Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016

  A Kindle Scout selection

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  The Robin Starling Legal Thriller Series

  Chapter 1

  “Robin, will you come out here?” Carly sounded close to tears.

  “Sure.” I got up from behind the desk in my office and went out into the reception area of the executive suites, where a man stood with his hands in the pockets of a navy windbreaker.

  “Uh . . . a gentleman is here to see you,” Carly said from behind her counter.

  The man was perhaps no older than his early sixties, and, despite the lines in his face and the sagging flesh, his hair was still dark blond. His gaze moved over me appraisingly, as if he were considering a not-very-promising side of beef for purchase.

  I approached him, extending my hand, but he kept his in his pockets.

  “You’re a stringy thing,” he said, his lip curling to reveal yellow teeth so mottled with brown that they might have been rotting out of his head. “From the newspaper pictures, I thought you might be, but I couldn’t tell.”

  I let my hand drop. As a female an inch shy of six feet, I had been called worse things than stringy. “What can I do for you?”

  “Do we have to talk about it here in the open, in front of Madam Nosey there?” He jerked his head in the direction of the reception desk, where Carly sat stiffly, blinking. She was an attractive woman in her midthirties, but she did have a large nose made more prominent by the narrowness of her face.

  “She goes by Carly,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Carly. And she has a last name, but it’s not Nosey.”

  “Well?” he said.

  I shook my head. “Come on back.”

  He followed me through the archway that led into the little cluster of offices where my own was located. Of the three doors, only mine and that of a detective named Rodney Burns were open. My friend Brooke Marshall, who had the middle office, was off evaluating some company’s IT system.

  “At least you’re pleasant to walk behind,” the old man muttered.

  I stopped in my doorway and turned on him. “Look. I don’t know who you are or what you want. I don’t know what you said to Carly. But one more impolite remark, and we’re done. Do you understand me?”

  He eyed me. “Are you this welcoming to all your clients?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “Yes, I understand you. And for what it’s worth, I think you’ll do.”

  “Do for what?”

  He withdrew a hand from the pocket of his windbreaker. The hand clutched several folded sheets of paper limp with perspiration. He handed them to me. “I’m about to be arrested for murder,” he said as I unfolded the papers.

  The document was a search warrant for the residence of Robert Shorter, 3412 Meander Lane, Richmond, Virginia. Midway down the page, it read, “This Search Warrant is issued in relation to an offense substantially described as follows: In violation of Virginia Code 18.2-32 to wit: First or Second Degree Murder.” I looked up.

  “You’re Robert Shorter, I take it.”

  “Bob Shorter. That’s me.”

  I flipped the page to look at the search inventory, my nose wrinkling at the smell of stale cigarette smoke that rose off the document. The police had taken a denim shirt, a pair of pants, and nine kitchen knives. “Come on in.” I continued into my office and remained standing behind my desk until Shorter had taken a seat in one of the two client chairs.

  I sat, dropping the papers on my desk. “Tell me about the shirt and pants they took.”

  “They had blood on them.”

  “Not yours?”

  “No, not my blood. I never saw the blood until the police pulled the clothes out from under my hanging clothes.”

  “They were on the floor?”

  “On the floor between my shoes and the wall. What I think is that someone got into my house, took my clothes and got blood all over them, then brought them back and shoved them back there.”

  “So they were your clothes,” I said.

  “Yeah, they were my clothes.”

  “Any signs of forcible entry?”

  “Not that I could tell. Cops didn’t say anything about it, though I did see them looking at the lock on my back door.”

  “So what’s your explanation?”

  “I go for a walk every morning and evening. My neighbors all see me. Anyone would have had plenty of time to go in and do their mischief.”

  “How would they have gotten in?”

  “Don’t know. Though I used to keep a spare key out in my toolshed. They could have used that.”

  “Is it gone?”

  “I didn’t think to check. Wouldn’t mean anything, anyhow. If it’s there, maybe whoever used it put it back. Or he could have borrowed it while I was out on one of my walks anytime in the last ten years, made a copy, and put it back. Or it could be that it’s not even there anymore. It’s been years since I’ve seen it.”

  “You said he. Who do you see doing this?”

  He shook his head. “Could have been a woman, any of my neighbors. They all hate me.”

  “Do they also hate”—I flipped to the affidavit attached to the search warrant—“William Hill?”

  “Bill? Probably not. He’s annoying as hell, always whining about his various health problems, both real and imagined, but I don’t know that people hate him. ’Course, I don’t talk to any of the neighbors much.”

  “How about you? Do you hate Bill Hill?”

  “He’s a pathetic son of a bitch, just sits and moons out the window. When the weather’s nice enough, he sits on his back patio, staring across at my house. It’s annoying as hell, but I don’t hate him for it. Once upon a time we were pretty good friends, but we had a falling-out, a practical joke that went a little wrong. That’s been years, though.”

  “Someone stabbed him.”

  “That’s what the papers say.”

  “With your knife, do you think?”

  “Could be. I can’t find my paring knife, and I don’t remember it among the knives the police took. Last time I remember seeing it, I left it on the counter after cutting myself up an apple. That’s been a few days.”

  “Was it part of the same set as the knives the police took?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I think it was.”

  I went back with him over the timeline. Bill Hill’s body had been discovered the day before, on Sunday, sometime in the late afternoon. By evening, th
e police were searching Bob Shorter’s house.

  “I’m not sure when it was the murder’s supposed to have happened,” Shorter said. “Not yesterday, I think. The day before, or the day before that.”

  “Maybe as early as Friday?”

  “Yes.”

  “So on Friday or Saturday, someone walked into your house, maybe one of your neighbors, maybe using the key he found in your toolshed. He found your knife and some of your clothes, walked them over to Bill Hill’s house . . . how far away is that, by the way?”

  “Just across the street and around the corner.”

  “Carried your knife and clothes around the corner, stabbed Bill Hill, a man whom nobody hates, carried the bloody clothes, but evidently not the knife . . .” I paused, raising my eyebrows.

  “Not the knife,” Shorter confirmed.

  “. . . back to your house and jammed them into the back of your closet for the police to find.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Tell me about this note that Bill left,” I said, tapping the warrant and its accompanying affidavit.

  “All I know is what it says right there. Evidently Bill scrawled my name on something before he died. From something one of the cops said, he may have written it in his own blood.”

  I leaned back in my chair, studying Shorter. My office was not a big one, and the smell of stale tobacco was becoming overpowering. Although he met my gaze squarely, the whole thing didn’t feel right. There was something entirely too self-possessed about Bob Shorter, given that it looked as if he was about to face murder charges. Under the circumstances, I didn’t like his calm demeanor, and I was pretty sure I didn’t like him. “There are a lot of lawyers in Richmond,” I said. “Why come to me?”

  “I’m in a fix.” He turned his hands so that they rested on his thighs palms up, the movement drawing my attention to the yellow-brown stains on the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. “I’m in a fix, and I know it. It may be that nobody can get me out of it. If so, if this is my last hurrah, I might as well have a long-legged—”

  I lowered my chin, looking at him steadily.

  “Hell, you’re not going to tell me your legs are short. Anyway, I read about you in the newspaper. It seems to me you have an unconventional way of doing things, and to my mind you’ve got a better chance of breaking a frame-up like this than some paunchy, middle-aged shyster who sits around on his flabby ass all day drafting documents and waiting for the police to uncover the facts he’s going to have to deal with.”

  I didn’t respond, just sat looking at him.

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m here because your ass ain’t flabby.” He bared his nicotine-stained teeth at me.

  I stood. “I don’t want your case. Thank you for coming in.”

  He stayed in his seat, tilting his head to keep his eyes on my face. “Now don’t be like that. Okay, I said something I shouldn’t of. I’m sorry. I can make it up to you.”

  “I doubt it.”

  He stood, too. Instead of turning to leave, he reached into his jacket’s inside pocket and came out with a checkbook.

  I shook my head. “You’re wasting your time.”

  He opened the checkbook and tore out a check that had evidently been filled out in advance. He laid it on my desk, turning it so that the writing faced me, and pushed it toward me. The check had my name on it and was made out for $30,000, about twenty times what I had in the bank at the moment.

  “I know I don’t got what you might call a winsome personality, so I compensate. A lot of times I find a big check will make up for my failure to honor some of the social niceties.” He grinned his rotting-corpse grin at me.

  I picked up the check.

  “That’s not a retainer—it’s a fee,” he said. “You get to keep it regardless of how much time you put in, regardless of what results you get. How about it?”

  “Don’t you want to wait for an arrest? You don’t even know there’s a case yet.”

  “That’s my lookout. I got some bloody clothes and a missing knife, and I don’t see any other explanation for it but that somebody’s framing me. I want to be ready for ’em.”

  “I don’t know what you said to my receptionist, but if you upset her again, I’m done—and, short of a court order, I won’t be returning your check. I’ll keep every penny of it I can get away with.”

  He started to cackle, but it broke down into a smoker’s cough. When he recovered, he said, “You’re a ruthless bitch, aren’t you? I like that. That’s why I’m here.”

  “And of course, if this check bounces, everything’s off.”

  We had some paperwork to fill out. When we had finished it, I walked him out and stood just inside the glass doors of the executive suites until the elevator doors on the opposite side of the hall had closed on him, cutting off his yellowed face from view.

  “He’s a dreadful, dreadful man,” Carly said behind me. “Tell me you’re not going to take his case.”

  I turned to put a hand on the counter. “What did he say to you?”

  “It was just his manner.”

  “No, it wasn’t. His manner didn’t upset you like this.”

  She took a breath. “He came in asking about you. He wanted to know if you were as good as the Times-Dispatch made you out to be. When I started telling him how good you were, he interrupted me with, ‘Why am I asking you? You’ve got a year of community college under your belt, if that.’” She sniffed. “He said I wouldn’t know a criminal case from a case of Bud Light. Here I am, mid to late thirties, no wedding ring, no engagement ring… ‘You don’t have a whole hell of a lot going on, do you?’ he said. It just came out of nowhere. I didn’t know how to respond. I sat there kind of stunned, and he told me that frizzing out my hair and putting on makeup with a trowel didn’t . . . didn’t help my looks any.” The sentence ended in a squeak, and she couldn’t go on. She just sat blinking her eyes and trying very hard not to cry.

  “I’m sorry. If it makes you feel any better, he called me a stringy, skinny-assed bitch—or something to that effect. He did manage to work both the a-word and the b-word into the conversation.”

  That got a smile from her. “So you didn’t take his case?”

  “I’m not sure there is one. If there is, we probably won’t see much of him here. He’s likely to be in the Richmond city jail, verbally abusing the turnkeys and the other inmates.”

  The idea seemed to please her. “Maybe someone will stick a . . . a shiv into him,” she said hopefully.

  “Well, you’re a bloodthirsty wench,” I said.

  “What’s he done anyway?”

  “What he says he hasn’t done is murder a man named Bill Hill. Can I borrow your newspaper?” I tapped the counter beside it. “There might be an article about it in there.”

  “Someone killed Bill Hill?” she asked, pushing it toward me.

  “You know him?”

  “No. It just sounds like it ought to be a Quentin Tarantino movie.”

  “You watch Quentin Tarantino?”

  “He’s just so twisted. Pulp Fiction got me hooked. From there, it’s only a short step to Kill Bill, Volume 1.”

  “I guess it is,” I said, picking up the newspaper. Carly always seemed to have a romance novel going, one of those with a picture of a shirtless, well-muscled man on the cover. As for her taste in movies, I would have thought she was more of a rom-com sort of girl.

  “Don’t you watch Tarantino?” she asked me.

  “I saw Pulp Fiction,” I said, and I headed back to my office.

  Bill Hill was on the third page of the local section.

  Richmond Man Found Dead in Home

  William Hill, 63, was found dead of a knife wound inside his Richmond home yesterday. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

  “There was no evidence of forcible entry, but the back door was unlocked when police got to the house,” said Richmond Police Detective Ray Hernandez.

  Police are withho
lding further details about the crime scene.

  Brooke Marshall, the pretty redhead who had the office next to mine, got back from her consulting job while I was reading. She and I were about the same age—she was thirty, and I was thirty-one. “Hey,” she said.

  I looked up. “Hey.”

  “What you reading?”

  “Kill Bill Hill, Volume 3,” I said.

  She unslung her purse and took a seat. “Quentin Tarantino is coming out with a new movie?”

  “No. I may be starring in this one.” I turned the paper around so she could see the article.

  After a moment, she said, “Not much there.”

  “No.”

  “So how are you involved?”

  “An old man came by, said he was about to be arrested for the crime.” I told her about Shorter’s visit, including his effect on Carly.

  “I’m surprised you took the case.”

  I slid the check across the desk to her. Her eyes widened. “Maybe not,” she said.

  “I’m going to present the check at his bank, see if he has sufficient funds, then I’m going to head home.” I got my purse out of the bottom desk drawer.

  “It’s barely two o’clock,” Brooke protested.

  “On the way I’m going to go by Shorter’s neighborhood, see if I can talk to some of the neighbors. He says they all hate him.”

  She looked at her watch.

  “Want to come?”

  She shook her head regretfully. “I’ve got to get some work done.”

  I gave her a lopsided smile. “Story of my life, too.”

  Chapter 2

  So far I didn’t have a client who was charged with anything, but there’s nothing like $30,000 in the bank to pique a girl’s interest. Shorter’s house was small and white with vinyl siding, its lawn mostly dirt, the weeds just beginning to green. I stopped against the curb and got out. The March air was brisk, but I still had on my coat from my walk to the parking garage downtown.

  The door of the house next door opened, and a woman came out to stand on her front stoop, her arms folded across her chest. She didn’t say anything until I started across the lawn to Shorter’s door.

  “He ain’t there.”