Innocence Read Online Free PDF Page B

onto Monsignor O’Brien Highway, headed toward Charlestown. It was gray out—the kind of deep, penetrating gray that only New Englanders know. The buildings and the streets and the sky blended together in a wall of slate as the impossibly impractical car dodged frozen puddles and potholes in the road, the darkened slush clinging to its wheels.
    “About what?” Kozlowski asked, looking out the passenger window.
    Finn knew he hated riding in the miniature vehicle, which could barely contain his large, square frame. The ratted soft top felt like it might actually give way to his shoulders, and the wind whistled through gaps where the canvas didn’t quite reach the steel.
    “Okay,” Finn said. “I won’t take the case.”
    “Your call.”
    Finn took his eyes off the road for a moment and looked over at the man sitting next to him. The thick scar that ran down his face was hidden from Finn’s view, and seeing him in profile, Finn realized that the private investigator must have been handsome once. “I’m assuming you remember the Steele shooting?”
    “Yeah,” Kozlowski replied, his eyes still scanning the streets outside his window. Then he went silent again.
    “That’s it?” Finn asked. “‘Yeah’? That’s all I’m gonna get out of you? Any chance you want to elaborate a little?”
    Kozlowski folded his arms. “It was a bad time for the department. Maddy—Officer Steele—was popular. She was a good young cop. She was a woman.”
    “And?”
    “As a cop, you can’t let that stand—particularly not with a woman. No one gets away with shooting one of your own. It’d be rough on the department if Salazar got out; it’d open a lot of old wounds.”
    “So you want me to leave it alone?”
    “Didn’t say that. I’m not in the department anymore; they forced me out, remember? The only person I’d feel bad for would be Maddy. The rest of them can fuck themselves, for all I care.”
    “She lived, right?”
    “She did. It was a long fight for her, and it wasn’t fun. The bullet hit the spine; she’s in a wheelchair now, and that’s where she’ll be for the rest of her life. It wasn’t the easiest thing to come to grips with.”
    Finn raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like you knew her pretty well.”
    “We were friends.”
    “Friends?”
    Kozlowski glared at him. “Just friends.”
    “Okay. So what do you want me to do?”
    “Like I said, it’s not my call.”
    Finn pulled the little car into a parking space in front of a small two-story brick structure on Warren Street. The pointing was chipping away between the clay squares, and the entire building listed uneasily to one side. A small Historical Society plaque on the bottom corner near the doorway read circa 1769; a larger sign to the side of the entryway advertised scott t. finn, attorney at law, and below that, kozlowski investigations.
    Finn pulled up on the hand brake and looked at Kozlowski again. “That’s bullshit, Koz, and you know it. I don’t have a dog in this fight—not yet. Could be an interesting case; lucrative, too, if Salazar’s actually innocent. But I can walk away just as easily. I’ve got no interest in pissing you off, particularly when I’d probably need your help with the legwork on the case if I take it. So you tell me, what should I do?”
    Kozlowski opened the door and got out; Finn did the same. The older man leaned against the car’s top, and Finn worried briefly that it would collapse. “Meet the man,” Kozlowski said after a moment. “See what you think.”
    Finn looked long and hard at Kozlowski, trying to read him. “You think I should talk to him?”
    Kozlowski nodded. “Just one thing.”
    Finn listened for the sound of the other shoe hitting the cobblestone. “What’s that?”
    “I want to meet the man, too.”
    z
    Finn opened the door to his apartment, stepped in, and dropped his briefcase on the floor. It landed with a weary thud. As was his custom, he debated leaving the lights off and