Final Judgment by Joel Goldman Page A

to the end of the line reaching from Rockley’s.
    That was all Mason could do until he heard from Blues. He had no doubt that Rockley would talk to him. When Blues wanted information from someone, he rarely came up empty. The greater risk was what Rockley would do after Blues finished with him. Blues would motivate him to keep his mouth shut and make another career move, this one out of town. Mason was certain Rockley wouldn’t be missed at Galaxy.
    If Rockley could point the way further up the food chain at Galaxy, Blues would make him draw a map. Mason would add that information to the dry erase board, knowing it was only a beginning. Rockley had to be the loose end of the thread, not the beginning.
    He wasted ten minutes throwing darts at the target hanging on the wall across from his desk, arcing high lob shots, not paying attention to where the darts landed, just passing time. He had other cases to work on, but couldn’t muster his concentration. If the blackmail scheme blew up in his face, he’d be charged with corrupting a public official. He checked the Missouri Criminal Code. It was a Class C felony punishable by a sentence of up to five years in the state penitentiary. The statute of limitations hadn’t run.
    He’d also lose his law license and, for the moment, that prospect chilled him as much as prison. Claire had motivated him to become a lawyer, though in the early years of his practice she had often chided him that he didn’t have the fire to become the kind of lawyer she had become. Someone who battled for the underdog, someone who was passionate not only about the law but about justice, sometimes squeezing justice out of a legal system too often reluctant to dispense it.
    Claire had eased up on him since he had opened his own practice, spending most of his time defending people accused of crimes. Regardless of their station in life, they were always underdogs when compared to any state or federal prosecutor. Though now she teased him that he was finally showing some promise, he’d learned one fundamental truth about himself: Being a lawyer was who and what he was. Take that away from him and Mason wasn’t certain what would be left.

THIRTEEN
    He drifted through the rest of the morning, walking two blocks down Broadway to a diner for a greasy cheeseburger at noon. The cold didn’t bother him. It had settled in his bones since Vanessa Carter’s visit.
    The phone rang at three o’clock that afternoon. It was Pete Samuelson.
    “What can I do for you?” Mason asked him.
    “Why don’t you and Mr. Fish come back downtown and we’ll talk. That is, if he doesn’t have any more dead bodies in the trunk of his car.”
    “Does that mean you’ve decided to take our offer?”
    “I can’t do that while the murder investigation is pending.”
    “Then we don’t have anything to talk about.”
    “Actually, we do. If your client agrees to cooperate with us, we may be able to help him.”
    “How are you going to do that?”
    “Just bring him downtown. Tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock.”
    Samuelson’s offer meant that he might know enough about the corpse in Fish’s trunk to exonerate Fish but that he hadn’t shared that information with the cops. If he had, the cops would have already given Fish a pass. That meant that the feds were holding out on the cops. It also meant that the feds were conducting their own investigation of a crime that was not in their jurisdiction.
    Detectives Griswold and Cates weren’t the kind of cops who would give Mason a heads-up if they no longer considered Fish a suspect. Nor would they tell Mason if Mason called and asked them. They would enjoy letting Fish twist while the investigation ran its course.
    Mason picked up his phone, dialing Samantha Greer’s cell phone number from memory. She was a homicide detective with whom Mason had had an on-again, off-again relationship for a couple of years before Mason met Abby. Since Abby left town, Samantha had done her