A Reasonable Doubt Read online

  A Reasonable Doubt

  Susan R. Sloan

  One

  There’s an old saying in the Pacific Northwest that if you can make it through winter, the rest of the year’s a piece of cake. The only problem is that winter in the Pacific Northwest too often begins in October and lasts into May, bringing with it months of raw winds and pelting rain, hail, snow, and flash floods. It’s especially hard on the homeless, many of whom have no choice but to huddle in doorways and alleys, trying, if not to keep warm, at least to keep dry.

  On a typical early morning in the middle of February, a stone’s throw from the docks of Port Hancock, Washington, Jason Lightfoot was asleep in the alley behind The Last Call Bar and Grill, in the tarpaulin-draped box wedged into a thick stone wall that he called home, snoring loudly and dreaming that he was really in a front row seat at the fights, close enough that he could grasp the metal guard rail, feel the spray of sweat from the boxers’ bodies across his face, see the concentration in the sparring duo’s eyes, and hear the shouting of the crowd and the sound of the bell -- so loud that it made him jump. He was close enough that it felt almost as though he were right there in the ring with the fighters, and the punches being thrown were coming right at him.

  Jason awoke with a start to realize that this was no dream -- someone really was, if not punching him, certainly kicking him. He opened his eyes into the glare of a flashlight. It had been a long time since anyone had rousted him like this. His head was throbbing, as was his bum right leg, and, with the light shining directly in his eyes, it hurt to look up.

  He had no idea what time it was, but he could tell it was still more or less dark, which meant it wasn’t anywhere near time yet for him to be awake. He didn’t have to be at the dry dock until mid-morning. He wondered if he might have drunk a bit more last night than he usually did, or maybe taken more of his medication than his doctor recommended. But, fuzzyheaded though he might have been, it didn’t keep him from realizing that it was two uniforms that were standing in front of his box.

  “What the. . .?” he muttered, blinking. Having become more or less a permanent fixture in the alley after fifteen years, the cops had pretty much stopped hassling him. Or to be more precise, the one mean son-of-a-bitch cop who used to get off on making his life miserable had got himself promoted and was no longer on the hassling detail. He squinted up at these two.

  “What’s the matter, officers?” he asked.

  “That’s what we’re looking to find out,” the taller of the two replied.

  “Come on out of there,” the shorter one said.

  Under the circumstances, Jason decided there wasn’t really much point in arguing. He was already crawling out of his box, slowly because of his bum leg, which ached all the more in damp weather, when his knee knocked against something hard. It skittered out from under him and onto the pavement. Even the pre-dawn darkness, compounded as it was by a thick fog, didn’t stop him from seeing it was a gun.

  The two officers saw it, too. They jumped back, caught off guard, and quickly reached for their own weapons.

  “Don’t touch it,” Paul Cady, the shorter one, barked, pointing his Sig Sauer P250 directly at Jason’s head.

  “Don’t even look at it,” Arnie Stiversen, the taller one, ordered.

  Jason didn’t intend to. It wasn’t his gun. He didn’t even know what it was doing in his box. He moved away from the weapon. It lay on the ground until Stiversen inched forward and snatched it up.

  “Now I want to see you flat on your face, mister,” Cady instructed, “arms straight out to the side.”

  The lanky Indian’s brain might have been a bit soggy, and he might not have been thinking too clearly, but he wasn’t dumb enough to argue with two men with guns. He lowered himself to the damp pavement, turned his face down, and stretched his arms out. There was nothing to see, so he closed his eyes. He could sense the two policemen hovering over him, checking him out. Then he could feel them searching through his shapeless jacket and frayed shirt, running their hands around his waistband, and patting up and down his baggy trousers. When they were satisfied he had no other weapon, they told him he could get up.

  It was as he was scrambling to his feet that he spotted something, maybe fifteen feet down the alley. He couldn’t make out much, but it sure did look like someone was lying there where no one should have been.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “Is somebody hurt? Does he need help?”

  “No, he’s not hurt,” Cady snapped. “He’s dead, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  Jason Lightfoot blinked. “Dead?” he echoed. “Well now, I’m right sorry about that. But I sure hope you ain’t thinkin’ I had anythin’ to do with that. Because if you are, I can tell you, right out, I ain’t had nothin’ to do with that. I been in my box, mindin’ my own business.”

  The two police officers had rousted the Indian thinking he could be a witness to the crime they had just discovered. It didn’t occur to them that he might be involved until they spotted the gun, and the oversight made the shorter one angry.

  “And what exactly is your business?” he asked with a sneer in his voice.

  “I clean up over at the bar,” Lightfoot told him, gesturing across the alley at the back door of The Last Call. “And I do odd jobs. I got no reason to kill no one.” He squinted in the direction of the body. “Besides, I don’t even know who that is.”

  “Well, I’d say it’s a little late for introductions,” Stiversen said, “but his name is -- was -- Detective Dale Scott.”

  Jason had his mouth open to reemphasize his point, but suddenly closed it. Because he did, in fact, know who Detective Dale Scott was. He was the very same son-of-a-bitch cop who used to get off on using him for a punching bag.

  He tried to remember if he had run into the policeman last night, and if there had been an argument of any kind, but his head was throbbing so much, it was making his mind all the more muddled, and he came up blank. The only thing he could recall, and not even that was very clear anymore, was his dream.

  “You ain’t sayin’ I killed him, are you?” the Indian asked.

  “Sure looks that way,” Cady replied.

  “But I don’t remember doin’ nothin’ like that,” he protested. “Why would I have done that? That ain’t even my gun.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Stiversen agreed, having examined the police issue semiautomatic weapon that was exactly like his own. “It’s his.”

  “What’s your name?” Cady asked.

  “Lightfoot,” the Indian mumbled. “Jason Lightfoot.”

  “Lightfoot. . .Lightfoot. . .” the officer repeated. “Don’t I know that name from somewhere?”

  Jason shrugged. “You might,” he conceded. “It’s not such an uncommon name around these parts.”

  The Indian wasn’t exactly clean with the law, but his offences were years old and mostly about being drunk and disorderly, which is why he knew the dead cop with the mean streak. Even so, their encounters had never amounted to anything really serious -- a broken nose, a couple of split lips, a few cracked ribs, assorted cuts and bruises, and then the usual overnight accommodation, courtesy of the city. He tried to think. He barely recalled leaving The Last Call, dumping the garbage, and crawling into his box. He didn’t remember seeing Scott, and other than that, there was nothing, nothing except his dream, until these cops had kicked him awake.

  “But I got nothin’ to do with that.”

  “Maybe no and maybe yes,” Cady said. “Not for us to say.” He leveled his gun at the Indian. “But right now, we’re going to take you in for questioning regarding the murder of Dale Scott.”

  From the corner of his eye, Jason saw Stiversen starting to move around behind him, unhooking a pair of handcuffs from his belt. In spite of the weapon pointed directly at him, in spite of his bad leg, the Indian bolted. It was the instinct of a cornered animal, of course, because there was nowhere to go. The alley was narrow, with the police car blocking one end of it and the two policemen blocking the other.

  He froze for an instant, trying to decide what to do. It was just long enough for Cady to whip out his baton and deliver a blow to the back of his bad leg. Jason collapsed like an accordion.

  But the law enforcement officer didn’t stop there. Blows began to rain all over his body as he lay there on the pavement. He managed to roll over onto his bad leg, and tried as best he could to protect it, only it didn’t help much.

  “All right, all right,” he heard the other cop say. “You don’t want to kill the guy.”

  After one more blow, the beating stopped. Jason felt Stiversen grabbing his arms and pulling them tight behind his back, and he heard the snap of the handcuffs as they locked securely around his wrists. Then the cop began reading him his rights about being under arrest and his right to remain silent and his right to have an attorney.

  “There’s gotta be some kinda mistake here,” he mumbled through a bloody lip.

  “Yeah, and you made it,” Cady said. “But look on the bright side. Think how lucky you are that we found you before the guy’s partner did.”

  “How do you mean?” the Indian asked.

  “I mean our getting to you first guarantees you get a trial and then years of living off taxpayers like me before you hang.”

  . . .

  Port Hancock was the largest city on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. It sprawled across a thrust of land that jutted out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca -- that strip of watery highway defining the northwestern border of the United States.
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  The seat of Jackson County, Port Hancock boasted a population just short of 25,000, in a county that, added all together, came in at just under 105,000. A good public transportation network brought the major city of Seattle and the state capital of Olympia within a three-hour journey. A reliable private ferry system regularly transported Canadians and Americans back and forth across the border. And the Pacific Ocean was a mere ninety minutes away.

  Arguably one of the most beautiful cities to be found in the Pacific Northwest, or anywhere, for that matter, Port Hancock was dominated by architectural masterpieces, crisscrossed by tree-lined avenues, and dotted with exquisite parks and gardens. Its location was no drawback either, nestled as it was between the scenic Strait on the north and the magnificent Olympic Mountains on the south.

  The city’s spectacular deep-water harbor had led early settlers to believe that Port Hancock would one day be the largest seaport on the West Coast and, as a result, a great deal of money had been invested in the fledgling town. However, when the railroad failed to extend west onto the peninsula, despite all the pressure that was put on politicians, those dreams were dashed, and many of the investors simply wrote off their losses and deserted the place.

  Port Hancock was, perhaps more accurately, two cities in one, with the residential sections to the south referred to as New Town, and the predominantly commercial district that stretched along the waterfront to the north known as Old Town. It was a misnomer, really, considering that a good part of New Town was just as old as Old Town, but nobody, except perhaps the historians, seemed to care.

  And not even the historians seem to take much note of the fact that, over time, the cultural divide, that had been wide to begin with, only grew wider.

  For several hundred years, the area had been a stable home for half a dozen Indian tribes. But by the late 1700’s, their populations had been almost decimated, thanks to territorial wars among the tribes themselves, and strange new diseases brought by white explorers and missionaries -- small pox, measles, syphilis -- that wiped out a whole generation.

  Their livelihoods were systematically destroyed -- settlers logged the massive stands of cedar trees that the natives relied on for basket weaving and clothing, using only downed trees for shelter and warmth. For little more than trophies, hunters slaughtered the wild game that had sustained generations of Indians, and fishermen overharvested the salmon, killed seals for their skins and shellfish for pearls, and polluted the waters.

  By the middle 1800’s, little more than a thousand natives were around to greet the colonizers. By the end of the century, only a few hundred remained, swindled out of most of their property, removed to reservations, left to eke out meager livings off the land that remained, if they could, or work on the docks or as servants, if they were lucky, and get drunk in the bars along the streets of Old Town. Once a proud and independent people, they had come to be regarded in their own community as second-class citizens.

  Named not for John Hancock, as most people quite naturally assumed, but for Commodore Edward Hancock, a relatively obscure seaman who had plied the waters of the Pacific with George Vancouver back in the late 1700’s, the town was officially settled in 1854, incorporated as a city in 1862, designated the seat of Jackson County in 1863, thrived until the 1890’s, and was then essentially abandoned until the late 1930’s when a resurging logging industry took hold, and the Port Hancock Paper Mill opened. Even then, a great many of the grand buildings remained uninhabited for another thirty years, until budding entrepreneurs stumbled into an essentially untouched utopia for business opportunities, young people began to migrate in search of work and a good place to raise a family, and old people came looking for a comfortable place to retire. What they found was an incredible collection of Victorian, Edwardian, and Romanesque structures that had been preserved, almost as time capsules, for nearly a hundred years.

  The Jackson County Courthouse was one such building. The fabulous Romanesque structure, begun in 1888 and completed in 1894, was constructed of red brick and sandstone, and replete with arches, gables, and turrets. Four stories high, not counting the clock tower, it sat on the edge of New Town, overlooking Old Town, presiding over both. It had withstood earthquakes, floods, abandonment, a rare lightning strike, and countless renovations with amazing grace and fortitude.

  Built at a time of enormous promise, the interior of the building was finished in nothing but the finest materials, walls paneled in mahogany, floors of polished marble, and furniture that had been hand-carved out of rosewood, walnut, and oak.

  The first floor of the courthouse held most of the county’s offices. The second floor, accessed by a grand marble stairway as well as an elevator, contained four courtrooms of varying size and grandeur. And the two upper floors housed the quarters of the prosecutors, the public defenders, the judges, and their staffs.

  By contrast, the Port Hancock Police Department, an unremarkable two-story concrete building with a daylight basement, circa 1975, sat just across the plaza from the courthouse. Within its austere confines of bare plaster walls and cement floors, one police chief, one deputy chief, two lieutenants, three sergeants, six detectives, and some eighteen officers worked diligently to keep the city safe.

  While Jackson County, as a whole, had a slightly higher than average crime rate, Port Hancock’s crime rate was reasonably low -- just the way everyone in town liked it. Vandalism was, of course, the most common crime, attributed mainly to teenagers, and there were the typical number of assaults, burglaries, arsons, DUIs, and drug-related episodes, and even the occasional rape got reported. But in the past decade, there had been only four homicides.

  The city’s main sources of income had changed somewhat over the last fifty years. The paper mill was still in business, and fishing and tourism were still important, but the economic focus was now on professional and related occupations. Despite the setbacks caused by the fiscal disaster of 2008, service jobs were still available, financial operations were regaining ground, and most of the corporate firms were holding their own. Even small business owners were seeing signs of a brighter future.

  . . .

  Lily Burns walked quickly down the fourth-floor corridor of the Jackson County Courthouse, her high-heeled shoes tapping smartly against the polished marble, looking neither to her right nor to her left, and neither stopping nor even hesitating until she reached the door at the far end, the door with the small brass plaque affixed to it that read: Presiding Judge.

  Lily always walked quickly, as though she didn’t intend to waste so much as a minute more than was absolutely necessary to get where she was going.

  At the age of thirty-five, she stood a trim five-foot-seven inches tall, with light brown hair that waved more than curled and fell just below her shoulders, her mother’s prominent nose, and hazel eyes that were either green or gold, depending on the weather, her mood, or the clothes she had chosen to wear.

  Lily had pretty much grown up in this building, scurrying behind her father from the time she was eight years old, sitting on the floor of the Jackson County Prosecutor’s office, spinning stories with crayons, picture books, and imagination. Then, as she grew older, she had been allowed to sit behind her father in the courtroom and watch, totally enthralled, as he spun his stories for a jury. And finally, after graduating from law school, she had worked from an office of her own, just down the hall from his.

  For almost thirty years, her father had occupied the big corner office on the third floor until, at the age of sixty-seven, a stroke cut short his tenure. But Carson Burns remained a legend in Port Hancock, for settling his family in the economically turbulent city of the late 1970s, and for taking on the prosecutor’s job when no one else wanted it. Much of the respect that the people of Jackson County still held for the law today was due to his quiet, steady influence.

  The youngest of three daughters, Lily went through the Port Hancock public school system, graduating near the top of her class, and then off to the University of Washington for a degree, with honors, in English. While her sisters opted for marriage and family -- one now lived in Oregon, the other in Colorado -- Lily was her father’s daughter, through and through, and there was never any question about what she would do after college.