A Grain of Salt is the story of a cold case murder investigation. The case involved the murder of a small infant by a means that is very unusual and unheard of by most people. The prosecution was swept under the table until a stranger came to town and reopened the case. This detective was up against small town politics involving old family power and corruption at the highest levels. His struggle to prosecute a murderer resulted in his own prosecution for crimes he was not guilty of by a prosecutor whose motives were a complete mystery. A Grain of Salt By Joe Cline AuthorHouse Copyright © 2009 Joe Cline All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4389-8628-9 Chapter One The Baby Dies The baby was a sixteen-week-old boy who weighed twelve pounds. He had facial signs consistent with downs syndrome and extremity changes including shortness of fingers. His development was otherwise normal and healthy in appearance. On this day his look was that of a baby about to die. He was flaccid, unresponsive and did not react to any stimuli. His extremities were dark in color and shook as if he was cold. It is hard to believe that his greatest enemy was a few teaspoons of salt. Salt that had invaded every cell of his body and was tearing the life out of him. The baby took his last breath while his mother, held him in her arms. He never had much of a chance in life and now at just over three months old his life was over. Stricken with severe downs syndrome, liver disease and a hole in his heart put him against all odds of survival from his very first day in the hospital. Nevertheless, he seemed to do very well and after a week was able to go home to live with his mother, father and three year old brother. Every day of his life was a major undertaking for his mother. He was very hard to feed and had trouble keeping food down because of the medications he was on for his liver disease. It was even difficult to get him to feed from a bottle. The deformities caused by downs made it necessary to position his tongue in a certain way just to get him to accept a bottle. Even though the baby's mother had support from her family, especially her mother, it became more and more difficult to care for her family. Her husband was always either working or going out to drink and party with his friends. The recreational life that her husband led used to include her but now with a sick baby and a three-year-old toddler to care for she was never able to go along. Instead, she was left at home with a three-year-old child running around the house and a new baby that required constant attention and care. Even when he was at home her husband was disconnected from his family. He would spend hours working outside on his truck or other projects and would do little to help with the chores around the house. The home belonged to her husband's friend who invited them in after they became homeless. It was a run down house in a run down neighborhood. The neighbors were mostly very poor and the environment was one of drug dealing, fights in the streets, noisy neighbors and filthy conditions. There was never enough money to go around and the only entertainment provided to her was the occasional affray that could be witnessed through the front window. This was definitely not the life that she had envisioned for herself, especially not at the young age of twenty-four. The baby's mother had lived through three pregnancies, the adoption of her first child, and the continual allegations of the abuse of her children, and the constant abuse of drugs and alcohol by those around her. She had more than one chance to straighten out her life and it seems as if every one of them went in the same direction. All of her problems were shared by her mother and stepfather and caused a lot of stress on their family. It is often very hard for middle and upper class people to understand the way people live in a very low-income setting. There is very little joy in the daily lives of people who live like this, at least joy, as most people know it. There is never enough food and seldom any new clothes to wear. It is an everyday struggle just to put food on the table. There is the constant complaining to your family who live a lot better than you do. It is hard to get any sympathy from them given that you put yourself in this position when you were a teenager, and continued the same path after they tried to help you on many occasions. You made life decisions that should have been made by someone with maturity. The joy you get is often derived from drug or alcohol abuse and usually leads to even more sorrow in the end. The most common thought about people who are in this position is that it is their fault since they made the decisions that put them there. The truth is that sometimes circumstances cause things to happen and we sometimes take the easy road instead of working hard to improve. A human frailty that I think we are all guilty of now and then. I am not trying t