Vengeance. Mystery Writers of America Presents B00A25NLU4

didn’t make the news.”
    “I would have missed it anyway. I’m always at the lake house after a trial.” He grimaced. “This time it was a damn good thing I got up there so fast. There was a burst pipe in the laundry room. I fixed it myself — a foot of half-inch pipe, some solder, a propane torch, and about two hours of labor.” He turned to Martinez. “So you think this hit-and-run is related to the Dolan trial?”
    “Maybe,” Martinez said. “At first we just figured Shadid was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
    “What changed your mind?”
    Martinez looked embarrassed. “That magazine writer called.”
    “Writer?” the judge said.
    “Leonard Lunney. He’s one of those true-crime guys. Said he was writing about the Dolan trial. He got a copy of the jury list and started calling ’em to see if they’d talk. When he found out Shadid thought Dolan was innocent from the get-go and then Shadid’s killed in that hit-and-run …”
    “Journalists are rightly skeptical of coincidence,” the judge said.
    “Police too,” Ebanks said.
    “I’ve read some of Mr. Lunney’s pieces in
Vanity Fair,
” the judge said. “It’s his job to spin the suspicious into the sensational.”
    “According to Lunney, the first vote was eleven to one to convict,” Martinez said. “Shadid was the holdout. He ended up getting two other jurors to go along with him.”
    “I’ve seen some heated deliberations,” the judge said. “That one was among the most acrimonious. I could hear the shouting in my chambers. The bailiff had to break up a scuffle at one point.”
    “You catch what the fight was about?” Martinez said.
    “From what I heard, a juror in favor of conviction accused Mr. Shadid of being blinded by Dolan’s status as an athlete.” The judge spread his hands. “Of course you’ll talk to the rest of the panel.”
    Ebanks frowned. “You’re thinking maybe a juror who argued with Shadid wanted to kill him because Shadid thought Dolan was innocent?”
    The judge looked at Ebanks over the top of his glasses. “Remember Jack Ruby? People have done worse in the name of justice, especially when they have some tangential involvement in the situation.”
    “The thing is, we checked into that,” Martinez said. “All the jurors had alibis for when the car hit Shadid.”
    “So if a juror isn’t a suspect, I’m not sure how I can help you,” the judge said.
    “We’d like to ask you about Mrs. Dolan’s family,” Martinez said. “Specifically, her brothers.”

    T HE PROSECUTOR , AS usual, had made a point of extolling the victim’s virtues at trial. Tina Lucchese Dolan was a loving wife who supported her husband’s baseball career, cheerfully moving from town to town as he worked his way up from Class-A to Double-A to Triple-A ball. She sang at church and did volunteer work.
    Tina’s only blemish was her maiden name. The Luccheses were a second-tier New Jersey crime family. Dolan’s lawyers, trying to create reasonable doubt, made some noise about Tina’s death being payback for a sanitation-contract dispute, but that’s all it was — noise. They didn’t have any evidence to back up their claims, only innuendo, largely in the form of Tina’s two brothers, who attended the trial every day. They sat in the first row behind the defense table and glared daggers at Kenny Dolan’s back, tough guys stuffed like sausages into shiny suits. No one would sit next to them.
    The judge blinked. “You think a
Lucchese
killed Mr. Shadid?”
    “We talked to the Jersey police. The Luccheses really are pretty Old World when it comes to justice.” Martinez leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs behind his belt. “Make that more like Old Testament. You should see their rap sheets.”
    “I’m not surprised,” the judge said.
    “Shadid didn’t exactly keep his views to himself,” Martinez said. “Right after the trial he told a blogger the police had planted evidence to frame Dolan. So when the prosecutor said he was going to retry Dolan, we think maybe the Luccheses killed Shadid.”
    A hung jury didn’t mean a defendant walked. The prosecutor could try the defendant again, either immediately or after collecting more evidence, as long as the statute of limitations hadn’t run out.
    “But why now?” the judge said. “The trial’s over. Mr. Shadid won’t be a member of the new panel.”
    “To send a message to the next jury,” Martinez said.
    “You’re saying the