Sins of the Fathers by James Scott Bell Read Free Book Online Page B

insight here, a little there.
    I’m a reasonable man.”
    She pondered this a moment. “Okay. I’ll give you what I can. But I can’t reveal confidences. You know that. So we’ll do this on my terms. I say how and where we talk.”
    “Agreed.”
    “Now you.”
    Sean reached over and took the pad from Lindy. He wrote something on it, handed it back. It was an address.
    “Drake and Darren lived in an apartment about half a block from the park. But Drake took off, left the place when his son got popped, and is now living here.”
    “You mind telling me how you found him?”
    “Reveal a source? Lindy, you shock me.”
    “Fair enough.” She slipped the pad into her briefcase and clasped it shut.
    “You’re free to stay the night,” Sean said.
    She felt her insides starting to heat up. “Sean, look, I’m serious. I’m giving up men for Lent.”
    “You’re not Catholic.”
    “And I don’t even know when Lent is. Don’t get technical.”
    Suddenly he put his hand behind her neck, pulled her to him, and kissed her. She let him. For a long moment she lingered over flame, heard the crashing of oceans.
    Then she pushed him away.
    “Lindy—”
    “Lent.”
    She made it to the door, and out.

FOUR

    1.

    When Leon Colby was two years old, his father, a Baptist minister in Cleveland, put a football in his hand. It was a toy football, a little rubber thing, but still pretty substantial for a toddler.
    As the Reverend Calvert Colby liked to tell it, two-year-old Leon took one look at that ball and smiled, love at first sight. But what happened next, Reverend Colby always insisted without hesitation, was the most remarkable thing: young Leon reared back with the ball in his right hand and threw it, hard. Harder than anyone was ready for, most of all the reverend, because it hit him right in the forehead.
    But even that, as legend had it, wasn’t the most incredible thing. It was that Leon Colby, age two, had thrown a tight spiral at his daddy’s head.
    Leon never took the story all that seriously, with his daddy given to tall tales and storytelling. But one thing was sure—he never knew a day when he did not love football.
    It was the competition he craved and loved and embraced. All the way through school and his illustrious UCLA career.
    To Leon Colby, football was all about getting the W .Winning. There was nothing like a hard-earned victory to charge him up.
    That’s why, when he came into the DA’s office, he always tried to get the tough cases. Even when he was doing misdemeanors—your .08 DUIs, your shopliftings—he loved going to court, even if his case was reed thin. Getting in front of a jury was like playing in front of a packed Rose Bowl. No feeling like it in the world.
    But as he’d matured as a prosecutor, he came to see the value of a good disposition. You could dispo certain cases and get the same W on the score sheet, and save yourself for the big game days, the ones that had to go to trial.
    He wasn’t sure yet which would be best for the DiCinni case. Taking it to trial would mean plenty of good pub, but the kid’s age was a wild card. Though the majority of good citizens were fed up with kids murdering other kids, you just never knew what could happen in the court of public opinion.
    Lindy Field was a wild card too. The Marcel Lee case had taken something out of her. Her breakdown was not one of the better-kept secrets in the legal community of Los Angeles. But desperation did strange things to people.
    Sometimes it made them stronger.
    But you had to take things step by step, the same way you did when you learned the new playbook at training camp. And the step this morning was to interview the cop, Glenn, who would be his only LAPD wit at the prelim.
    “So you remember what you wrote in your report?” Colby asked Glenn, a thirtyish officer who had come to Colby’s office for the interview.
    “Sure.”
    “You found the suspect how?”
    “Three guys had him pinned to the ground, in