Nathan's Run (1996) by John Gilstrap

than a child abuser. Warren knew that these rantings on the phone were just the first act in a long drama of posturings and spin controls that would attempt to explain to the press how he never really said what they had all heard him say just a few hours earlier.
    For reasons that Michaels could never understand, it was important to Petrelli that all bad guys be portrayed as sociopaths whose actions were irrational. He had no tolerance for extenuating circumstances that might have driven the criminals to behave the way they did. His obsession with dehumanizing lawbreakers pushed him to be the first to the microphones with a hard-line prosecution strategy. His approach had certainly served his career well, but Michaels, as cynical as he himself had become, couldn't help feeling sorry once in a while for the poor bad guy.
    In the case of Nathan Bailey, Michaels didn't know what to believe. Prisons of all sorts, whether built for adults or for children, were inherently violent places, occupied by criminals with violent pasts and staffed by personnel whose primary function was to quell violence. It didn't stretch his imagination at all to envision a staff member becoming homicidal. As unlikely as Nathan's story was, the boy's presentation of the facts was too detailed, too articulate, to be written off as a complete lie. Indeed, if it weren't for the fact that Ricky Harris was dead, Michaels might have been inclined to launch a second felony investigation.
    Yet, even if he accepted Nathan's claim that he had killed in self-defense, it was still true that the boy had broken the law when he escaped from the Juvenile Detention Center, and he remained a fugitive from justice. As a law-enforcement officer, Michaels's obligation to apprehend the escapee had not changed one whit. While he agreed with The Bitch that the kid was undoubtedly due a little luck in his life, Michaels would continue to turn the area inside out until he was caught. He'd also continue reminding his patrol officers and detectives that a prisoner capable of killing once was capable of killing a second time.
    For Michaels, the most telling and convincing words the boy spoke on the radio were his vow never to return to the JDC. They were the words of desperation; and desperate people were known to do foolish things, even in the face of outrageous odds. Nathan still was a very dangerous young man indeed.
    On the other end of the phone line, J. Daniel Petrelli had built a much more complicated world for himself than the one in which Warren Michaels lived. In addition to considerations of mere guilt and innocence, Petrelli had to consider how each prosecution would play in the press, constantly weighing the political impact of every win and every loss. There were times when pollsters in his employ could barely keep up with the changing tides of investigations. The perceived guilt of any defendant was a key element in determining how public and how aggressive the pursuit of a guilty verdict would be.
    This morning, it had seemed so clear in the Bailey case. People were sick and tired of being frightened of out-of-control kids, and the blatant and willful murder of a corrections official by an escaping convict had been more than the public could bear. Rarely had there been such an opportunity to show strong leadership in the Commonwealth's Attorney's office.
    True, the initial stages of the investigation had begun to unearth some dirt on Ricky Harris, but Petrelli and his staff had already devised a strategy whereby any leaks about violence in the detention facility would be made a secondary issue. It would be stressed that no child had the right to take the life of a corrections officer just because he claimed to be frightened.
    Who in the world would have thought that the kid would take his case directly to the people on a nationally syndicated radio show? The little shit's performance was perfect. It was still way too early to have any hard polling numbers, but there