Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  We sat.

  “That was telephone wire they tied you with.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “It matches the cord that was used on Wendy Walters,” he said, “which supports your conspiracy theory.” He squinted at my throat. “Boy, it does do damage, doesn’t it?”

  I couldn’t say anything to that, but such a vacuous observation merited some kind of response, so I crossed my eyes at him.

  He laughed. “Okay, okay, I’ll get to the point. I spoke to Ian Maxwell, who spoke to the D.A. They’re not going to try to indict your boyfriend…” He hesitated. “Was John Parker your boyfriend, or were you just blowing smoke in there?”

  “Oh, they were lovers,” Brooke said. “Big time.”

  I turned a disbelieving gaze on her.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Jordan said, “And they’re not going after you either. They could, of course. If it wasn’t you or John Parker, then whoever killed Wendy Walters didn’t leave fingerprints or anything else to indicate they’d ever been in the apartment.”

  “The telephone wire,” Brooke said.

  “Well, yes, the telephone wire. Anyway, the D.A.’s exercising his prosecutorial discretion and declining to prosecute.” He had more to say, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. As I was to discover over the next couple of days, conversation loses a lot of its appeal when you yourself can’t contribute to it.

  That was Wednesday. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal carried a front-page article on McCormack Labs. The SEC was launching an investigation. Odyssey’s brokerage arm had changed its recommendation from “Strong Buy” to “Sell,” and the stock, which had closed at 62¼ the previous Friday, had dropped below 45.

  I didn’t go into work the rest of the week, and John handled my one court appearance that couldn’t be rescheduled. On Friday evening, he showed up at my front door with a dozen roses.

  “I never thanked you properly for everything you did for me,” he said, holding out the flowers.

  I hesitated before taking them. I could forgive John Parker, could wish all the best for him, but the romantic spark was gone.

  “You look good,” he said. “Are you going out?”

  I was wearing a short, blue jean skirt and a striped top with spaghetti straps. My hair was in its usual ponytail, but I had put on makeup.

  “Yes,” I said. My voice still had a whispery quality, but it was audible.

  “Who with?” He sounded so aggrieved that I had to laugh at him. A big Ford pickup pulled up to the curb, and John turned to frown at it. Dustin Steed, one of the workmen I had met outside Wendy’s apartment, opened the door of the pickup and got out. He had looked me up, though it had taken him long enough to do it. Now he came up the sidewalk wearing Wranglers and a polo shirt.

  “With him?” John said.

  I smiled, tilting my head at him and giving him a shrug. “Hi,” I said hoarsely to Dustin.

  “Hi. Am I interrupting something?”

  I was standing in the doorway with a dozen roses on one arm.

  “No,” I said. “Just give me a minute to put these in some water.”

  I left the two of them together on the front stoop. When I came back, I couldn’t tell that either had said a word to the other. “Well, see you,” I said to John.

  He watched us go. I let Dustin help me into his pickup, then looked back at John as Dustin walked around to the driver’s side. He was sitting on the stoop watching us go, his forearms resting on his knees. His expression was glum, and I really did feel sorry for him.

  Dustin got in and slammed his door. “You ready?”

  I turned to smile at him. He had beautiful eyes, brown and warm. I didn’t know if he was built like his friend Steve because I’d never seen him without his shirt, but he looked like he could be.

  “What?” he said.

  I shook my head to clear it of such avid speculations, and he started the truck.

  “Sex never delivers all it promises, does it?” I said, and put a hand to my mouth. Once again, the filter between my brain and my mouth had let a big one through.

  He took his hand off the gearshift and looked at me. “You were looking at me and thinking about sex? That’s encouraging.”

  I moved my hand. “Sex, and how it never delivers all it promises.”

  “It delivers a lot.”

  “But it promises everything.”

  He waited, but I didn’t follow up on it. He shrugged and put the truck in gear. Glancing out the window, I saw that John Parker hadn’t moved from his position on the porch. “Have you ever had sex with anyone?” I asked Dustin.

  He looked at me. “Boy, you get personal on a guy in a hurry, don’t you?” He pulled away from the curb, turned the corner, added gas.

  “Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you in love?”

  “Yes.”

  “It felt like forever, and you were content with that?”

  He shrugged, glanced again at me. “Yes.”

  “Where is she now?”

  After a minute or so he said, “I take your point.” He turned onto the entrance ramp of I-64 and accelerated. “I guess this means I’m not getting any tonight, am I?” he said.

  I laughed, and he shot a glance at me.

  “Am I?”

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  Juggling

  Evidence

  Chapter 1

  The woman who stood when I entered the reception area was wearing sunglasses despite the subdued lighting. The day outside was overcast, too, or had been when I came in, which made the sunglasses even more incongruous. The boy with her was about twenty or so. Though he was a decade younger than I was, his eyes cut downward when he saw me before flicking back up to my face. I don’t know what men find so fascinating about a woman’s knees, but I’ve gotten used to it.

  “I’m Robin Starling,” I said, holding out my hand to the woman.

  She took it in a weak grip. “Lynn Nolan. You did some wills and a trust last year for my husband and me.” I couldn’t see her eyes through the sunglasses, but there was some discoloration on her cheek just visible beneath them. Though she was forty or so, her long, blond hair fell past her shoulders.

  “I’m Matt Nolan,” the boy said when I looked at him. His dark blond hair was combed roughly forward in bangs that covered his forehead.

  “Come on back,” I said.

  I led them down the hall to my glass-walled office. I closed the door to give us auditory privacy, but at the law firm of Northcutt, Hambrick and Larsen, visual privacy was something denied to associate attorneys and their clients. The Nolans sat in the client chairs as I walked around my desk. Matt was wearing baggy jeans and a striped polo shirt that looked too small for him. Lynn was wearing capris and a matching jacket over a pale cotton blouse. She was tall, though several inches shorter than I was—maybe five feet six or seven.

  “Are you here about your estate planning?” I asked. “Has something changed?”

  Lynn Nolan raised her hands to the stems of her sunglasses and took them off.

  She had a black eye with some swelling over her cheekbone and a bit of purpling along the lower rim of her eye socket. The contrast with her pale coloring made it look like she was wearing a fright mask.

  “Ow,” I said.

  “I have a question for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is it possible to get a divorce secretly?”

  My eyes slid over to the face of her son Matt. “You mean, are divorces matters of public record? Yes, I’m afraid they are.”

  “I mean would the person being divorced need to be notified? Or would it be enough for him to find out after the fact?”

  “No, he’d have to be notified. A suit for divorce is a lawsuit. Once it’s filed, notice and a summons would be served on the other party
just as they would be in any lawsuit.”

  Lynn took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “That’s it then,” she said. “I was afraid of that.”

  “That’s not it, Mom,” Matt said.

  “Your husband do this to you?” I asked.

  “Last night,” Matt said.

  “Did you see him do it?” I asked him.

  He looked at his mother. “No. I was out. This isn’t the first time, though.”

  “You’ve seen him hit her before?”

  “I’ve seen him grab her. And hurt her.”

  I looked at Lynn. “He’s hit you before?”

  She hesitated, nodded.

  “Move out of the house,” I said. “We can get a preliminary injunction to keep him away from you while the divorce goes through.”

  “You don’t know Derek.”

  “Is he home now? We can—”

  “He’s usually home. He works out of the house.”

  “Then don’t go back. Get what you need at Target and move into a hotel.”

  She seemed to consider it, then shook her head.

  “He keeps close track of her money,” Matt said. “He knows exactly how much she’s carrying, and she has to account for every cent of it.”

  “Not any more,” I said. I looked back at Lynn. “Do you have a credit card?”

  “He’d know,” she said softly.

  “Not ’til he gets the bill,” I said.

  “When I don’t come back…”

  “He’ll find her,” Matt said.

  “Then let’s have it out now. I’ll go to the house with you while you pack some things, and we’ll take along a witness. I can get the divorce suit filed and the preliminary injunction in place this afternoon.”

  Matt looked at his mother hopefully.

  “You can do this,” I said, though I myself had never been married and didn’t know what I was talking about. “You need to do this.”

  Lynn stood. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “I’ll think about it and let you know.”

  Matt stayed in his seat, looking as if he were in pain.

  “Take a picture of your face before it heals,” I said. “A close up. Keep it in a safe place, and let me know when you make up your mind. If anything else happens, call me.”

  “It’s Matt,” Lynn said. “At this point in his life he doesn’t need…”

  “An abusive father,” Matt interrupted. “Nobody does. Don’t use me as an excuse for letting this go. I don’t have to live at home, anyway, with him or with you. I can move into an apartment.”

  “You’re about to get married,” his mother said.

  “Exactly,” he said, getting up to face her. “I can move in with Melissa.”

  “No. I don’t want you to rush that.”

  “I can do it. It won’t be like you and Dad.” He looked down at me. “Mom married in haste,” he said. “It was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” his mother protested. “You weren’t even born.”

  “I was in utero,” Matt told me. His mother sank back into her chair, looking stricken. “The wedding was in early February,” Matt said. “I was born August 30.”

  I did the mental arithmetic. “Two months premature?”

  “I weighed nine-and-a-half pounds. Some preemie, huh?”

  “How long have you…” Lynn trailed off.

  “Dad’s never liked me. Why would he? I’m the matchmaker who put together his happy home. It’s like I held the shotgun.”

  “When…” She got the word out and seemed to run out of air.

  “I figured it out when I was fifteen.” His shoulders tensed. He took a breath, then said, “A few weeks ago, I started wondering about something else.”

  His mother looked at him, but it was clear she wasn’t going to ask.

  “I’ve begun to wonder if I’m even his. I don’t look like him. He’s square-headed and barrel-bodied and has that reddish complexion. I’m…” He gestured at his face. I nodded. Both of us looked at Lynn.

  She said, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “That’s not an answer, Mom.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She looked at me. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Starling.”

  “Robin,” I said. “Sorry about these…” My eyes cut to Matt. “…complications. But you think about what I’ve told you. You don’t have to live with an abuser.” I scribbled my home phone number on the back of one of my business cards and walked around the desk to give it to her. “If anything else happens, anything at all, you call me.”

  Chapter 2

  That evening, I was in the middle of my five-mile run, when Brooke, my roommate, drew up beside me in her car. The door swung open, and I looked into the interior. “Get in,” Brooke said.

  I thought at once that someone in my family had died. I got in. “What is it?” I asked, sitting forward to keep my sweaty back off Brooke’s seat.

  “One of your clients called, a Lynn Nolan.” Brooke had the car moving, doing a tight U-turn in the middle of the street.

  I felt a wash of relief at the assurance that I wasn’t suddenly an orphan or an only child.

  “Something’s happened, and they need you right away.”

  “What’s happened?” I said.

  “She didn’t say, but she sounded urgent. She wanted to know how long it would take you to get there. I told her fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ve got to take a shower.”

  “There isn’t time.”

  “I’m sweating like a…”

  “I know. You stink, but she really sounded panicky. You’ve got to go.” She reached into the backseat, pulled forward a pair of jeans and a cotton top, and dropped them onto my bare, slick legs. I lifted them quickly in an effort to keep them dry, though my hands were as sweaty as the rest of me.

  Brooke turned into the alley that ran behind our house and triggered the garage door remote. “I told her you were on your way.”

  I rolled my eyes, opened the car door, and stepped out into the driveway. “I hate emergencies,” I said. I shucked out of my exercise bra and into the shirt Brooke had brought me. “You might have brought along some underwear.”

  “I didn’t think of it. She—”

  “…was panicky. I know.” I pushed down my running shorts and stepped out of them. The run had raised my body temperature enough that the crisp October air felt good on my bare skin. I pulled on my jeans. “Drive on into the garage so I can get my car out,” I said, and I slammed the car door.

  Just east of downtown Richmond, the cross streets off Main Street rose steeply. I turned my Volkswagen Beetle onto one of them. The brick homes on either side were occupied, but unlighted for the most part, no more than tall, rectangular shadows against the pale night sky. I turned again onto Grace Street, back in the direction of downtown. After a block and a half, I pulled over against the curb and parked. I tucked my wallet under the seat, got out and beeped the lock. The evening had gotten colder, and I had no jacket.

  I was in historic Church Hill, Richmond’s earliest community. A couple of blocks further on, Grace Street ends in a overlook of downtown Richmond which at night is spectacular enough to give a girl high, romantic feelings when a guy has his hand inside her shirt. Don’t ask me how I know.

  At the house I wanted, stairs went up and down from the brick sidewalk: up to the formal rooms of the house, down to what used to be the servants quarters. There was a bulldog tied to the wrought-iron railing. The bulldog didn’t seem belligerent, but I kept my eyes on it as I went up the steps to the wide double doors. The bulldog’s head didn’t move, though its eyes followed me incuriously.

  At the top, I saw that the right-hand door was standing open a few inches, but I knocked anyway. Matt Nolan appeared in the entrance hall.

  “Hi, Ms. Starling,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

  I nodded, watching his eyes cut to my unsupported breasts. “Sure,” I said, wishing I had taken a minute to run back i
nside the house for a clean bra.

  “We’re all in here.”

  He led the way to the living room, where a redhead in her mid-twenties sat on the couch. Several people stood around her. She was clearly the center of attention, not entirely because her short skirt had ridden up to the tops of her thighs, though that probably helped, at least with Matt Nolan and the forty-something-year-old man who stood looking down at her.

  Lynn Nolan said to the man, “This is Robin Starling, our attorney.” Her black eye had darkened, and her blonde hair shone like silk in the living room lighting, softer than the harsh fluorescents of my office building.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, conscious of the sweaty dampness of my own hair, pulled back into an unflattering ponytail.

  “I was attacked,” the girl on the couch said.

  “Not sexually,” Lynn said quickly.

  The girl on the couch eyed her. “Someone hit me in the head as he ran up the steps out front. They’re saying it was Mr. Nolan.”

  “This was on the steps right outside the front door?” I asked.

  “The steps coming up from the basement to the sidewalk.”

  “Where is Mr. Nolan now?”

  Nobody seemed to know.

  “Did somebody call the police? Even if we can’t get them to do anything, we need to make this a matter of public record.” To the middle-aged man who was keeping a solicitous eye on the visible patch of the redhead’s panties, I said, “Where do you come in?”

  He started. “She was unconscious,” he said. “I found her lying on the steps out there. Actually, Rex found her. She was below the level of the sidewalk, so I might not have seen her. Rex is my dog. I’m Charles Rogers.”

  He wore a light jacket against the October chill, and his thick, dark hair had a windblown look.

  “You said to call you if anything else happened,” Lynn said.

  I nodded. “And who is…” I jerked my head at the redhead on the couch.