Shadow Men by Jonathon King Read Free Book Online

stayed seated. I knew what kind of business went on here.
    A minute or so later the inside door opened and the large head of a whiskered man appeared. He was wearing a pair of safety glasses and had a set of protective earmuffs pulled down around his thick neck.
    “Well, Max Freeman,” he said. “Come on in, boy. What can I do for you?”
    William Lott is a big lout of a man with opinions on everything but a true knowledge and specialty in only one: forensics science. At one time, despite his irascible personality and love of good scotch, he was one of the best in his field at the FBI labs at Quantico. He says that he quit just before the media exposed the myriad problems and botched cases of that unit. He said he had ducked out so that his own “sterling reputation” wouldn’t be sullied by the government administration “hacks” and management “drones” who left the true scientists “hung out to dry.” He opted to set up his own private forensics lab in Florida. It would amaze you, he said, how many people mistrusted the government and the cops. Since O. J. his practice was booming with clients wanting independent DNA tests, chemical analysis and crime-scene reanalysis of evidence gathered against defendants. “And you don’t even wanna know how many sheet samples I get in here from the wives or the husbands in Palm Beach and East Boca,” he was fond of telling me. He was also quick to add, “All I do is the science. What they do with the results is their gig.” Lott was one of Billy’s many acquaintances, and on that recommendation alone he would have prospered. Billy had introduced us at lunch one day, and I sat humorously amazed while the scientist downed three dozen hot chicken wings and a six-pack of Old Milwaukee and never lost a beat in conversation.
    “Let me put this old cannon away, Max,” he said, and I followed him inside. As we passed a dimly lit room off to the right, I could smell the stink of cordite drifting out. Lott was carrying a military .45 loosely in his right hand, and his white, long-sleeved glove meant he was capturing blow-back residue from firing the weapon. We entered a large white room that looked like a cross between an industrial kitchen and the biology lab I had in high school. Glass- fronted cabinets, sinks with long, swan-necked faucets, hooded workstations and three different microscopes set up against one wall, along with rows of numbered drawers.
    Lott was a big man, as tall as me at six feet two but carrying sixty more pounds than my 205. Still, he moved about the place with a grace that came from familiarity and a perhaps unconscious efficiency. He laid the gun on a countertop and then carefully took off the glove and placed it under one of the lighted hoods. He then unlocked one of the drawers, placed the gun inside and relocked it.
    “OK, Max,” he finally said, taking my hand in his big palm and shaking it. “What’s our boy Billy got you on now?”
    “Nothing, yet,” I said. “But he will. You know Billy.”
    “Yeah. Smart little bastard, ain’t he? Sweet move you getting in with him, Freeman. Got ethics up to his eyeballs. Not like them other scum-sucking lawyers out to line their own damn pockets creatin’ a fuckin crisis a minute that, of course, only they and their own brethren can solve at three hundred dollars an hour plus expenses.”
    I nodded, fully prepared to let Lott go on even though I’d heard his line before. But he stopped on his own accord.
    “Gettin’ on to lunchtime here, Max. What can I do for you, unless you wanna join me over to Pure Platinum, where they have got the finest little buffet and boobs lunch special goin’ on. They is a little honey from one of them daytime soaps struttin’ her stuff you would not believe.…”
    “No thanks, Bill,” I said, pulling the plastic bag with the charred wood sliver from my pocket. “This one’s for me. A matter of accelerant, I believe.”
    Lott took the sample, his eyes and