The Evil Inside. Heather Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ joining his first small firm, because his boss had needed an investigator more than another attorney in the office. He’d learned the ropes from Colin Blake, Esquire, and he’d come to terms with a sad truth: a defense attorney was still required to give his best effort in a legal defense, even if he thought his client was guilty as all hell. He’d learned to make the cops and the prosecutors suffer, but discovered he didn’t much like that side of the business. Still, despite that, he wasn’t sure he could ever go back to being a prosecutor. It wasn’t the money. Well, it was about money. Often. It was sometimes about the money it took to put together a great team of defense attorneys. He’d seen a young woman sent to prison for years, convicted of the murder of her newborn. He’d seen a rich young man walk on drug charges, and a poor one sent up fifteen years for the same offense. He understood the law; he didn’t understand why the slow wheels of Congress took so long to correct the inequities that were to be found in so many instances. He was violently opposed to the death penalty, always afraid that somewhere, sometime, it would send an innocent person to his or her death, and yet he understood the desire others felt to see it utilized. Too many drug lords, murderers and rapists made it back onto the street. But last night …

      Something about the kid he’d come upon in the street was still tugging at his heartstrings.

       The kid, according to police, had axed his family to death.

      There was no doubt that Malachi Smith’s father, mother, grandmother and great-uncle had been murdered, and horribly so. Jumping on the internet that morning, he’d seen that the news regarding the killings had gone global. Abraham Smith, sixty-two, Beth Smith, fifty-nine, Abigail Smith, eighty-three, and Thomas Smith, eighty-seven, had all died from exsanguination—Beth, Abigail and Thomas all receiving at least eight blows from a honed ax, Abraham over twenty. The previous week, a neighbor, Mr. Earnest Covington, had been found hacked to death on his parlor floor. Six months earlier, a Salem native living in nearby Andover had been found murdered in his barn. Police had been following leads and now suspected that the cases were related.

      Indisputable evidence indicated that the youngest son of the Smith family, Malachi, was the killer. The police had the young man in custody, and he remained under guard in isolation at a correctional facility hospital.

      The Smiths were the current owners of Lexington House, famed for its bloody reputation. The family had adhered to strict fundamentalist teachings, being members of the Old Meeting House in Beverly, Massachusetts. This was a strange connection of sorts with the original murders in the place. In the midst of the witchcraft trials, Eli Lexington had murdered his family with an ax. He’d been imprisoned with the nearly two hundred arrested for witchcraft at the time. Then he disappeared. There were no records of his fate after prison.

      Then, in the late eighteen hundreds, Mr. and Mrs. Braden had been killed in the house, as well. A historical parallel of the Menendez case? From the books, movies and court records that had come down through time, it appeared that a disgruntled son had killed his parents for the money. And, of course, similar cases had been suspected elsewhere. The Braden case was similar, too, to the Lizzie Borden murders. Both Lizzie and the Braden boy had been acquitted, but nobody doubted that each of them had murdered their families.

      Just like today’s case.

      Sam told himself over and over to get the hell away from his computer. He was not involved. But he was.

      He’d found the kid in the road.

      And, he’d grown up in Salem. He could still remember being a school kid, and the rhyme every school kid in the area had learned. Oh, Lexington, he loved his wife …

      A good attorney, of course—even a hack—would go for an insanity plea. The kid had grown up in what everyone in the area termed a haunted house—a really haunted house—which, in a city like Salem, was saying something.

      Any attorney could defend the boy. It was too easy. He forced himself to leave the computer screen and walk around the house.

      His parents had been dead for nearly two years; he’d returned for the funeral, and he hadn’t been back since. The house, however, was in excellent shape. His father, until his death, had seen to it that no electrical wires frayed, that the heating system was state-of-the-art and that every board that even seemed slightly damaged was replaced. His father’s friend and contractor, Jimmy Chu, had kept the house in good repair during the two years. His dad had come from old Puritan stock, and he’d considered it an honor to care for the home that his parents had owned, just as his grandparents before them did. It wasn’t one of the oldest houses in the area, but it ranked right in there with many of the homes surviving from the turn of the eighteenth century all the way into the twenty-first.

      He smiled suddenly, shaking his head and taking a sip of the coffee he still held, untouched. “Darn you, Dad. You knew that I won’t be able to sell the damned thing!”

      A house—in a city in which he no longer lived—was a pain in the ass, no matter what. He guessed that his father had always figured he’d come home one day.

      Well, he’d managed to, but on the wrong damned day. He dropped his head. He didn’t want to be involved with a legal situation here.

      But he couldn’t blink without seeing in his mind’s eye the blank brown eyes of the naked boy covered in blood and shaking on the road.

      “Jenna!” Uncle Jamie drew her to him, giving her a warm and emphatic hug.

      She hugged him in turn. She loved Jamie. She loved her family in general. Despite their long history of warfare, the Irish were an exceptionally warm, passionate and profuse people. They were full of magical tales, and they seldom felt obliged to refrain from speaking their minds.

      “Uncle Jamie!” she said.

      He pulled her away for a moment, holding her at arm’s length to study her. Jamie had brilliant green eyes and graying auburn hair. He was her mother’s younger brother, and had always had a mischievous side to him, making him very popular among children. He was so devout that he’d nearly gone into the priesthood, but had decided at the last minute that he didn’t really have the calling. He’d attended medical school and become a psychiatrist instead.

      “You look good, my girl, aye, that you do! Pretty thing, you always were. Beautiful eyes, green like Eire, and hair like fire—you got my sister’s temper to go with it, eh?” Her own accent had become little more than a hint of a different place, but she had come to the States when she’d been a young teen. Jamie had been a grown man.

      “Mum’s temper isn’t that bad, Uncle Jamie. She’s a lot like you—opinionated.”

      He grinned. “Come over here, I’ve a booth for us,” he told her. He slipped an arm through hers, leading her toward a corner booth. “Lovely, lovely, isn’t it? I’ve always loved this city. You have the Wiccans with their wonderful shops—and their Wiccan gossip and squabbles, of course! You’ve got the immigrants and the old Puritan families, and all of them getting along—and not. But fall here is the most wonderful season in the world—everyone loving life and creating cornucopias and carving out pumpkins.”

      “Yes, I love it here, too, Uncle Jamie.”

      He looked around and motioned to the waitress. “What will you have, niece?”

      She was surprised to feel a sudden chill. Jamie was hedging, and he usually just spoke plainly. It was unusual that he’d dawdle by ordering like this, but she decided she’d let him talk at his own speed. “Something warm,” she replied.

      “An СКАЧАТЬ