Small Town Lawyer
Defending Innocence
Identical Evidence
The Testimony
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, MAY 2021
Copyright © 2021 Relay Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Peter Kirkland is a pen name created by Relay Publishing for co-authored Legal Thriller projects. Relay Publishing works with incredible teams of writers and editors to collaboratively create the very best stories for our readers.
www.relaypub.com
Blurb
An innocent client harbors dark secrets…
Defense attorney Leland Monroe lost it all: his big-city job, his reputation and, worst of all, his loving wife. Now he’s back in his hometown to hit restart and repair the relationship with his troubled son. But the past is always present in a small town.
Leland returns to find his high school sweetheart hasn’t had the easiest of lives—especially now that her son faces a death sentence for murdering his father. Yet what appears to be an open and shut case is anything but. As Leland digs deeper to uncover a truth even his client is determined to keep buried, a tangled web of corruption weaves its way throughout his once tranquil hometown.
Leland soon realizes it’s not just his innocent young client’s life that’s at stake—powerful forces surface to threaten the precious few loved ones he has left.
Contents
1. Monday, June 10, 2019
2. Tuesday, June 11, Morning
3. Tuesday, June 11, Later That Morning
4. Tuesday, June 11, Evening
5. Wednesday, June 19, Evening
6. Wednesday, June 19, Evening
7. Thursday, June 20, Evening
8. Thursday, June 20, Evening
9. Friday, June 28, Afternoon
10. Thursday, July 11, Morning
11. Friday, July 19, Morning
12. Friday, July 19, Afternoon
13. Friday, July 26, Afternoon
14. Friday, July 26, Evening
15. Sunday, July 28, Morning
16. Monday, July 29, Morning
17. Monday, July 29, Afternoon
18. Tuesday, July 30, Morning
19. Thursday, August 1, Evening
20. Wednesday, August 7, Afternoon
21. Thursday, August 15, Afternoon
22. Tuesday, August 27, Afternoon
23. Monday, September 9, Afternoon
24. Friday, September 27, Afternoon
25. Friday, September 27, Evening
26. Saturday, October 5, Afternoon
27. Friday, October 11, Morning
28. Sunday, October 27, Morning
29. Tuesday, November 5, Morning
30. Thursday, November 21, Afternoon
31. Monday, December 16, Morning
32. Monday, December 16, Afternoon
33. Tuesday, December 17, Morning
34. Tuesday, December 17, Afternoon
35. Wednesday, December 18, Morning
36. Tuesday, December 24, Morning
End of Defending Innocence
About Peter Kirkland
Make an Author’s Day
Sneak Peek: Lethal Justice
1
Monday, June 10, 2019
The Ocean View Diner, where I was waiting for my fried shrimp basket, was a dump with a view of nothing but the courthouse parking lot. It was already shabby when I was in high school, living on fries and coffee while I brainstormed the college application essays that were my ticket out. Much to the surprise of folks in my hometown, I’d made it to law school and beyond. I owned more than a dozen suits. I had tan for summers in the office, navy for opening statements to the jury, charcoal for talking to the media on the Charleston courthouse steps. My kid had admired me at an age when it was almost unnatural to think your dad was anything but a loser. I was a law-and-order guy trying to make the world safer. I’d thought I might run for office.
I nodded to the bailiff who walked through the door giving him a cordial “howdy”, but he looked right through me, as he walked past. We’d certainly seen enough of each other in the courthouse, and I tried not to take offense at the slight but there’s only so much a man can put up with when it comes to small town judgment.
They say pride goeth before a fall.
I’d seen enough, in my past life representing the great state of South Carolina, to know a man could have it a lot worse. The amount of depravity and human misery that had flowed across my desk made me know I ought to be grateful for what I still had left. My son, in other words, and my license to practice. I’d nearly lost both. The accident that took my wife had nearly killed him too, and even if he still hadn’t entirely recovered from it, he’d come farther than anyone expected at the time, but Noah was incredibly angry all the time. Mostly at me but I tried not to let it get to me.
Like water off a duck’s back, the little things ought not to have bothered me at all. It shouldn’t have mattered that the locals at the next table had stopped talking when I walked in, apparently suspicious of anyone who wasn’t a regular. Which I wasn’t yet, since it’d been barely six months since I dragged my sorry ass back from the big city. Getting to be a regular took years.
A better man would not have been annoyed by the smell of rancid grease or the creak of ancient ceiling fans. It was even hotter in here than in the June glare outside, and a good man would’ve sympathized with my waitress, who was stuck here all day and probably never even got to sit down.
But I was not that man. I did say “Thank you kindly” when she dropped my order on the table and sloshed another dose of coffee in my cup, but I was irrationally annoyed that no one had ever fixed the menu sign on the wall between the cash register and the kitchen. The word “cheeseburger” was still missing its first R. When my friends and I were sixteen-year-old jackasses, we thought it was hilarious to order a “cheese booger.” Now it was just pathetic that I was back. Especially since the reason I wasn’t in the new ’50s-style diner on the next corner—the popular lunch
