Free Dirty by Debra Webb

and a matching tube top sheer enough to show off my erect nipples. Jesus Christ, and the blond wig.   Damn.   Did they have to take pictures on the coolest night of that crappy sting?   I gave my head a little shake to clear the confusion.   What I really wanted to know was who authorized someone to take pictures period?   Or to duplicate them?
    “Who...?”   My gaze shifted to the young man whose knees I’d once patched.   “Where did you get this?”
    A dopey grin had stretched across his face.   “There’s more,” he enthused.   “Wanna see?”
    Max leaned down and fingered his keyboard until the HPD official website bloomed on his screen.   “Watch this.”   He slid and clicked the mouse and a new page popped up.   “What you’re about to see is Rob-Ho’s unofficial page.”   Another click and the screen filled with several shots of me all decked out in that same streetwalker garb and a couple other women I didn’t recognize.
    My mouth gaped.   What the hell?   When I’d recovered to some degree from the initial shock, I stammered, “Did...you say Rob-Ho?”
    Max clicked on a frame and it enlarged to fill the page.   “The page is a hidden, authorized-access-only tack on to the official site.   They update it every week or two but your pictures are keepers apparently.   Yours are always there.”
    Somehow my fingers managed to wrap around the Sharpie pen and scrawl my name on the eight by ten glossy Max would likely pin up next to his mother’s sweet little five by seven.   The only thing I could mentally grasp just then was how I couldn’t wait to get my hands on Nance.
    I was going to kill the bastard.
    Funny, I mused.   My whole day had pretty much revolved around two things...sex and murder.   I’d already had sex.   I guess murder was next.
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER SIX
     
     
    I didn’t go directly to Chief Cates as I’d first thought I might.   Instead, I decided to file away the information on Nance’s scam and retrieve it at some point when it might prove the most beneficial.   I did a lot of that in my line of work.   Still, I couldn’t let Nance slide without some sort of sneaky retribution.   I’d have to ponder his punishment for a time, orchestrate the perfect payback.   A grin pulled across my face.   Oh, yeah.   I was going to enjoy this.
    But first, I had work to do.
    I considered the best place to go next with my long, lost lover investigation and knew there was one other man who might be able to cut through some of the time-consuming legwork and give me what I needed to move forward.
    Bob Fraley was a seventy-five-year-old man who had retired only a few years ago from a lucrative career as a jury consultant.   Before that he’d been a practicing criminal attorney.   The top of the heap, at least until his fetish for ignoring the law caught up to him.   But Bob didn’t let a little thing like getting disbarred slow him down.   He started a consulting firm and was soon one of the most highly sought after jury consultants in the business.   The man had a mind like a steel trap, never forgot a face, name or a case.   That was precisely what I was counting on.
    The Fraley brothers, Bob and his brother Luther, were infamous in this town.   Each had chosen his respective career field—on opposing sides of the law of course—and risen to famedom.   Until his nervous breakdown, Luther was rumored to have been a topnotch hitman.   There was no evidence of this rumor, however.   Just the tall Texas tales passed along in huddles involving large quantities of alcohol and the testosterone fueled need to top the previous tale.
    Bob spent most of his days now monitoring the ever-changing flow of patrons at the Cow Palace, a five-star restaurant where the up and coming and ego-driven movers and shakers hang out to feed or simply to see and be seen.
    As a regular, Bob had reached a kind of status that included the proverbial table with his name on it in