her the other papers in his hands. As she perused them, he kept talking. “That’s a contingency fee agreement giving Tobin one-third of whatever Felton recovered from the legislature. This guy is a fraud. He’s making money on these death penalty cases. Maybe Felton wouldn’t have gotten twenty million but if he got five, Tobin’s payout is over a million and a half. You hit one of these babies every couple of years and you’re making a lot of money for very little work. He’s motivated to get people off because there’s a payoff at the end and not for the noble reasons that he pretends. He’s a phony.”
“You said that already.”
“It’s worth saying twice.”
Danni wouldn’t admit it to Sam, but the documents did trouble her. Jack wasn’t doing anything illegal, but these documents showed that he was profiting from his work and not telling anybody about it, which made him exactly what Sam said he was—a fraud.
“Why are you showing me these things, Sam? Why do you want to involve me in this?”
“I care about you, number one. I really don’t know your relationship with Tobin, and I want to make sure you’re not taken in by this guy.”
“And number two?”
“I figure Tobin had to be pretty pissed off when Felton killed his opportunity for a payday by killing my daughter. He might have had a little vendetta of his own.”
Danni was starting to get where this was going. “Are you suggesting that the loss of a fee was a motivation for murder? That’s outrageous. The guy was sitting out in the woods trying to protect me.”
“That’s what he told you. Felton had a cell phone on him. Tobin called him two nights before he was killed and again just before he was killed.”
“So you’re suggesting Jack lured him out there to kill him?”
“Why else would he be calling him?” Sam said.
“I don’t know but why would he be out in the woods?”
“Why not? I don’t know what he told Felton to get him into the woods but killing Felton behind your backyard is a perfect alibi for Tobin.”
“It’s just too crazy, Sam. How do you explain Jack coming directly to my house, concerned for my welfare? If he’d committed the murder, he would have gone directly to the body and put a gun in Felton’s hand and said Felton had tried to shoot him—not run to my house. How do you explain that?”
“I think what you just said was Tobin’s original plan. What he didn’t plan on was me showing up. I think he heard me barreling through the woods as soon as that gun went off and decided he might not be able to get to Felton’s body before I did. I was there pretty fast. So he went to your house, great guy that he is, to check on your welfare.”
It was an incredible story but as a homicide detective Danni knew that the stories behind some murders were sometimes pretty incredible. So far, she wasn’t buying any of it, not with Jack. She knew Jack, or at least she thought she did, and this was not the person she knew. And she didn’t trust Sam. He’d been through too much.
“Let’s follow this logically, Sam. If Tobin was going to plant the gun but didn’t or couldn’t, what happened to the gun? I mean, he was at my house right away. I was with him right up until the time we went to the station. You guys had him empty his pockets at the station. I’m sure somebody did a pat down.”
“They did.”
“So where did the gun go that he was supposedly going to plant?”
“The only thing he could have done was throw it away as he was running toward your house. He’s right-handed so he probably threw it off to his right. I didn’t piece all this information together until this morning so I didn’t know enough to have somebody check that area before today. We had nothing to keep Tobin so we let him go late yesterday. I suspect that if he threw the gun away, he would have been back last night to retrieve it. You didn’t happen to see him last night, did you?”
So that’s why Sam is here. He’s looking for this last little piece of information to incriminate Jack. Danni hadn’t bought anything so far, but now she recalled seeing that dark figure coming out of the woods from the left as she sat on her porch. That would have