Flat Lake in Winter by Joseph T. Klempner Read Free Book Online

Aid and friends for a dozen years or so, ever since Laura had cajoled him into representing a deaf-mute who couldn’t read, write, or converse in sign language.
    Laura tried her best to talk Matt out of quitting, but this time he managed to resist her charms. He told her he was determined to head for the woods.
    “This means you’ll have plenty of free time?” she asked him.
    He should have seen it coming, but he didn’t. “I sure hope so,” he said.
    “Then I’m signing you up for Death School,” she announced.
    “ Say what?”
    FIELDER FINISHED SPLITTING the last of the wood and tossed the sledgehammer and wedges to the side. He figured he’d done about a quarter of a face cord in two hours. He loved splitting ash. It was a good, hard wood for burning, but it was less work than either oak or maple, both of which tended to resist coming apart cleanly. Elm was the worst: The fibers clung and held on forever. Not like ash. With ash, you hit it right, it rewarded you. Life itself ought to be like that. But there sure did seem to be a lot of elm out there lately.
    Fielder dried the sweat off his face and upper body with the sweatshirt he’d stripped off earlier. In the quiet of the clearing, he became aware of a faint beeping noise coming from inside the cabin. He remembered the phone call. Looking up at the sky through the branches, he figured he still had another half hour of daylight to stack the wood. He brushed the chips out of his hair and off his jeans and headed for the cabin door.
    “ One . . . new . . . message, ” the robot inside the answering machine told him. A push of a button retrieved it.
    “Matt, this is Kevin Doyle. We’ve got a double murder up in Ottawa County that’s going to be arraigned tomorrow morning in Cedar Falls. The DA’s a meateater. This could be the real thing. I’m hoping you can take it. Call me as soon as you can, at (516) 555-7282. Thanks.”
    “DEATH SCHOOL,” Laura Held had explained, was the intensive training program run by the CDO to qualify attorneys to handle capital murders. It was open to lawyers who had extensive backgrounds in defending murder cases, and offered to only the very best of those, Laura had confided. For the next ten minutes, she’d played up to Fielder’s commitment to justice, empathy with the underdog, and - pulling out all the stops - his ego. Fielder, of course, had never had a chance: This was the same Laura Held, after all, who had once convinced him to represent a client so totally impossible to communicate with that he may as well have been from Mars.
    Death School had been a grueling three days of lectures, seminars, demonstrations, and participation. Classes had begun at eight in the morning, and discussion groups ran late into the night. Experts from all around the country had come to share their knowledge, strategies, anecdotes, successes, failures, and secrets. David Bruck had flown in from Seattle to re-create his closing argument on behalf of Susan Smith, the mother who had strapped her two young children into her car before rolling it into a lake. Andrea Lyon came from Ann Arbor to discuss the merits of bursting into tears in front of the jury. Cessie Alfonso, a social worker from Jersey City, described going back more than 100 years to document the recurrence of mental illness, sexual abuse, alcoholism, and drug dependency in every generation of a particular defendant’s ancestors.
    Fielder had come away from the experience almost shell-shocked. While colleagues all around him rubbed their hands together, eager to get to work on capital cases and the higher hourly rates they were expected to pay, Fielder cringed at the thought of being responsible not only for a client’s freedom, but for his very life. When invited to fill out a form, the final question of which asked when he’d be available to take his first case - a question others were answering with replies like “Immediately,” “Tomorrow,” and “ASAP” - he’d