Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Read online

  “We’d like to walk through the house with Ms. Sterling.”

  “Starling,” I said.

  “Is he dead, then?” Dr. McDermott asked.

  “If you don’t mind, we’d like to address that question when we get back inside the house.”

  “Don’t you think that’s going to be unnecessarily traumatic for…?” He jerked his head in my direction.

  “Ms. Sterling,” I said. My stores of fear and shock and horror seemed to be exhausted, and I felt strangely cheerful, as if I had some kind of bipolar disorder and was swinging back toward the manic pole.

  “We’re afraid it’s necessary,” Phillips said to Dr. McDermott.

  “Perhaps you’d like to come with her,” Aston suggested.

  “Thank you, I will,” he said.

  The four of us crossed the street together. The front door was standing open. The cops entered the house ahead of Dr. McDermott and me, turning toward the kitchen, and we followed. I reached out and took hold of one of Dr. McDermott’s slightly gnarled hands.

  Just inside the kitchen, blood was smeared and puddled on the floor, and a bloody handprint was on the counter. On the jamb of the door leading out to the garage was another smear of blood, and through the open doorway I could see through the open garage to the alley.

  “There’re blood spots all the way down the alley to the street,” Phillips said.

  “There’s a lot of it right here,” I said.

  “Too much,” Dr. McDermott added.

  “What do you mean?” asked Phillips.

  “I mean he lost a lot of blood to have walked away under his own power.”

  “You a doctor?” Phillips said.

  Dr. McDermott nodded. “I am.”

  “Let’s go in the bedroom,” Aston said, interrupting their exchange.

  The room was a wreck — a tangle of bedclothes trailing off onto the floor, a smashed lamp, an overturned nightstand with stuff spilling from its drawer… A strong floral scent came from a perfume bottle that had broken when it fell from the dresser. Amid the clutter was a length of what looked like clothesline, about a yard of it.

  “He tried to strangle me with that cord there,” I said, pointing.

  Dr. McDermott looked at my neck. “I have something for that back at the house,” he said.

  “What happened?” Aston said to me.

  “I heard a noise,” I said. “It woke me up, and…” I had to pause to clear my throat, making a noise like the grinding of gears. “I got up to walk through the house and make sure everything was all right.”

  “Uh huh,” Aston said.

  “Everything seemed okay. I came back to the bedroom, and suddenly this man was behind me and a cord was around my neck.”

  “How did you get away?”

  I described it as best I could. When I got to the scissors-lock, everybody’s eyes went to my legs, which thanks to the bathrobe were only visible below the knee. I described the muffled snap I’d heard when I twisted the man’s neck and the unnatural angle of his head. “His head was still cocked on one side when he came out of the bedroom. He was just this shadow moving across the living room, and, with his head tilted that way, he…It was like one of those zombie movies.”

  I looked from face to face, but got no encouragement.

  “The phone was dead,” I went on. “I got a corkscrew out of one of the drawers, and, when he came into the kitchen, I stabbed him with it. He fell to the floor right where we saw all that blood. He was still gasping and gurgling when I went out the front door and ran across the street to Dr. McDermott’s.”

  “You said he was dead,” Phillips said.

  “Well, dying. I don’t see how he… I don’t know.”

  Nobody said anything, and I wasn’t at all sure how to interpret their silence.

  “But that cord on the floor looks just like the cord that was found around the neck of Wendy Walters.”

  The name didn’t seem to register.

  “The woman who was murdered in Shockoe Bottom yesterday,” I explained. “I guess now it’s the day before yesterday.”

  Three sets of eyebrows climbed three foreheads.

  “What about her?” Aston asked.

  “I’m the one who found the body.” My throat was hurting and my back was beginning to cramp up on me. “Could I get some water?” I said. “I’m not feeling so good.”

  Dr. McDermott got the water for me, along with four Advil from the cabinet over my sink. It was more than I’d ever taken before, but he was the doctor.

  We sat in the living room. Aston asked a few more questions, and Phillips scribbled in his notebook. “I’d feel a lot better about this if you could give us a better description of your attacker,” Aston said.

  “It was dark. He was behind me. When I finally saw him head on, he was just kind of a shadow.”

  “A shadow with its head cocked on one side.”

  “Yes.”

  “Height?”

  “I don’t think he was shorter than me.”

  “Five-ten or eleven?”

  “Five-eleven. He could have been five-ten.”

  “And he could have been as tall as…”

  “Six-four or so.”

  Aston rolled his eyes.

  After a while, some police technicians came and scraped up the blood, or some of it. There were no usable prints, as it turned out. Even the handprint on the counter had evidently been made by a latex glove.

  When everyone had gone, Dr. McDermott said, “Get your keys. Or your purse or whatever. You’re spending the rest of the night at my house.”

  “That’s all right. I can go to a hotel.”

  “Not tonight. You need me to doctor those abrasions around your neck, for one thing.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I have a guest room all made up. You’ll even have your own bath.”

  Chapter 18

  I woke to the smell of bacon. The room was cool, but, though the bedspread was on the floor, and the sheet was in a twist, I was damp with perspiration. I swung my legs out of bed and sat waiting for my breathing to slow, feeling more exhausted than I had when I lay down. I sighed and got up and swung my arms. A few circles with them, forward and backward, took out some of the stiffness, but it was going to be a long day.

  It was while I was using the bathroom that my nightmare came back to me, dark shapes with canted heads chasing me down doorless corridors that went on and on and never seemed to end. A shudder went through me, and I did my best to push the images away and slam the door on them.

  After shrugging into Dr. McDermott’s terrycloth robe, I padded barefoot down to the kitchen, which was too bright and sharp-edged to seem quite real. There was a Cuisinart coffee maker sputtering the final drops of coffee into the carafe, bacon sizzling on a hot frying pan, and Dr. McDermott standing over it and wearing an apron decorated with a grinning pig’s head.

  He motioned me to the table. “How’s the throat?”

  “All right.” The words came out in an unexpected croak, though, and I touched my neck. It was tender.

  “Some coffee will feel good on it. How do you take it?” He put down his spatula and got a couple of mismatched mugs from a cabinet.

  I didn’t ordinarily take it at all, but something hot did sound good. “Black,” I said.

  He poured and brought the mugs. “Let me get the bacon off the fire, and we’ll sit a bit,” he said.

  I took a sip of the coffee. It was flavored with something I couldn’t identify, but it was wonderful. And it felt good going down.

  Dr. McDermott brought a plate of bacon with him to the table. “Did you sleep well?”

  I shook my head. “Nightmares.”

  He nodded as if he had expected it.

  “Zombies like the one from last night,” I said by way of explanation.

  “Brains,” he croaked, and in response to my uncertain expression added, “Night of the Living Dead. A movie. You probably wouldn’t have seen it.”
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  “What bothers me, it’s not the first time the supernatural has broken in on me lately.” I told him about finding Wendy’s body and the sense I’d had that she was there in the room with me. “I mean her, herself, not just her corpse. Before that, when I was down in the street, there was a moment when I thought I saw the window blinds move as if someone was looking out through them.”

  “Maybe someone was. Her killer?”

  I shook my head decisively. “Couldn’t have been. There was no way for him to have gotten out.” Though, now that I thought about it, I wondered. I had spent a lot of time on the balcony, and the door to the apartment was around the corner.

  “We are surrounded by the invisible,” Dr. McDermott said.

  “What?”

  “Love, fear, hope. Things with no physical substance that are nonetheless very real.”

  “Yes, but…This is different. Love and fear and hope don’t have personality. They’re just…” I stopped.

  “Feelings? You don’t believe that. Is friendship just something inside you? Is courage just an emotional state, or is it something real, something important?”

  I seemed to remember something about this from my freshman philosophy class, but I hadn’t paid much attention.

  “People have often attributed personality to love and hate.”

  “What?” I said.

  “God, Cupid. The devil.”

  I smiled a little. “You remind me of a lawyer I ran into a couple of days ago. Out of nowhere he started talking to me about how prepared was I for the afterlife.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. Things just seem to come in waves, that’s all.”

  He stood up. “I’ll put on the eggs.”

  It was late morning before I returned to my house, freshly showered, my stomach warm with a breakfast of bacon and eggs and Pillsbury biscuits. The lab techs had cleaned up the worst of the blood and the worst of their own mess, but ServiceMaster they were not. There was a noticeable smell in the living room and kitchen, and the heavy scent of perfume in my bedroom was almost as bad.

  Though my nightmare had by that time dissipated like morning fog, I got my clothes on as quickly as possible. For one thing, I was running late. Despite my best efforts, it was nearly eleven when I got to the office, and the red light on my phone was glowing, indicating I had missed some calls. As I took my seat, I hit the message button on my phone and punched in my password.

  Five new messages, the first from John Parker at 8:45 that morning: “Robin, where the hell are you? You’re not at home, and you’re not here. I’ll try your cell.”

  Message number two, also from John Parker: “Why do you even have a cell phone if you’re not going to keep it turned on?”

  Message number three: “Okay, so you’re out somewhere. When you get back…Never mind, I don’t think you can call me here.”

  Message number four: “I’m at the Richmond Police Department. I’m…They’re holding me for Wendy Walters’ murder. Get down here as soon as you can, will you?”

  Message number five was from Pete Larsen, the law firm’s senior partner. He wanted to see me; he didn’t say what about.

  I punched the speaker button to disconnect. “Oh boy,” I said to no one in particular. John didn’t need me; he needed a criminal defense lawyer. Tom Mitchell, one of the firm’s partners, had begun his legal career as a prosecutor. I thought about taking this to him, but John could have called Mitchell himself if he had wanted to.

  I drummed my fingers on my credenza. It seemed there was nothing for it but to get down to police headquarters. I stood up. The phone began to ring as I left the office, but I let it ring. If it was John, I was on my way. If it was Larsen, he was going to have to wait.

  Chapter 19

  It didn’t take long to get to John Parker. Ten minutes to the station. Less time than that before Ray Hernandez came down to the lobby and took me up. Ray was Jordan’s partner. I’d seen him before, at Wendy’s apartment, though I hadn’t spoken to him.

  On the second floor we came to a line of numbered doors. Hernandez rapped on one marked “2,” and James Jordan came out wearing a short-sleeve shirt and a tie that was obviously a clip-on.

  “It is you,” he said.

  I could hardly deny it.

  “I didn’t figure there could be two Robin Starlings practicing law in Richmond. It was just hard to believe it when Parker said he was calling you.”

  “We’re associates in the same firm.”

  “It seems like too much of a coincidence, somehow, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Depends on why you’ve arrested John Parker. You have arrested him, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you charged him?”

  “We’re still talking to him. We’ve just had him in custody since seven o’clock this morning. What happened to your neck?”

  My hand went halfway to my throat before I stopped it. “Last night someone broke into my house and tried to strangle me with a piece of clothesline.”

  “What?” He looked incredulous.

  “Seems like too much of a coincidence, too, doesn’t it?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “West end. Halfway to Short Pump. There’s a police report.”

  “They get him?”

  “The guy who attacked me? No. He got away.”

  “It wasn’t Parker, I take it.”

  “No, but I like how your mind works.”

  “You mean suspecting Parker?”

  “No. In realizing the attack on me has to be connected to Wendy’s murder.”

  “How?”

  “How should I know? If I had the resources of the Richmond Police Department, maybe I could find out enough to connect the dots, though.”

  “What are the dots you think need connecting?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Okay, dot one. Wendy Walters comes to see me and leaves me a disc. Dot two: Two men accost me outside my home only hours later. Wendy’s data disc goes missing. Dot three, that same night my friend Wendy is strangled with a piece of clothesline. Two nights after that, someone tries to do the same thing to me.”

  “That would be dot four?”

  “Dot four,” I said.

  Hernandez said, “Are you sure it was clothesline they used on you?”

  I nodded. “About a yard of white clothesline.”

  “With Walters it was telephone wire,” he said.

  “What?”

  “A gray telephone wire.”

  “I remember white.”

  “You were pretty upset,” Jordan said. His voice was gentle, but I looked back and forth between them, wondering if they were jerking me around. They seemed sincere, but then they were cops in a murder investigation.

  “So what have you got on John Parker?” I said.

  “Is he going to talk to us?”

  The question suggested he hadn’t already, which seemed like good news. “I don’t know,” I said. “What have you got on him?”

  “We’re supposed to ask the questions.”

  “I’m supposed to advise my client, and I need some basis for doing it. You didn’t just pick him up at random. Come on.”

  Jordan ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “Fingerprints,” he said finally. “His inside her apartment and now hers inside his.”

  “How did you happen to have his prints for comparison?”

  “Computer kicked him out. Attorneys are fingerprinted when they’re licensed.”

  I remembered. What I hadn’t realized was that the prints became available to law enforcement. “That’s what you’ve got? Fingerprints?”

  “And a witness who saw them downtown together the day Walters was killed. She called us after Wendy’s picture appeared in the paper.”

  “She knew Parker by name,” Hernandez interjected. “Works in the same building, says he hit on her once.”

  It figured.r />
  “We’ll have DNA evidence in forty-eight hours,” Jordan said. “Victim had intercourse almost immediately before she died.” With that, he opened the door on Interrogation Room 2, where John Parker sat in a wrinkled T-shirt, his folded hands on the table in front of him.

  I stepped inside.

  “Let us know when you’re ready,” Jordan said, and he closed the door behind me.

  I stood looking down at John, and he looked back at me.

  “I could swear you told me you never actually consummated your relationship with Wendy,” I said finally.

  He took a breath and let it out again, then shrugged. “It was what you needed to hear — what I needed for you to hear, anyway. I hardly expected forensic science to contradict me.”

  I sat across from him, thumped my purse down on the table and slapped my legal pad down beside it. I knew it was time to let go of the merely personal, but I was having trouble doing it. “Of course I lied to you, Robin,” I said in a deep voice. “How could I know I was going to get caught?”

  “Would it help to tell you I was sorry?”

  “For what? The lying or the infidelity?”

  “You choose.”

  I shook my head. “A little genuine contrition might help, but I’m afraid the word sorry has lost its pizzazz.”

  He turned his hands palms up. “Maybe this was a mistake,” he said.

  “If you mean calling me to get you out of jail, of course it’s a mistake. Tom Mitchell is the obvious choice.”

  “I’d rather keep this quiet if I can. This is so obviously some kind of mix-up.”

  “Does that mean you’ve been answering questions? To clear up the obvious mix-up?”

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  The point was, perhaps, debatable, but I let it go. “Good,” I said. The explanations of the accused were admissible as evidence. Too often, innocent people tried to explain their way out of difficulty, but succeeded only in supplying the police with the one bit of evidence they could have obtained from no other source.

  “So what do we do? If I don’t say anything, they’re going to charge me.”

  “They might let you go while they wait for the DNA evidence.”