Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

doing six years.”
    “Yeah, I saw that. But he would’ve been looking at nine, minimum, if it weren’t for the plea. As I understand it, the mom said she was the one who made the agreement with Williams after seeing him at a bar and recognizing him from her visits to the prison. Wasn’t Williams the only person to say that both the mom and dad knew what was going on?”
    Rachel Chance had confessed but steadfastly refused to turn on her husband. If only Diane had found another witness. If only someone other than Williams could have placed the parents together during that time window — she would have had a second witness to contradict the Chances’ fabricated story about separation.
    “The mom’s a piece of shit. So’s the dad. And so is Williams. Maybe he’s lying now, but he wasn’t then.”
    “All right. I was all set to cut him loose. Wouldn’t be the first time a jailhouse snitch lied to me. I’ll take a closer look at the cellmate, just in case. Thanks for the info.”
    As she zipped her purse, Diane caught sight of a familiar face near Market Street. She was too far away to hear his words, but after eighteen years as a prosecutor, she could spot hand-to-hand drug transactions across a football field.
    Once the customer had left, she waved in Jake’s direction. Kiley turned to look, then held on to Diane’s leg. Her sweet little brown eyebrows were furrowed.
    “That’s just a friend of your mommy.” She’d have to ask Kiley’s psychologist whether a lingering fear of men was to be expected.
    Jake nodded, but then turned away to walk farther south. She supposed the presence of a deputy district attorney wasn’t good for a drug dealer’s business.
    “You want some more cookie? Can you say
cookie?
”
    Kiley was still clinging to her leg, but the worry in her eyes had transformed to panic. Her breath quickened, and Diane recognized all the signs of a serious meltdown.
    “What’s wrong, sweetie? Is Mommy’s cookie monster all full? Is it nap time?”
    Her daughter’s gaze moved south, and her grasp tightened. “Jake.”
    “What did you say?”
    Kiley’s lower lip trembled, but her next words were unmistakable. She pointed to a spot between her legs. “Jake. Snake.”
    “How do you know —”
    Snippets of images replayed in Diane’s visual cortex. A pair of Kiley’s soiled pants in a Ziploc bag, the source of the bodily fluids still unidentified. Jake’s frantic banter when she’d approached him about the Chance case. His utter certainty when he’d finally said, “Sorry, DiLi, never seen either one of these ugly crack-heads.” Fourteen pops, no convictions. No convictions meant no blood sample for the DNA data bank.
    She tasted bile and chocolate at the back of her throat. What else had she been wrong about?
    She pictured Trevor Williams on the stand, promising to tell the whole truth. Rachel Chance’s insistence of full responsibility:
I’m so ashamed, but I can’t blame this on Kyle. I fell apart when he left me.
Kyle Chance hugging his lawyer when Stone allowed him back in Kiley’s life. The lawyer for once appearing pleased to have helped a client.
    As if Chance were standing before her, Diane remembered the clarity on his face when he’d opened the apartment door that night. She saw her daughter on that worn kitchen floor, gazing up with sleepy eyes, oblivious to her father’s blood beginning to soak into the bottom of her flowered flannel pajamas.
    The grass and the tulips shimmered in the sunlight and went out of focus, as though the laws of gravity had been set in abeyance and would not be restored anytime soon.

BLIND JUSTICE
    BY JIM FUSILLI
    A ngie and Turnip were best friends for as long as either could remember, beginning when Angie came to Turnip’s aid, grabbing Weber by his pale hair, bloodying his nose with a roundhouse right, then dribbling his skull on the sidewalk. Bobby Weber was in the first grade, Angie and Turnip in kindergarten at St. Francis of Assisi in downtown Narrows Gate.
    That was twenty years ago, the winter of 1953, and since then nobody picked on Turnip twice.
    Though they were unemployed, neither Angie nor Turnip lacked: Their widowed mothers, both of whom were born in the Apulia region of southern Italy, received pension checks from Jerusalem Steel as well as Social Security. They gave the boys what they wanted and then some, provided they spoke not of the source, figuring if anyone knew they received so much for doing nothing, the