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Truth was, he’d lied when he’d told her that he would have hurt her. That he would have left her. That he would have hated her.
But the reality was that she’d been much too young. There had been no chance that they could have had any kind of relationship, even if her father would have allowed it, which he wouldn’t have. Not then. Maybe not even now.
Jason thought of the cases he’d recently worked in San Diego, involving some of the worst kinds of criminals. While he felt a certain satisfaction in putting them behind bars, he also experienced a sense of guilt, because on some level, he related to those lowlifes. Under different circumstances, it could have been him behind bars. He knew that some of the people he worked with were aware of his background and looked down their noses at him because of it. As much as he tried to tell himself that his past experiences made him a better law enforcement officer, he couldn’t shake the sense that he’d never completely eradicated the angry delinquent kid that he’d once been. He was just better at hiding it.
Caroline had once accused him of keeping his tattoos concealed because of what others might think about him. In truth, he couldn’t care less what anyone thought about him, but he took no pride in the ink he’d gotten as a teenager. There were times he’d even considered having the tattoos removed, but he had decided to keep them as a reminder of who he really was. He could fool some people, but he couldn’t fool himself.
He leaned forward, bracing his forearms on the railing of the deck, and breathed in the clean, salt-tinged air. Now that Caroline was living in Virginia, the judge rarely spent any time at the beach house. He refused to sell it, however, despite the fact he could get a small fortune for the oceanfront property. The house had belonged to his late wife, who had died in a car crash when Caroline was just a toddler. William had always maintained that the house was part of Caroline’s inheritance.
Being back at the beach house only served to remind Jason that he and Caroline came from different worlds. He didn’t like to think about his own parents, or his miserable childhood in Hunters Point, one of the most impoverished and crime-ridden districts of San Francisco.
He only knew that if it hadn’t been for Judge Banks, he probably wouldn’t have survived to adulthood. He hadn’t been back to his old neighborhood since he’d turned eighteen. He hadn’t seen his old man since he was twenty, when his father had turned up at his college dormitory looking to borrow money. He could still recall the anger and shame he’d felt when he’d opened his door to see Daryl Cooper outside his room, looking like a homeless bum and obviously in need of his next fix. Jason had wanted him gone before any of the other guys in the dorm saw him and guessed who he was and where Jason had come from.
But everything in him had rebelled against giving his father money, especially when he knew it would only go toward drugs or alcohol. Only when Daryl had grown belligerent and threatened to make a scene had Jason relented. He’d given his father everything he’d had, under the condition that he never come back and never try to get in touch with him again.
That had been almost fifteen years ago, and he hadn’t seen Daryl Cooper since. But the memory of that exchange remained vivid. Even now, there were times when he felt his life was a sham and that sooner or later people would realize he was nothing more than poor white trash.
He turned at the sound of footsteps behind him and saw Deputy Mitchell and another man just inside the house. He recognized the second man as Steven Anderson, the judge’s legal assistant. They’d met several times when Jason had traveled to San Francisco to visit the judge. He was young, probably in his mid-twenties, and he reminded Jason of the ambitious Stanford law students who had frequented Judge Banks’s house back when he was a teenager: good-looking, affluent and entitled. As Steven pushed a two-wheeled dolly, stacked high with white cardboard boxes, Jason couldn’t help thinking that the legal assistant looked as if he’d be more comfortable on a golf course than in a courtroom.
He stepped through the French doors into the house and shook Steven’s hand.
“Thanks for bringing these over on such short notice,” he said. “I’ll make sure you get them back as soon as possible.”
Steven nodded. “No problem. I had our paralegals working around the clock to make copies of everything before the FBI confiscated the files. This is every case the judge worked on for the past twelve months.” He indicated one box with an orange label on the outside. “These are the high-profile cases, like the Sanchez case and the Conrad Kelly case.”
