Flat Lake in Winter by Joseph T. Klempner

couldn’t use the money. If the case stayed death, he’d get paid at the rate of $175 an hour. Never mind that Wall Street firms were charging $500 an hour these days to take their clients to lunch; to Matt Fielder, the idea of working for $175 an hour was nothing short of winning the lottery.
    No, it wasn’t the money. And it certainly wasn’t the work. Getting his teeth into a murder case was what made this business worthwhile in the first place. It hadn’t been the big cases that had ultimately driven Fielder from practice; it had been the little ones - the petty drug possessions, the shoplifts, the car thefts, the turnstile jumpers. That and the business of running a law office.
    “Hello.” It was a woman’s voice.
    “Hi. This is Matt Fielder. I’m returning Kevin Doyle’s call.”
    “Just a minute.”
    Not that he hadn’t tried his best to duck the first two cases Doyle had called him on, too: He was on trial; he was too busy; he had a vacation coming up. But both times, Doyle had brushed those excuses aside, seeming to sense immediately that it was only Fielder’s uneasiness about doing death work that he was hearing. And it was that very uneasiness, of course, that had caused Doyle to put Fielder on his short list in the first place.
    Both times, Doyle had succeeded in prevailing upon Fielder. Both times, Fielder had managed to overcome his reluctance and hit the ground running, soon finding himself far too involved in the defense of his clients to dwell on what might become of them if things went wrong. And both times, circumstances had fortunately arisen to ensure that things wouldn’t go wrong - at least not fatally wrong.
    But this time promised to be different. Doyle himself had made that clear in his message. “ The DA’s a meateater,” he’d said. “ This could be the real thing.”
    “Doyle here.”
    “Hey, Kevin. Matt Fielder.”
    “Thanks for getting back to me, Matt. How’s life in the woods?”
    “It’s been a learning experience.”
    So much for the small talk.
    “I’ve got a live one, Matt.”
    “So it sounds.”
    “Twenty-eight-year-old kid up in Ottawa County. Far as we know, he’s got no priors. Living on an estate with his grandparents in someplace called Flat Lake. Wakes up sometime Sunday night and butchers them in their sleep. State police have an oral confession. They’re arraigning him nine o’clock tomorrow morning in Cedar Falls.”
    “Who’s the DA?”
    “Guy by the name of Gil Cavanaugh. Don’t know too much about him, other than that he calls himself a conservative Republican, he’s a friend of the NRA, and every four years he gets reelected on a law-and-order platform tougher than the one before. Got 88 percent of the vote last time he ran.”
    “Lovely,” was all Fielder could think to say.
    “One more thing,” Doyle added. “He didn’t even give us notification. Claimed he wasn’t aware of the case.”
    “Can’t your branch office in Flat Lake handle this?”
    “Our branch office in Flat Lake?” Doyle laughed. “We don’t have anyone within 100 miles of Ottawa County.”
    “Except for me.”
    “Except for you.”
    Fielder found a clean spot on his sweatshirt to mop his forehead dry again. “I don’t want this,” he told Doyle. “We both know they’re going to try to kill this kid.”
    “I need you to help me out for now, Matt. If you still want out in a week, say the word. I’ll pull you off it. Promise.”
    “Right,” Fielder said. They both knew that by week’s end he’d be up to his elbows in it, and there’d be no way he’d let go of it.”
    “Thanks,” said Doyle, exhibiting that rarest skill of all in the legal profession - the good sense to shut up when you’re ahead. “Kid’s name is Jonathan Hamilton. Cedar Falls, nine o’clock.”
    “You bastard,” said Matt Fielder.

 
    THE OTTAWA COUNTY COURTHOUSE is a two-story brick building located directly on Main Street, about halfway between Maple and Birch. Since