Dead to Rights

That’s easy, Joa

One terrible injustice had already been visited on the man. He had lost his wife to a senseless, tragic death. Now another blow was about to fall if he ended up being charged with murder in the death of Bo

That hadn’t happened yet, not officially, but only because Ernie Carpenter had so far been too busy to get around to crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. At this point, Morgan was still only a suspect-some would have said prime suspect-in the case.

With her heart quickening in her breast, Joa

What came over Joa

The moment of realization rang so true that Joa

And then, in that peculiar way minds work, a long-buried memory surfaced in her head. She was twelve years old again and sitting at the breakfast table in her parents’ home of Campbell Avenue. Eleanor had been cooking breakfast am was just then slamming the frying pan into the sink, whet Big Hank Lathrop came into the room and poured himself a cup of coffee.

Sheriff D. H. Lathrop had been out all night investigating a homicide crime scene. He had come home at sunup to shower, change clothes, and eat breakfast before heading back to the office.

“I don’t know why you had to be out there all night like that,” Eleanor complained as she slid a loaded plate in iron of him. “You’re not as young as you used to be, Hank. You can’t expect to work around the clock without having it affect you.”

“But Ellie…” he objected. Big Hank Lathrop was the only person in the world Eleanor Lathrop ever allowed to call her by a nickname. “You just don’t understand how great it feels. I knew from the begi

“He and his buddy.” Eleanor’s habitual corrections of her husband’s grammar were so much business as usual that Big Hank barely missed the beat of his story. “… he and his good buddy, Lionel Dexter, were out hunting. Hammond claimed that he stumbled and that his thirty-ought-six went off by accident. All of a sudden, right while he’s in the middle of telling this long, complicated story, I realize it’s a crock. Ol’ George is making it up as he goes along. I can’t tell you how I knew; I just did. As soon as I caught on to him, I couldn’t stand to walk away without managing to trip him up.”

The whole time Big Hank had been speaking, ostensibly he had been telling the story to his wile. But ever so often, as he spoke, his eyes would stray to Joa

Sitting down across from him, Eleanor’s disapproval was as plain as the permanently etched frown that furrowed her forehead. “Did you?” she asked. “Trip him up, I mean.”

Big Hank’s face had lit up like a Christmas tree as he continued. “You bet. All night long Georgie had been telling us about tripping over something-a rock, or maybe even a branch or a root. He claimed that’s how come the gun discharged. So come sunup, I tell him, ‘Okay, Mr. Hammond, all’s we need now is to have you show us whatever it was you tripped over.’ So he leads us to this big of rock and tries to pass that one off as being it, except anybody who knows a thing about guns and trajectories and all that can see it isn’t true. From where the rock is and where and how we found the body, you can tell those two things just don’t add up.

“ ‘Look here, Georgie,’ I said. ‘This whole thing’s a bunch of B.S. It couldn’t have happened this way, and you know it. How about if you just haul off and tell us the truth?’ And you know what happened? He did. Just like that. Broke down in tears and started spilling his guts. The thing is, if I hadn’t nailed him on it, George Hammond might have gotten away with murder.”

Eleanor, listening in silence, refused to be swayed by either her husband’s story or by his enthusiasm in telling it. “You still shouldn’t have stayed out all night,” she responder at last when he finished. “You’ll be paying for this foolishness the whole rest of the week.”

It was amazing to Joa

Even at age twelve, Joa

After years of enduring her mother’s unremitting criticism, she realized that D. H. Lathrop had been Eleanor’s target long before his daughter was. When he was no longer there to bear the brunt of it, Joa

Big Hank Lathrop had thrown himself into living without reservation. He had grabbed hold of everything life had to offer. Eleanor had clung to the sidelines. Unable to compete with her husband out in the world, she had cut away at him at home, constantly trying to whittle him down to her size. She was smart enough not to reveal her hand by directly belittling his triumph in the Hammond case. That would have exposed her own jealousy of his devotion to duty. Instead, she cloaked her rebuke in the socially acceptable guise of wifely concern-of Big Hank’s needing his rest-rather than saying what she really meant. Never once did she admit that anything that took her husband’s attention away from her-Big Hank’s job included-was a rival to be attacked on all possible fronts.

Suddenly, as clearly as Joa

The things that had driven Big Hank-the same needs and desires that had sent him out on a nightlong mission to match wits with a killer-were the ones that motivated Joa