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About the Author

JOSEPH TELLER was born and raised in New York City. After graduating from law school, he spent three years working undercover for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. For the next thirty-five years he was a criminal defence lawyer. Not too long ago he decided to “run from the law” and began writing fiction. Depraved Indifference is his second novel for MIRA Books.

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THE TENTH CASE

To Darcy, Katie, Amy and Rachel, with all my love.

And lest you think that makes me a terrible womanizer, think again. They are my granddaughters.

Acknowledgments

Once again I find myself deeply indebted to my literary agent Bob Diforio, who claims he’s deluged with other writers but continues to treat me as though I’m his only one, and to my fabulous editor Leslie Wainger and the rest of the gang at MIRA, who do pretty much the same. I would be totally lost without either one of them.

For some reason, I always seem to have great difficulty persuading my wonderful but terribly overcommitted wife, Sandy, to find time to read my latest manuscript. But eventually the sheer force of my nagging prevails. Warning me in advance that she’s going to absolutely hate it, she disappears into the den for the better part of the day. Sometime that evening, she emerges and tracks me down, a broad smile on her face, to pronounce the work my very best yet. That’s the moment when I know it’s okay to send it off.

Chapter One

A Very Bad D. W. I.

“So,” she said, raising herself onto one elbow, just high enough off the bed to reveal a single nipple, still visibly hard. “What do you do for a living, when you’re not busy knocking people down?”

She was Amanda. At least that was as much of a name as he’d gotten out of her over the hour and twenty minutes since he’d literally knocked her to the ground by being overly aggressive with a sticking revolving door at the Forty-second Street Public Library.

“I’m a lawyer,” said Jaywalker. “Sort of. ”

“Sort of?”

“I’m not practicing these days,” he explained.

“What happened?” she asked. “You get burned out?”

“No,” he said, “more like thrown out. I’m serving a three-year suspension. ”

“What for?”

“Oh, various things. Cutting corners. Breaking silly rules. Taking risks. Pissing off stupid judges. The usual stuff. ”

“They suspend you for those things?”

“It seems so. ” He left it at that. He didn’t feel any particular need to tell her about the juiciest charge of all, that he’d managed to get caught by a security camera in one of the stairwells of the courthouse, accepting—or at least not exactly fending off—an impromptu expression of heartfelt thanks from an accused prostitute for whom he’d just won a hard-fought acquittal.

“What did you say your name was?” she asked.