Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “He borrowed my dictionary and never gave it back to me,” I said. It was untrue, but John and I had agreed to keep our relationship low-key, if not quite secret.

  “Unh huh,” Steve said. He exchanged a look with one of the other lawyers.

  “What do you mean, unh huh?”

  Steve winked at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing. I haven’t seen John, and I don’t know anything about a dictionary.” There was a snort behind me, and I spun on a first-year associate named Matt, who went immediately stiff.

  “Why should you know anything about my dictionary?” I said to Steve.

  Steve gave me a knowing smile, and I considered whacking him with my purse. The elevator doors slid open on the lobby floor, though, and I flipped my pony tail at all of them and stalked out. There was a brief burst of laughter behind me, quickly muffled.

  If John Parker’s big yap had made me the subject of office gossip, then he had a lot to answer for. I didn’t want to share another elevator cab with Steve and company when we got to the parking garage, so I quickened my pace, my heels clacking on the tile as I strode past the black monoliths with their falling water.

  On the far side of the lobby, I entered a short hall and slipped between the closing doors of the elevator. Two people were there before me, a man and a woman, but I didn’t know either one of them. The man got off with me on level four and walked beside me in the direction of my car.

  I glanced at him. He was wearing a polo shirt and needed a shave, and there was something familiar about him. I stopped at my car, a VW Beetle, and he glanced at it as he went past. He didn’t get into a car himself, but turned up the ramp to the next level.

  I frowned, shrugged, opened my car door and tossed my briefcase and my purse across onto the passenger seat.

  Chapter 4

  I carried my shoes into the house and, as soon as I got to the bedroom, tossed them into the closet and shrugged out of my dress. The bra I’d been wearing still smelled like laundry soap, so I put it back in the drawer and got out an exercise bra to replace it. After pulling on a T-shirt and a pair of gym shorts, I grabbed my running shoes and a pair of balled socks and padded barefoot to the kitchen.

  I was going to exercise, but not until after I’d eaten. I run better if I eat something first, as long as I don’t eat too much or run too hard. I dumped some salad from a bag in the vegetable drawer, sliced in a leftover chicken breast, and sprinkled on a little raspberry vinaigrette. I ate in front of the TV, watching American Idol on the DVR. Somehow, I never get to watch it at the same time as the rest of the country.

  When I was done eating, I let a commercial run while I washed my dish and fork and laid them on a dishcloth to dry. Then I went back into the living room to do my stretches while American Idol finished up. It was beginning to get dark when I set out on my nightly run, a five-mile loop through Richmond’s far west end.

  Nine months ago, when I started dating John Parker, I’d adjusted my run to pass through the apartment complex where he lived. He didn’t know I ran past his building four nights a week, though, and I didn’t plan to tell him. It would make me look weird.

  Thirty minutes into the run, I was trotting down the unevenly lighted sidewalk that bisected his apartment complex. John’s car wasn’t in his parking space, so I knew he wasn’t home. Still, as I went by it, I glanced up at the balcony of John’s second-floor apartment. Pure habit.

  The French doors stood open, though, beyond them a glow of shifting, bluish light. The television, I thought. Maybe John had had car trouble, but was home now watching television. I heard a woman speaking — no surprise — but I came to a stop with a little stutter-step as I realized that the voice was live rather than televised.

  John had a girl up there, and the girl wasn’t me. That wasn’t right. I stood there on the sidewalk, breathing hard, feeling numb, having no idea what to do. For perhaps a minute I did nothing at all. Then I came to myself.

  With a quick, furtive glance about me to make sure I was unobserved, I moved off the sidewalk and against the wall of John’s building where I stood next to the privacy fence that circled the patio of the apartment below his. Other than the indistinct murmur of the television, no sound came from above me.

  After a half-minute or so, I allowed myself to breathe again, trying to relax. Maybe you imagined the voice, I told myself. Besides, the reason for running past his apartment has nothing to do with keeping tabs on him. You’re just a weird chick who has to run somewhere, why not somewhere that interests you? Just go on with your run. Accept what you heard, or think you heard, as the subject of future rumination, and go on.

  So persuasive an advocate am I, at least when talking to myself, that my right leg actually gave a twitch in the direction of home. My left leg, though — my left leg just wasn’t going to go along. Ah well. So much for not keeping tabs.

  I glanced across at the building opposite and didn’t see anyone, then went up on my toes to peek over the six-foot privacy fence I was standing next to. At five-eleven, I’m used to seeing over things. Inside the fence, the patio was vacant but for the dark shapes of a lounge chair and a gas grill.

  What I was about to do is no doubt evidence of one of the less pleasant aspects of my personality: curiosity combined with a lack of respect for the privacy of others. If I wanted to know about something or someone — and if no one was ever going to know that I knew — then I could satisfy my curiosity, and no one’s sense of privacy would be violated: Their privacy, okay; their sense of privacy, no. If that strikes you as a distinction without a difference, you have to realize there’s some expensive legal training at work here.

  I put my hands on the ledger board that ran along the top of the privacy fence. With a hop and a push, I got one foot onto the top of the fence, then the other, and I stood with one palm just brushing the brick wall of the building for balance. As I straightened, my left knee popped. It had been doing that lately. I turned thirty last fall, and with that milestone came this audible indicator of my mortality.

  From the fence I could see into John’s galley-style kitchen, but its lights were out and there was no one there. I stretched upward on my toes so I could grasp the square metal uprights of the balcony railing as high as possible, then swung a sneakered foot up between two of the uprights. I pulled myself up, swung one leg over the railing, then the other. On the balcony, working to keep my breathing quiet, I stepped around a wrought-iron love seat to the wall beside the open French doors.

  No voices were coming from the apartment any longer, not even from the TV, but I could hear breathing — then a grunt and the creaking of the living room sofa. I mouthed a silent curse. There was no question in my mind as to what John and his female visitor were doing. Only two nights ago, John had been in there doing it with me, which made him a pig. I wasn’t sure what it made me.

  I crouched, one hand on the jamb of the door for balance, then took my peek, leaning in and out in a single swaying motion. I saw long, dark hair, his open hands against the pale skin of her back, tangled clothes … and the image became an afterimage, a ghost on my retina as I put my forehead against the brick wall beside the open doors. The pain I felt was like a blow to the solar plexus. I felt as if my diaphragm were paralyzed, that I couldn’t draw air.

  In the apartment building opposite, a dog started barking. As if in answer, a small yelp sounded inside John's apartment, and the sound of movement followed. “There’s someone out there,” a woman said urgently. Somehow I managed to move. I stepped up onto the balcony railing, bracing myself against the overhanging eave.

  “There’s no one out there.” John’s voice.

  “That dog’s barking at something. Go look.”

  It was a schnauzer on the balcony of the apartment opposite to John’s. It locked eyes with me and began barking in earnest, bracing its paws on the balcony railing. It wasn’t going to stop. Behind me, someone was coming. I took a breath and stepped off into space. The d
ark ground rushed toward me. My feet hit, the weight of my fall driving me down onto my hands and knees. The air in my lungs gusted out of me, but I pushed at the ground with feet and hands, forcing myself upright.

  I staggered toward John’s building and wedged myself behind the close-packed branches of a rhododendron. John came out onto the balcony, his hands holding up his pants, and the dog stopped barking. Little fur-ball.

  “What is it? Who do you see?” Something about the woman’s voice was beginning to disturb me.

  “There’s no one,” John said.

  She stepped through the doorway beside him, still buttoning her blouse, and, of course, I knew her. It was Wendy Walters. It had taken her ten years to do it, but the little tramp had finally gotten back at me. She looked around carefully, not taking John’s word as to what was there. Her eyes focused on the shadowy movements of the rhododendron, and it seemed to me for a moment that our eyes met. I held my breath, having no desire to confront the two of them. I was ashamed — ashamed not only of spying, but of being cheated on, which made no sense at all.

  The schnauzer gave a yip.

  “I see the dog,” Wendy said.

  “Me, too.”

  I exhaled, softly. The drop had shaken me, and my feet stung, but I kept them still.

  “I could have sworn it was barking at someone,” Wendy said.

  “What are you so jumpy about? No one can possibly know you’re here.”

  “I’m not jumpy. It’s just the way that dog was barking.”

  “What difference does it make how the dog was barking? We’re on the second floor. It’s not like anyone could see anything from the sidewalk.” He turned back into the apartment, a hand on her arm by way of encouragement. Clearly, he was ready to get back to what they had been doing,

  Go, go, I thought at her, doing my best to beam my own encouragement telepathically. Go play more hanky-panky with my boyfriend, you backstabbing slut.

  They went. I moved my head, stretching the muscles in my neck, still stiff from the fall, but before I could get too relaxed, an outer door whooshed open just around the corner.

  “Wendy!” John’s voice held exasperation. I slipped out from behind the rhododendron and swiftly skirted the privacy fence, keeping my head down, and ran back down the sidewalk the way I had come.

  Nine months with John, that’s all it was, I told myself as I circled the apartment complex. No great investment of my life. A little fun, a few laughs… But as I ran along a curving suburban street in the general direction of home, tears kept welling in my eyes, blurring my vision. I wiped them away with the heels of my hands. No great loss, I told myself. I’d had serious boyfriends before, perhaps a dozen of them. John was only the latest.

  How I would miss him, though, even though I would be seeing him every day at the office. Life would go on, somehow, even with another piece of me torn away and stapled to some guy’s bedpost. A few months from now and I could be on to boyfriend number thirteen.

  I was running faster and faster in a doomed effort to escape the pain, rhythmically cursing in time with my footsteps, the wind in my ears amplified to a dull roaring. When I turned onto my own street, my T-shirt was so wet with perspiration it was sticking to me, and I was blowing like a horse after a long gallop. I didn’t notice the car parked across from my house.

  I dropped into a walk and continued past my sidewalk. After a hard workout it takes a minute or two for the heart to slow, and, until it stops pumping the blood out at such high volume, your circulatory system needs the help of the leg muscles to send the blood back up to it; hence the cool-down. I was in need of an emotional cool-down as well, and I was working on it. You’re better now, I told myself as I walked. You’re going to be okay. I got to the corner and turned back toward home.

  It was only then that I noticed the silhouette of a man leaning against the low-slung car. I wasn’t alarmed, merely uneasy, but my pace slowed. The end of a cigarette glowed orange as the man took a drag from it, then the glow arched away from him as he flicked the cigarette away.

  As I drew even with him, he said the last thing I expected to hear from him. He said my name. “Robin Starling?” He had some kind of accent, and his voice was unfamiliar to me. At the edge of my vision, another man was getting out of the car on the passenger side.

  I didn’t wait to find out what they wanted. I bolted, turning back the way I had come. The hand that was already reaching for me closed on the shoulder of my T-shirt, but by that time I was moving, and I tore loose, already gaining momentum while the man’s weight was shifting to bring that first foot forward. By the time you could say he was running, I was halfway to the corner, and the other man was a couple of steps behind the first one.

  Chapter 5

  In general, you would expect a man to be able to outrun a woman: The average man has longer legs and greater muscle-mass than the average woman. The same holds true at all levels of athletic competition. You’d expect the men’s high school basketball team to beat the women’s team. In track and field, you’d expect the men to hold the fastest times in all the races, and, with rare exception, you’d be right.

  The averages, however, are only modest predictors of the outcome of a contest between any two individuals. At five-eleven, I am an inch or two taller than the average male. I’m a natural athlete, and I’m in shape. The man who had accosted me was, to all appearances, an average male: roughly my height, maybe five to ten years older, a good bit heavier. Thus, it surprised and terrified me to find that he was gaining on me, that, as I reached the corner of the first cross street, the sound of his breathing was as loud in my ears as the sound of my own. I felt his hand at the nape of my neck, grasping for my ponytail, for a grip on my shirt or my shoulder. I was less than a second away from capture when I pulled the only trick I could think of: I dropped into a crouch, my momentum driving me forward onto my palms and one knee as the shin and then the opposite foot of my pursuer hit my back and passed over. I staggered, gaining my feet even as he drove face-first into the pavement, his up-stretched hands extended above his head, his elbows only partially taking the force of the fall. Sidestepping him, it took me a few steps to regain my speed, and the second pursuer would have gotten me if he had been right behind the first, but he wasn’t. The engine of the car in front of my house roared into life, and I glanced over my shoulder as the car’s headlights stabbed on and raked my house in a tight turn.

  If I’d had some hopes of outrunning two men, I had none of outrunning the car. I turned onto the cross street, now running full out, my mind racing ahead to the choices that were already on me. As my shadow leaped onto the pavement in front of me, cast by the headlights of the skidding car, I turned left into a paved alley. Big trash canisters stood like sentinels on either side, shadowed by backyard trees that overgrew the privacy fences. In the middle of the block, one of the fences was chain-link rather than wood, the twists of wire along the top sticking upward in little spikes that extended just past the top bar. A couple of them tore at my wrist as I reached out, seeking the half-seen bar without breaking stride. Light splashed into the alley behind me. I brought my hand down to grip the bar and jumped, twisting toward and over the fence, one spike raking the inside of my forearm as I went over.

  I landed on my butt in something soft, grass and dust rising around me in an invisible cloud. The sick, sweet smell of decaying compost was momentarily overpowering, and I rolled onto one elbow, gasping in an effort to catch my breath. The alley brightened as the headlights rolled closer. I couldn’t imagine who these people were, or why they were pursuing me. What had I done to piss them off?

  The car stopped just on the other side of the chain-link fence, the sound of its engine low and as smooth as satin. The window on my side of the car was open, but the driver was in shadow.

  “I got you, Robin.”

  There was my name again.

  “I have a pistol, and it’s pointed at you,” the man said. “Don’t make me shoot you.” He didn�
�t sound as if it mattered much to him one way or the other.

  I pushed onto my hands and feet. “What do you want?” I called, but I coughed as I inhaled a throat full of grass and dust. There was an answering cough, not a human one, but something like the sound of steam chuffing through a pressure valve.

  I lurched upward as if it were a starter’s pistol, tearing through the trees and the shrubbery at the edge of the lawn before shifting course into the more open ground in the middle. Behind me, a car door slammed. Almost as if the sound had triggered them, the gopher heads of a sprinkler system sprang up around me, one burst of water soaking the left side of my shirt, and, on my next stride, another burst of water hitting me in the face from the right. I kept going.

  After ducking and dodging for fifteen minutes or an hour, I climbed a stack of firewood and dropped down into another backyard, this one surrounded by an eight-foot-high privacy fence. For the moment I was alone, which was a relief. Out there, every pair of headlights and every moving shadow had been a threat. In here…but almost immediately I heard footsteps in the driveway. My heart rate quickened almost before it had begun to slow, and I moved away from the fence, looking for another way out. A small, cinder-block tool shed was at the back of the yard, and I ran toward it, my elbow pressing into the stitch in my side. There was a gate behind the shed, and I felt a surge of hope before I noticed the padlock. Crap. I looked up, measuring the fence with my eyes, but it was too high for me to jump, and I’d tear it and me both apart if I tried to climb it.

  I turned back, looking for a possible weapon. The knob on the door of the tool shed turned, but the wood had swollen enough so that the door screeched against a crooked threshold that slid with the door as I jerked it open. Glancing toward the front of the yard, I didn’t see anyone, but an army could be on the other side of the privacy fence and I wouldn’t know it. I went into the tool shed.