No Winners - A Counselor and Detective Story

Chapter 1

"I don't care what anyone wants to see, Nolan, I care about the evidence. Base your decision on the facts and the law.

Nothing Else. "

Nolan Price sat back in his oversized executive desk chair and ripped the cheaters off his face, throwing them down on the law tome spread open on the desk in front of him.

"Base your decision on the facts ..." Jack McCoy's words, delivered in his powerfully stirring tones, echoed in Nolan's head. "...and the law."

Exhaling a sharp breath, the EADA reached for the police file containing all the factual details of the shooting of James (Jimmy) Doyle. It was almost five am, and between the moment his office had received the file, to now he had to have read through it over a hundred times. At the point, he could close his eyes and the facts would prance across the inside of his eyelids, like ducks in a shooting gallery.

Jimmy Doyle's blood DNA on Kendra Daniels shoes and jacket

A gun

A witness statement putting Kendra Daniels and James Doyle in the same location, but no eyewitness to the defendant's state of mind at the time she pulled the trigger.

A decorated, twenty-three-year veteran of the force, detective first grade, two IA investigations, both with no findings. Verse a woman with no priors, a good job, good education and standing in the community.

A decorated white, male cop vs a model citizen, Black woman. Nolan tossed the file back on his desk without looking at the contents. It would just be like opening your refrigerator repeatedly, expecting food to magically appear even though you hadn't gone to the grocery store. Couldn't find what simply wasn't there.

The NYPD wanted the DA's office to throw the book at her, and while Jack McCoy wasn't unsympathetic to their feelings, but the law was the law. Nolan could put murder one on the arraignment charges, but no jury in the world would convict the defendant given the lack of evidence. They could prove, without a reasonable doubt that Kendra Daniels was the shooter, but without clear motive or situational evidence, there was no way a jury was going to choke down murder one. Hell, aggravated manslaughter one was going to be a stretch.

Nolan's defense attorney brain practically salivated at the way he'd defend someone like Kendra Daniels. Nolan could picture the smiles and handshakes as he got her acquitted, it would be a slam dunk.

"I didn't even know he and Heather had split, No." The smiles faded as the memory of Frank, from the other night echoed behind the EADA's closed eyes.

"How did I let us drift so far apart? We walked the beat together for years."

It had been after midnight when Frank had gotten home from the wake. Nolan had wrestled with whether to attend, had spent the previous night in Jack's office until well after eleven at night talking through the optics. Neither he, nor McCoy had been proud of the conclusion they each reached through their own process, but there was no way around the fact that Nolan was going to be trying the case and as such, he could not be seen to have an emotional entanglement in Doyle's family.

Frank had said he understood, but they both felt the strain on their personal relationship. It wasn't the first time they had stood on opposite sides of the aisle but the emotion involved in this situation was ... volatile.

Nolan hadn't been surprised when Frank had come stumbling through the door. Drunk, emotionally raw, and angrier at the world than Nolan could recall ever seeing his husband before. For all his verbal skill in the courtroom, there was nothing the younger man could do to ease the pain and venom that had ripped its way out of Cosgrove's chest. All Nolan could do was not take his lover's words personally.