Justice Delayed (Innocent Prisoners Project) Read online

  PRAISE FOR MARTI GREEN

  “Marti Green’s look at the potential for abuse and corruption in the privatized, for-profit juvenile-justice systems across America is taut, edifying, and, at times, terrifying. The thought that some of the terrible things described in this book really happen to youngsters charged with minor offenses made my skin crawl. This is an important novel as well as a top-notch thriller. I’d recommend it to anyone.”

  —Scott Pratt, bestselling author of Justice Redeemed, on First Offense

  “Unintended Consequences is an engrossing, well-conceived legal thriller. Most enjoyable.”

  —Scott Turow, New York Times bestselling author of Presumed Innocent

  “This one will grab you by the neck from the very first page!”

  —Steve Hamilton, Edgar Award–winning author of Die a Stranger, on Unintended Consequences

  OTHER TITLES BY MARTI GREEN

  Help Innocent Prisoners Project Series

  Unintended Consequences

  Presumption of Guilt

  The Price of Justice

  First Offense

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 The Green Family Trust

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477819876

  ISBN-10: 1477819878

  Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects

  To my sister, Judith, who put up with me long enough for us to become good friends.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To delay Justice is Injustice.

  —William Penn

  All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

  —Galileo Galilei

  CHAPTER

  1

  1994

  The night Kelly Braden disappeared, she had been babysitting her cousin Lisa. Jenny Hicks usually drove her niece home after she and her husband, Todd, returned at the end of the evening, but this time they’d attended a wedding, and since they wouldn’t get back until close to 2:00 a.m., they’d asked Kelly to sleep over. When they finally arrived home, Jenny peeked into her daughter’s bedroom and saw that both Lisa and Kelly were sound asleep in the twin beds. She tiptoed inside, kissed Lisa’s forehead, damp from the unusually warm March evening air despite the open window, then quickly undressed and flopped down on her own bed.

  Jenny awoke with a start the next morning. The bedside clock read 9:18, well past the hour when five-year-old Lisa usually awoke. Todd lay next to Jenny, snoring softly. She smiled at the thought that Kelly had gotten up with Lisa and given her breakfast so her aunt and uncle could sleep in. She’s such a good kid, Jenny thought.

  She roused herself from the bed, then quietly stepped outside the master bedroom so as not to disturb Todd. She expected to hear the TV, and see Lisa quietly curled up on the couch watching her favorite cartoon show. Instead, she heard only silence. As Jenny walked down the hallway, she saw that Lisa’s door was still closed. She opened it, found her daughter fast asleep, and the other bed empty. She continued down the stairs into the living room. Empty. She knocked on the door to the half bathroom in the hall. No sound. She opened it. It, too, was empty.

  Could Kelly have gone home? Had her parents picked her up? Jenny reached for the phone and dialed her sister.

  “Hi,” Susan Braden said when she answered the phone. “How was the wedding?”

  “Fun. Is Kelly there?”

  “What do you mean? She’s at your house.”

  Jenny had a sick feeling in her gut. “She’s not. She was asleep last night when we got back, but she’s gone now. Could a friend have picked her up?”

  There was silence on the phone. “I’d think she’d leave a note if she took off. Did you look around for one?”

  “No. I’ll do that now. I’ll call you back when I’m finished.”

  Jenny hung up and began a search. There was nothing on the counter or table in the kitchen, nothing on the living-room cocktail table, nothing tacked to the inside of the front door. She went back upstairs and entered Lisa’s bedroom. No note there. She looked over at her daughter, still sleeping soundly. Too soundly. Lisa always awoke at 7:00 a.m. overflowing with energy. Jenny leaned over her daughter and felt her forehead. It was cool to the touch. She gently shook her daughter to wake her, then shook harder when she got no response. She fell down on her knees, her face close to Lisa’s. That’s when she saw the bump under her silky blonde hair. Big and red and ugly.

  Her chest tightened with fear. She jumped up, ran into her own bedroom, and screamed at Todd to wake up. His eyes shot open.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Jenny tried to tamp down her rising hysteria. “Lisa won’t wake up, and she has a big bump on her head, and Kelly’s gone.”

  Todd jumped out of bed and ran to Lisa’s room. After his unsuccessful attempt to rouse her, he turned to Jenny. His face was pale, and his hands shook. “Call 911. We have to get her to the hospital.”

  Two hours later, Jenny and Todd paced back and forth in the hospital waiting room as their daughter underwent a craniotomy to remove an epidural hematoma and reduce the pressure on her brain. Jenny was simply unable to sit down.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Hicks?”

  Jenny spun around and saw two policemen.

  Her lower lip trembled as she asked, “Have you found Kelly?”

  “No, ma’am,” said the older of the two. “I’m Detective John Thompson, and this is my partner, Detective Ed Cannon. Other officers are searching for your niece. We just had a few questions to ask you, if you don
’t mind?”

  The man talking had a kind face. His soft features seemed to match his protruding stomach and the patches of gray sprinkled throughout his wavy hair. Not so the other one. He was tall, slim, and young, with chiseled features and spiked hair that combined to give him a harder look.

  “Sure,” Todd said. “Anything you want.”

  “Mrs. Hicks, you told the ER doctors that your niece had been with your daughter last night,” Thompson said.

  “That’s right. We were at a wedding, and Kelly babysat.”

  “When did you get home?”

  “A little after two a.m. I checked on the girls, and they were both sleeping. Everything seemed all right.”

  “When did you notice something was wrong with your daughter?”

  “This morning, a little after nine, when she didn’t wake up. That’s when I saw the bump on her head.”

  “And you noticed Kelly was missing then?”

  “No, just before that. I thought she was downstairs, but she wasn’t. That’s when I went into Lisa’s bedroom.” Her hands were held in front of her, squeezed tight. She tried to concentrate on the officer’s questions, but her mind kept wandering to Lisa, picturing her small body lying on the operating table, doctors drilling into her skull. Jenny ached to be with her, holding her hand.

  “Did you hear any unusual noise during the night?”

  Jenny shook her head slightly, to clear it of the worry that gnawed at her. “No. But we keep a sound machine on at night.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s white noise,” Todd cut in. “Our bedroom faces the front, and it drowns out street sounds.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Have you ever seen Kelly act aggressively toward your daughter?” Cannon broke in.

  “What?” Todd said, baffled. “Kelly?”

  Jenny was taken aback by the accusatory tone in the man’s voice. “God, no,” she said. “They adore each other. Kelly would never hurt Lisa, not in a million years.”

  “Sometimes teenagers hide things from adults,” Cannon pressed. “Have you ever seen her high on drugs?”

  “No! She’s a good kid. Straight-A student.” Why was he asking these questions? They should be looking for Kelly, not treating her like a suspect. She looked up at Todd, silently beseeching him to put a stop to this. Her heart hadn’t stopped racing since they’d taken Lisa to the operating room.

  Todd took a deep, audible breath and said, “Listen. We’re both pretty rattled now.”

  “I understand,” Thompson said. “Just a couple more questions, then we’ll leave you alone. The doctors said Lisa had been hit with something hard, like perhaps a baseball bat. Is there anyone else you can think of who might have hurt Lisa? Maybe someone who has a grudge against either of you?”

  Jenny stared at the detective. Her body was numb, but her mind swirled with horrific pictures of some stranger standing over her precious daughter, beating her senseless. It seemed unreal to her. “No one we know would do this to our daughter.” Her voice was hoarse, her vocal cords stretched tight by the dread that had filled her ever since the doctor had taken their daughter away from them.

  “Can you think of anyone, sir?”

  “No,” Todd mumbled.

  “Is there a baseball bat in your house?”

  Todd shook his head.

  “Okay, we won’t bother you any longer.” Thompson held out a card and handed it to Todd. “If you think of something, give us a call.”

  With the detectives gone, Todd sank into a chair, and Jenny returned to her pacing, her arms wrapped tightly around her body. The minutes dragged on and seemed like hours. She kept glancing at her watch, trying to will time to pass, for the surgery to be over, for her daughter to be all right. Finally, a doctor dressed in scrubs entered the room and walked toward them. Jenny ran up to him. “How is she?”

  “The surgery went well,” Dr. Burton said. “We’ve removed the hematoma and drained the fluid. She’s still sedated now, but I think she should recover completely.”

  Jenny fell into Todd’s arms and sobbed as relief flooded through her. Lisa was okay, Kelly would be found, and their life would return to normal.

  Jenny’s sister called every one of her daughter’s friends, and then called Kelly’s boyfriend. No one knew where she was. No one had heard from her. It made no sense to Susan. Kelly was always so responsible. She would never have hurt Lisa, would never have disappeared without a word. Was it possible that she didn’t know her daughter? That Kelly had been keeping secrets from her? She shook her head. No, it simply wasn’t possible. They’d been close from the moment Kelly had been born. Just a few years ago, Kelly had told her mother that she was her best friend. That’s how close they were.

  The alternative terrified Susan. If Kelly hadn’t run away, that meant someone had taken her. Someone who was cruel enough to hurt a five-year-old child. Her hands started shaking first, then her whole body. Her husband, Carl, came over to her and pulled her into his arms. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “She’ll come home.”

  Susan wished she could believe him, but she knew, in the deepest part of her, that her world had just tilted and would never be the same.

  Jenny hadn’t left Lisa’s bed since she’d come out of surgery. Her daughter, normally so robust and pink-cheeked, still had a ghostly pallor the day after her surgery. Her hair had been shaved in spots, and her head was wrapped in bandages. Tubes ran from her thin arm to the metal pole next to her bed, and an assortment of beeps periodically sounded from the monitor on the wall. She still hadn’t awoken since being rushed to the hospital, but the doctors reassured Jenny that was to be expected. “It’s still early,” Dr. Burton had told her just an hour earlier.

  A knock sounded on the door. Jenny looked up and saw the two detectives from the day before standing in the doorway.

  “Ma’am, how’s your daughter doing?” Detective Thompson asked.

  “She hasn’t awakened yet.”

  “We just spoke to the doctor. He thinks she’ll be fine.”

  “That’s what he told me, too.”

  “Do you have time for a few more questions?”

  She wanted to say no. She wanted to be back home, baking cookies with Lisa, chasing her around the house in a mock race, reading her favorite books to her. She wanted normal, not a hospital with a detective looking pityingly at her. She glanced over his shoulder at the other detective, his face set in a rigid mask. Whoever had done this to Lisa needed to be caught. And Kelly was still missing.

  She stood up and said, “Let’s go into the hallway.” Even though the other bed in the semiprivate room was empty, Jenny didn’t want to have this conversation by her daughter’s bedside.

  Once outside the room, Detective Cannon asked, “Is Mr. Hicks here?”

  “He’s on his way. He went home to shower and change, and then had to stop in his office briefly. He should be here any minute. Do you want to wait for him?”

  Cannon glanced at Thompson, who gave a quick nod. “No, we can go ahead. Do you recall if the window in your daughter’s bedroom was left open the night she was attacked?”

  Jenny nodded. “It was warm. Not enough for air-conditioning, but we left it open for the breeze.”

  “Was there a screen on the window?”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ve had some of the technicians out at your house. There are marks outside Lisa’s bedroom that suggest a ladder had been propped up against the house. And the screen over the window appears to have been tossed into the shrubs. We think that’s how someone entered your daughter’s bedroom.”

  Instantly, Jenny knew what that meant. Although she couldn’t imagine Kelly harming Lisa, a small part of her had hoped that was the case. Maybe she’d taken drugs, had a bad reaction. If her niece had done this to Lisa and then run away, then maybe Kelly hadn’t been harmed. But a ladder up to the second floor? The screen gone? That meant some monster had struck Lisa and taken Kelly.

  “I wonde
r if you’ve had any more time to think about who might want to hurt your daughter?” Thompson asked.

  “No one we know would do this.”

  “What can you tell us about your neighbor Jack Osgood?”

  “Jackie? He’s slow—you know, brain-wise—but he’s harmless.”

  “Some of your neighbors say he frightens the kids on the block.”

  Jenny felt a flare of annoyance. “Only because of his size. And because he’s different.”

  “Mrs. Hicks, did Kelly ever tell you she was afraid of him?”

  “She never mentioned him at all.”

  “Has he ever been inside your house? Would he know which bedroom is your daughter’s?”

  Jenny nodded. “A few months ago, we bought new furniture for Lisa’s room. He helped my husband carry it inside.”

  “Ever see him with a baseball bat?”

  Jenny froze. She had seen him with a bat many times, hitting tennis balls against the side of his garage. And once, she suddenly remembered, he’d told her he thought Kelly was pretty.

  “Oh, God,” she moaned, then looked up at the detective. “Could it be Jackie? Could he have done this?”

  “He’s a person of interest. That’s all we can say.”

  Susan Braden jumped when she heard the doorbell, then ran to the door. Her nerves had been frayed to tatters since her daughter had disappeared two days ago, and with each ring of the telephone or knock on the door, she was flooded with the hope that it was someone with news—good news—about Kelly.

  She pulled open the door and saw two men dressed in suits, one holding up a badge for her to see. They were different from the policemen who’d been to her house the morning Kelly disappeared. Those men had been wearing uniforms. They had asked for a picture of Kelly, then asked her and Carl questions—about Kelly’s friends, her boyfriend, whether she had any enemies, whether they had any enemies. They’d asked where she and Carl had been the night before, as though they were suspects, but Susan didn’t care. They could ask her questions all day if it would bring Kelly back.

  “Ma’am, I’m Detective John Thompson, and this is my partner, Detective Ed Cannon. May we come in?”