Also by Rachel Sinclair

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  Harper Ross

  Bad Faith - http://amzn.to/2x8Q8Nr

  Justice Denied - http://amzn.to/2x8trZN

  Hidden Defendant - http://amzn.to/2eEcHhU

  Injustice for All - http://amzn.to/2wDJtJu

  LA Defense - http://amzn.to/2xNsVxB

  The Accused - https://amzn.to/2HZ7P4K

  Damien Harrington

  The Associate - http://amzn.to/2wE1lnT

  The Alibi - http://amzn.to/2x8QnrF

  Reasonable Doubt - http://amzn.to/2yDRmOI

  The Hate Crime - https://amzn.to/2vNR5uD

  Secrets and Lies - https://amzn.to/2yiRlkr

  Emerson Justice

  Dark Justice - https://amzn.to/2RL6bLu

  Chapter 1

  “Now, what is it that you suggest I do with Nate?” I asked my therapist, whose name was Dr. Betty Jordan. I had managed to talk Nate’s school into letting him stay, even after he was caught with a gun in school, on the condition that I completed 40 hours of family therapy with him with an approved guidance counselor. Nate’s school selected Dr. Jordan as the proper counselor, and Nate and I had been seeing her twice a week every week for the past six weeks. Nate had opened up to her, when she saw him individually, about what his teacher had done to him. Mrs. Bowen, his fifth-grade teacher, had pled guilty to molesting Nate and was awaiting sentencing at the moment.

  “You really need to spend more time with him. I’ve spoken at length with both you and Nate, over the past six weeks, and what I’m getting from Nate is that he is a very isolated and lonely child. He feels like he’s neglected. He feels like he doesn’t have any parents. Losing his mother has been very hard on him. But even more difficult for him is the thought that you don’t care about him either. That’s been very apparent to me.”

  I nodded my head. “I know what you’re saying, but I just don’t know how realistic it is that I can spend as much time with him as what I need to. I’ve already cut back my hours at work to deal with this, and I’ve tried to show Nate in every way possible that he’s very important to me. I just don’t know what more I can do.”

  Dr. Jordan just watched me. She had to have known what kind of predicament I was in. I was in a stressful position. A stressful profession. I had gone through the ringer myself in the past few years. Between having my wife running off on me, and having her tell my daughter that I was not her biological father, and the fact that I was on trial for my life after my biological father was found murdered and I was accused of it, I had been through it all in the past few years. All sorts of issues came up during my murder trial, including the fact that I had killed my stepfather when I was only 15 years old. I was never prosecuted for it, because he was going to kill either me or my mother or both of us, and he had promised this all the time. Even as a kid, I knew that it was his life or ours, and I chose his life.

  The upshot was that the past few years had been beyond chaotic. My daughter Amelia had beaten cancer, but it was touch and go for a long time. There were years that I didn’t know if she would live to see her 10th birthday. The bone marrow transplant finally was the thing that put her into remission, but, even now, I felt like her condition was touch and go. I knew that her remission was precarious, as all remissions are, and I knew that she was not out of the woods. She was relatively healthy, thank God, but who knew how long that would last? Every time she got as much as a cold, I worried about her.

  But the fact of the matter was that Amelia’s sickness was just one more thing on my plate, and I didn’t have the mental energy to really deal with my one healthy child. I was guilty of thinking that he was just going to be okay, because there was nothing obviously wrong with him. Of course, I was proved wrong, when he brought a gun into the school and aimed it at a kid who had been teasing him about being gay. He wasn’t gay, at least not that I knew, but that was beside the point. The point was that that kid thought that he was gay, and that was enough for him to bully Nate.

  “You can take a leave of absence. Just until we manage to find the proper medication for your son, and his signs of depression are lessened.”

  That was another thing that I was going to have to deal with. The doctor had decided that she wanted Nate to be on antidepressants. I was against it, as I was against all forms of medication, yet the doctor had been persistent that Nate needed some kind of antidepressants, and she told me that if I didn’t go along with her recommendations that she would not sign off to the school that I completed the requisite counseling. Which meant that Nate might still end up being expelled from school. In other words, I needed to dance to her tune, or Nate was going to suffer.

  The doctor told me that giving anti-depressants to a child as young as Nate, a child who had just turned 11, was tricky, to say the very least. She reviewed all the side effects with me, including the fact that Nate might become suicidal, and I was dead set against it. I had to battle my own bouts of depression, over my life, and I always managed to get over it without drugs. I wanted Nate to do the same. Yet I gave in, just because of the threat that if I didn’t go along with the recommendations that Nate might end up being expelled from school. For a child in such a precarious and unstable position as Nate, being expelled from school would be the last straw for him. It would only be a matter of time before he went the way that I went, and ended up in prison. Staying in his school was his only hope of beating that scenario. I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that he stayed at Pembroke Hill, which was the private school that he attended.

  Now the shrink wanted me to take a leave of absence. I could afford to take one, because I settled a personal injury case case years back that netted me $4 million. So financially, it wasn’t a problem to take a long break from work. I just didn’t want to leave Harper high and dry, as I had just become a partner in the law firm. She had a lot of cases on her plate, and she needed my help with them. The only other attorney in her office was named Tammy, and she was an estate attorney
who never appeared in court.

  “Okay,” I said reluctantly. “I guess I could take a small leave of absence. A sabbatical.” My plan at that time was to take a leave of absence long enough that I could be home with Nate, while he was going through the early stages of taking his antidepressants. The doctor had explained to me that it was going to take some tweaking to find the right formula for him, as it always took a lot of tweaking to find the right formula for anybody. Apparently, because everybody’s body chemistry was different, doctors always had to try different dosages and different drugs in different combinations to find out just the right combination and dosages of drugs to alleviate depression in any given person. Then they usually had to do some more tweaking later on, because meds tend to stop working after a certain period, so it would be back to the drawing board. Because Nate was so young, it was even trickier. There was a real chance that he could become suicidal because of the antidepressants. That was a known risk. I certainly could not take the chance and leave Nate to his own devices when he was first taking these drugs.

  But, as I left Dr. Jordan’s office, I got a phone call that changed everything.

  “Damien,” my mom’s voice was on the other end of the line. “I’m in the clink. The hoosegow. Gotta come down.”

  I rolled my eyes. This was not the first time my mother had been in the jail, and I doubted that it was going to be the last. My mother was regularly being taken to jail for one reason or another. Unpaid parking tickets, unpaid moving violations, a DUI or two. Always minor things, never anything enormous, unless you consider drunk driving to be enormous. That was just a routine thing for her anymore. I was really in no mood to have to deal with her. Not at that moment, when I was coming out of the therapist’s office, with Nate strongly on my mind.

  “I’ll get there when I get there.” That was a game that we played. She would go to jail for one reason or another, and I would take my own sweet time getting her out. That was my way of saying, in a very passive-aggressive way, that she needed to get her shit together. “What are you charged with this time? How many speeding tickets have you not paid, or maybe you got a DUI?”

  “I wouldn’t be making so much fun if I were you,” she said. “I’m being charged with murder.”

  Chapter 2

  “Come again? Mom, seriously, this isn’t funny.”

  “You think I’m being funny? I’ll show you funny. Unless you think that the cops coming into my house at 2 o’clock this morning and hauling my candied ass to jail, asking me all kinds of questions for the past 10 hours, if you think that’s my idea of a good time, you got another thing coming. Now get down here. I didn’t want to call you, but the person I usually call to get me out of these things is dead. Deader than a doornail. And the cops think that I’m the one who killed him.”

  I took a deep breath. “Mom, you’re going to have to slow down. Who is it that they think that you killed, and what –”

  “They think I killed my friend Tracy Dunham. He’s a guy that I screw around with once in a while, good guy. Ain’t never been more then a bed buddy, but we hang out too. Tracy, he was taking the drugs, which ain’t no concern of mine. I don’t do it. I don’t get into that crap, but to each his own. Anyhow, turns out he’s married. Or he was married, he ain’t married now to nobody. He was married, and his old lady threw him out of the house.

  “Last July, he comes over to my house, higher than a kite. Tells me his bitch wife don’t want him no more, can he crash? I say yeah, sure, why not? So he comes over and sleeps on my couch. You know, he comes over and passes out, I go to bed, I wake up the next morning and he’s dead. You know, I try to do CPR and shit like that, I don’t even know it all that well, but I seen it on TV shows, I try doing what I saw on TV. But he was stiff and cold, there ain’t no bringing him back at that point. I didn’t know what to do, so I call up the hospital, 911, they send somebody out to come and pick him up. They send the ambulance over and some woman, she says her job is to comfort the people who wake up to find a stiff in their house. I tell her I didn’t need no comforting, I barely knew this guy, I wasn’t shedding no tears for him. The cops come next, they question me, they want to do a piss test. I tell them okay, sure, why not? I ain’t taking the drugs. They’re gonna find out I was drinking, but that ain’t illegal, and I was sitting in my home, so I’m allowed to drink. They do a piss test, but they’re not telling me the results.

  They go into my medicine cabinet, I guess they figured out that Tracy died of an overdose, they’re looking in my medicine cabinet to see if I got some horse in there. I tell them ‘have at it, knock yourself out, loser,’ then they come out and tell me that they’re taking one of my BP meds in for testing. They tell me they found a suspicious powder in my BP med bottle.

  They take him away, I think that’s it, then two cops show up at my door three months later. They’re telling me that I’m responsible for his death. They’re saying that they did an autopsy and some kind of test, toxic test or something like that, and-“

  “Toxicology test,” I said. “It’s to find out about the presence of drugs or poison in a dead person’s blood at the time of death. Go ahead.”

  “Yeah, toximology test, or whatever, anyhow, they tell me that the toxic test showed that Tracy died of a heroin overdose and that it’s my fault ‘cause I gave him the drug. Then they tell me that my BP meds weren’t BP meds at all, but high-grade heroin. I tell them to go to hell, and to fuck right off, in those words, ain’t nobody responsible for Tracy’s death but Tracy, and that I don’t know nobody who would sell me that junk and that they made a mistake. I don’t possess horse and I never have. Well, they don’t like me telling them off like that, so they haul me down the station. They’re asking me questions for God knows how long, not letting me pee, freezing my nipples off. They’re keeping the room colder than a witch’s tit, which is bull, if you ask me.”

  I knew what she was talking about, and I thought it was nonsense as well. I knew why cops did it, but it didn’t make it any less ethical. They were trying to get a confession from my mother, in any way that they could. They deliberately tried to make her uncomfortable to the extreme, so that she would confess to a crime just to get out of there.

  My mother was talking way too fast, and I wanted to slow her down.

  “Mom, it’s okay. You don’t have to tell me the entire story right now. I’ll be coming down to the jail within the next half-hour.”

  Nate and Amelia were home with Gretchen. I had arranged for Gretchen to come and watch the both of them, because I needed to speak with the counselor completely alone, because I needed her advice for what I needed to do with Nate. Turned out that everything that she was telling me, about how I needed to slow down, maybe even take a sabbatical, was going to go right out the window. My mother was charged with murder. As much as my mother and I did not get along over the years, and we didn’t get along over the years because of the way that she was when I was growing up – drinking all the time, a revolving door of men, just basically being neglectful – I had forgiven her once I found out the reason why she always had her own share of mental problems. She was raped by a very wealthy man, Josh Roland, and I was a result of that rape.

  Josh Roland was then bludgeoned to death by an oriental lamp that was in his office, and I was charged with his murder. It turned out that the person who really did murder him was Addison Weston, the first lady of the state of Missouri. She had hired somebody to actually do the deed, Jaclyn Peterson, who ended up getting charged with manslaughter and was currently serving 10 years in prison for her role in the murder. As for Addison, she managed to be acquitted on the basis of temporary insanity. She hired the best attorney that money could buy, which was the reason why she got that result, while her patsy did the time that she needed to. It was the best justice that money could buy, which unfortunately was the way of the legal system. If you got money, you get away with anything. If you don’t, you’re going down no matter if you did it or not.

 
Now my mother was charged with murder. A nonsense charge in this case, if ever there was one. I had heard of people being charged with murder just because they were taking drugs with somebody who happened to die, and also instances where people were charged with murder because they bought drugs for somebody. But in this case, it was none of the above. My mom wasn’t doing drugs with him, she just let him sleep on her couch. So she happened to be in the room when he died, and that makes her a murderer? Seriously?

  Something was very off about this entire thing. To say the very least. I was just going to have to go down to see her in the jail and try to figure out what was going on. And then I was going to have to storm over to the prosecutor’s office, and find out what the hell they were thinking. How could they possibly charge my mother with murder for something so stupid?

  Then I realized something. My mother was probably lying. She said that she didn’t do drugs, but I knew that she did. She also drank a lot. It was entirely possible that when they took a urinalysis at her home, after she called 911 about Tracy’s death, they found out that she had drugs in her system as well. And, if they were the same drugs as the ones that were found in this Tracy Dunham’s system, they could charge her with murder. It would still be a baloney charge, but it would be a much more solid charge than if she was just sitting in her house when he came to visit, he passed out on her couch, and then he died, and she had nothing to do with it.