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

  “A hunch. I’m sorry about knocking you down at your house the other night.”

  He nodded jerkily. “I know you are. It’s all right.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I thought…” He broke off.

  “Yes?”

  “I thought you might want to go out with me some time.”

  I tried to take it in stride. “You need to work on your approach,” I said.

  “I mean, it’s like we know each other. You know?”

  I supposed he meant that I’d been to his house and tried to rip off his pecker.

  “It’s more like we’re complete strangers,” I said.

  His mouth twisted, and I was afraid for a moment that he was going to cry.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’m in the middle of a crisis right now at work, but when things settle down, I’ll bake you some cookies.” Somehow.

  He sat up straighter. “Really?”

  “Yes. But for right now you’ve got to stop stalking me, okay?”

  He nodded.

  “We have a deal?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great.” I put my window back up, gave him what I meant to be a friendly wave, then drove around to my garage. When I went out the front door to get my mail, his car was gone. I checked my watch and gave a nod of satisfaction.

  Before I went to bed, I did another perimeter-check. This time, already more comfortable in my own home, I didn’t bother with the gym clothes and the shoes by the bed. I changed into my usual T-shirt and panties, filled a glass with water from the fridge, and set the glass on the nightstand, something I’d neglected to do the day before.

  I drink my first glass of the day before getting up in the morning. No doubt it’s one of those weird rituals that single women develop, but ten glasses a day keep me feeling lubricated, and, if I don’t start off with one, it’s hard to get them in.

  I threw back the covers and got in bed, pulling up just the sheet for covers. In the summer, as a good citizen of Planet Earth and a miserly young woman besides, I keep the house at a warm 76 degrees. Just before I dropped off, I glanced over at the clock. It was 10:35.

  Chapter 15

  2:41. I lay still, my heart pounding, my eyes moving over the shadows, picking out the dark dresser, the chair and ottoman, the low shelf of books that looked black against the cream-colored walls. Everything looked as it should, yet my ears strained in the silence for some repetition of the sound that had brought me out of sleep.

  Nothing came. It occurred to me that the sound might have been part of the dream that I couldn’t quite remember. The thin layer of perspiration that made my skin feel tacky suggested the dream had not been a peaceful one.

  Just as I was selling myself on the only-a-dream theory, there was a creak from somewhere in the house, a soft groan of wood. I swung my legs out of bed. It’s the house settling, said the practical, sensible voice inside me, but my heart was racing, and I knew I was never going to get back to sleep until I checked it out.

  Without turning on any lights, I padded out of the master bedroom into the hall. I looked into bedroom number two, then into the bathroom on the right and the living room through the archway on the left. Bedroom number three, which I used as my study, was at the end of the hall. A little light filtered in through the front window, showing everything in its proper place.

  My heartbeat was returning to normal as I went out into the rest of the house. All was as it should be in the living room. The front door was closed and locked. Nothing looked out of place in the kitchen. The back door was secure.

  Just an excitable girl, I murmured as I headed back to the bedroom, but I wasn’t too hard on myself. With all that had happened, I thought I was entitled to be a little jumpy. I was reaching for my bed, already feeling the soft mattress in my imagination and feeling the luxury of my spine relaxing a vertebra at a time, when something hard and thin closed around my throat and jerked me backward, almost off my feet. There was a shape behind me. I thrashed desperately in an effort to dislodge it, and together we staggered about the dark bedroom, taking out a floor lamp and knocking over the bookcase, crashing into the dresser, into the doorway, into the wall. Throughout it all, the cord remained around my throat, just under my chin, completely closing off the flow of air. The darkness of the room began to take on a grayish quality, and a high-pitched whistle sounded from somewhere, a thin, weak whistle that grew in volume until it filled my head.

  I stopped moving, trying to fight back panic enough to think. The cord tightened further, but was no longer really painful. Everything was gray around me, and the strange whistling was in my ears. Something came to me then, not quite an idea, but something more on the level of instinct. I straightened, my movements dreamlike, my arms and legs feeling like something separate from me, and the man behind me leaned backward, away from me, keeping the pressure unrelenting on my throat. The doorway to the hall was in front of me. I jumped toward it, throwing my legs into the air. It threw my weight, all 139 pounds of it, onto the cord under my chin. My assailant staggered forward, unable to hold me. I landed on my back, and he landed on top of me. His head bounced against my knees and the pressure on my neck disappeared.

  Air flowed sweet and clean into my lungs, and I gagged on it, recovered, gagged again. The man on top of me was moving, the inseam of his pants rubbing across my face as he tried to get up, groping for the cord that had been jerked from his grasp. That was not going to happen. I caught his head between my knees and locked my bare feet together, my knees pressing into his neck just below his jaw as I squeezed with all my strength.

  He collapsed on me, his crotch mashing painfully into my face, then he managed to get his hands and knees under him, still straddling my body. He started to rise, dragging my legs and lower body with him, but I arched my body, driving him downwards, and his head thudded solidly into the hardwood flooring. He tried to roll off me, but I rolled the other way, controlling his head, and the pressure on his neck forced him to reverse direction with something halfway between a grunt and a scream. His crotch came down heavily on my face again, and I pushed at his hips, still holding onto his head with my knees for all I was worth.

  He punched me in the side, maybe aiming for a kidney or something equally sensitive, but unable to reach anything, at least not with any force. He lunged upward, trying to break free, and I held on, arching my body and driving his head into the floor with another sound like the crack of a baseball bat. His crotch landed on my face again — that was where I was taking some damage — and I grabbed him about the hips with both arms, pushed my face into his crotch, and bit down with all the strength in my jaws.

  He jerked so violently that my knees almost lost their grip on his head. Thrashing and throwing himself mindlessly this way and that, he began to scream frantic, breathless screams that sounded horrifyingly inhuman. I held on with arms and legs and teeth, and he bucked me against the floor, twisting and jerking and rolling in his agony.

  There was blood in my mouth, and I thought with horror that it was his. I opened my mouth, releasing his inseam, pushing at his hips, twisting and rolling in a blind effort to get out from under him, but as his body twisted away from me, I felt a muffled crack between my knees, felt it or heard it as his body turned in the air and he fell mostly on his back. Panicked, I opened my knees, letting go of his head, and finally was able to scramble out from under him. His body had gone slack.

  I was gasping, scooting backwards on hands and feet until I came up against the bed and stopped, my mouth and eyes open wide in shock. I could see the body only in shadow, but the head was canted sideways at an impossible angle and nothing was moving. I scrambled onto my bed, my eyes fixed on the corpse on my bedroom floor. The clock on my nightstand read 2:49, which added to my sense of unreality, of having come unmoored in time and space. Unless my clock had stopped, it had been only eight minutes since I’d gone in search of the noise that had awakened me. I reached for the phone, kee
ping a careful watch on the body of the man who had attacked me.

  The body moved.

  I leaped off my bed, skipping past the man on the floor, but I ran full tilt into the doorjamb, bounced, kept going. Somehow I got out of the room and into the hall and then into the living room. My impressions were disjointed, though, as if I were teleporting from place to place rather than moving through the intervening space. Finding myself in the kitchen, I snatched up the cordless phone from its cradle and, dropping down behind the counter, punched the talk button, then 9-1-1. I put the phone to my ear.

  Nothing. I thought for one panicky instant that I was doing something wrong, that under the stress of the moment I had forgotten how to use my own telephone. I pushed END, then TALK again, and put the phone to my ear to hear the dial tone, but there was none.

  I stood up and, across the counter, saw the silhouette of a man on the far side of my living room, his head cocked to one side as if he were listening. I threw the phone at him.

  It was a good, straight throw, but it missed him by about three feet and thudded into the wall.

  “Crap,” I said, and yanked out a drawer, which fell to the floor amid a clatter of tableware and utensils. I yanked at another one and overdid it on that one, too. Tossing the drawer aside, I scanned the dark floor with eyes and fingers for something I could use as a weapon — an ice pick, a knife of some kind.

  I’d pulled out the wrong drawers. All I saw among the ladles and spatulas and whatnots was a corkscrew, just a wooden handle and a short spiral of steel. It would have to do. I snatched it up and scooted around the counter, bent double to avoid being seen. Standing, I pressed myself against the wall next to the doorway, the corkscrew tight in my hand, the steel twisting out between my fingers.

  A lamp crashed to the floor in the living room. Silence. I waited, ears straining, every muscle in my body tensed and ready.

  When he came through the doorway, he was like a man in a trance, moving unsteadily, his head lolling on his right shoulder. I stepped into him, sliding one arm about his waist and driving for his kidney with the corkscrew protruding from my fist.

  It went in surprisingly easily, as if I were punching into a balloon filled with Jell-O. His body stiffened briefly, and he collapsed.

  I backed out of the kitchen into the living room, my eyes on the man’s body. I could hear him breathing, a horrible gurgling sound, and I didn’t trust him to stay down. When I lost sight of him, I turned and ran for the front door, my fingers scrabbling for the thumb latch, for the chain, for the doorknob.

  The hot, humid air of an August night in Virginia felt to me like airy freedom. I ran down the sidewalk to the street and crossed it, hobbling slightly on my bare feet. There wasn’t a car against the curb anywhere, not even Eddie Unger’s. The man who was dying inside my house evidently had had better sense than to park his car in front.

  Chapter 16

  There was no question, really, of where to go. A single mom lived on one side of me, a schoolteacher of some kind. Two women shared the house on the other side, and a family of four was directly across the street. I went down two houses and rang the bell of a retired physician who lived by himself. In the evenings he was usually outside tending his yard or sitting on the porch. Once after my evening jog I’d been sitting on his steps chatting with him while he weeded his rose bushes, when a woman stopped her Lincoln Continental in the middle of Beechnut Street, got out, and strode over to us, her heels tapping on the sidewalk.

  “You do nice work,” she said.

  Dr. McDermott looked up at her, squinting a little, and said thank you. It was a crisp, spring evening, and he was wearing a stained, white flannel shirt under bib-overalls.

  “How much do you charge?”

  “Pardon?”

  “For yard work. Do you charge by the hour or by the job or what?” There wasn’t a strand of gray in her blonde hair, though her time-weathered face said she was sixty. Her elegant coiffure made me think of old issues of Life magazine.

  Dr. McDermott sat on his heels blinking up at her, looking bemused.

  “Well?” she asked him.

  “He does my yard in exchange for sexual favors,” I said. “It’s a very satisfactory arrangement for both of us.”

  The woman’s head jerked toward me, her cheeks sucking in and her mouth puckering in a way that was distinctly fishlike. I smiled brightly, and her eyes went back to Dr. McDermott, who shrugged and lifted his eyebrows.

  Her mouth closed in a firm line, and she spun on her three-inch heel and tapped back down the sidewalk. Her car door slammed, her engine roared, and she was gone.

  Embarrassed now that the two of us were by ourselves, I gave Dr. McDermott an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have butted in,” I said. “It just sort of came out.”

  “You do have a free way of talking,” he said.

  “I hope I didn’t embarrass you.”

  He shook his head. “It takes more than a free way of talking to embarrass me.”

  “And she had it coming,” I said.

  It probably took Dr. McDermott less than two minutes to get to the door, but it felt like too long. I stood watching my house. No sign of anything going on there, but as the adrenalin seeped from my system I started to shake. I needed to sit down soon, or Dr. McDermott would be picking me out of his boxwoods.

  The porch light blazed on and the door whooshed open behind me, causing me to spin around so fast I nearly turned myself inside out.

  “Robin Starling?” Dr. McDermott said.

  I stretched my mouth at him, trying to smile. “There’s a man inside my house.” I stopped, shocked at the hoarse quality of my voice, then said, “I was hoping I could use your phone.”

  He looked toward my house, which still showed no sign of activity or of anything amiss. His eyes came back to me, a thirty-year-old woman in a T-shirt and panties standing on his doorstep in the middle of the night. My eyes had sprung a leak, and, noticing it, he stepped back, reaching out a hand to draw me inside.

  “What man is in your house?” he asked, closing the door and bolting it behind me.

  “He tried to…to kill me.” It sounded melodramatic, especially in my newly acquired smoker’s voice, but I couldn’t help it, and my tears began in earnest. Dr. McDermott put his arms around me, and it wasn’t long before my chest was hitching and I was snuffling snot in an all-out cry. I found that I derived an irrational amount of comfort from his patting my back and telling me that everything was going to be all right.

  When the worst of the storm had passed, he put me in a chair in the kitchen and picked up the wall phone to dial 9-1-1.

  “Yes,” he said. “This is Donald McDermott. I live at…Yes, that’s right. A young lady who lives across the street tells me there is an intruder in her home…No, she’s here. She seems to be all right.” He raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded. He had a tuft of hair standing straight up on the top of his balding head, drawing a watery smile from me through what remained of my tears.

  “Her house number is ten-seventeen. Yes, thank you.” He looked at me when he had hung up. “They have a patrol car in the area,” he said.

  I nodded.

  He poured me a glass of water from a plastic jug in the refrigerator and set it in front of me. “Drink that. I’d make you some tea or something, but it sounds like they’re right around the corner. Will you be all right?”

  “I think so.” I tried to take a sip of the water, but it hurt to swallow. My hand went to my bruised throat.

  Dr. McDermott said, “Let me see if I can find you something to wear before the police get here. Your nightshirt just barely covers your…” He made a flapping gesture with his hand. “I’ll be right back.”

  I looked down. Just barely was politeness on his part; half my underwear was showing. My face got hot, and, when Dr. McDermott came back with a white, terry cloth bathrobe, I shrugged into it gratefully.

  “There,” he said. “All better.”

 
We heard the sound of a car engine out front, followed by the slamming of doors. Dr. McDermott peered out through his blinds. “They’re here,” he said.

  There were two of them, one about fifty and one much younger. We came out onto the front porch as they approached, and they stopped at the edge of it. “You the ones who called about an intruder?” the older cop asked.

  Dr. McDermott nodded. He opened his mouth to elaborate, but I beat him to it.

  “My name is Robin Starling,” I croaked. “I live right over there. I woke to a noise about…a half-hour ago. There was a man in the house. He tried to strangle me with some kind of cord.”

  “Is he still there?”

  “I think so.” I swallowed. “He’s probably pretty badly injured, and he may be…” I swallowed again.

  “Yes?”

  “Dead,” I said, and cleared my throat.

  The older cop half smiled at me. “How did that happen?” he asked.

  “I think I broke his neck.”

  “How…”

  “And then I stabbed him in the kidney with a corkscrew.”

  Their eyes shifted to Dr. McDermott, then came back to me.

  “Do you have your keys, ma’am?”

  “I ran out without them. It’s not locked.”

  “You wait here. We’ll go have a look.”

  Dr. McDermott and I sat down on his front porch steps as we watched them cross the street. I was hugging the bathrobe around me, chilled, though the outside temperature was probably somewhere in the eighties.

  “You’ve had a rough night,” Dr. McDermott said.

  I nodded, dumbly. It seemed to me that I’d had a lot of rough nights lately.

  Chapter 17

  In about fifteen minutes the cops were back. According to their nametags, the older one was named Aston; the younger one, Phillips.

  “You want to come with us?” Aston said.

  Dr. McDermott stood with me. “What is it?” he asked.