Free Where Angels Rest by Kate Brady

together in a way that made men of all ages catch themselves staring, and she wore them naturally and without arrogance, with a slim figure and thick dark hair attractively threaded with silver. She never wore a speck of makeup yet—
    Christ.
    Nick cursed beneath his breath. This was the problem with shrinks: They could take a man apart and put the pieces back together in a way that created a different man altogether, something that wasn’t real.
    Detective Mann, isn’t it a fact that you went there with the
intention
of killing Bertrand Yost? Isn’t it a fact that you
enjoyed
beating the hell out of him?
    Nick bit back a curse. Focus. This is about Lauren McAllister. Not Allison, not Yost.
    He slid a finger beneath the portrait of Lauren provided by her family and held it beside the ME’s headshot of herdeath: a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, complete with the mole above the left corner of her lip, heavy makeup, and a come-fuck-me look in her eyes. Typical nineteen-year-old these days, Nick thought, feeling his age, then remembered that this shot was actually twelve years old.
    It was an old case. A closed case. A case in which the murderer had already been identified, tried, and convicted. Justin Sims.
    He pulled out another folder: Sims. Justin and Erin were the children of Marla Gordon and Chuck Sims. Sims died in a boating accident when Justin was a baby and Erin was six, and her mother re-married Jeffrey Collins, a successful realtor in South Florida. By all accounts, the family was respected and privileged, and though the marriage ended in divorce several years before the murder, there were no indications that teenage Justin was on any sort of bad track at the time. His mother attended his trial but was noticeably absent from her daughter’s efforts to defend him afterward; Jeffrey Collins disappeared after the divorce. Similarly, there was a husband in there for at least a little while. David Cox was a law student Erin Sims married a year before the murder. He testified for the defense, claiming Justin’s gun had been stolen, but after that, he too stopped showing up in reports.
    Nick looked across the room at Sims, at the empty left ring finger. She
was
alone. Even the rest of her family seemed to have accepted Justin’s fate and, one by one, had abandoned the cause. Jensen had a whole stack of pages here that showed ten years of visits to police departments, the FBI, journalists, and a string of private investigators—none of them mentioning anyone but Dr. Sims.
    A twinge of admiration threatened and Nick bullied it back. No matter how much she believed in her brother’sinnocence, her methods couldn’t be condoned. When Justin was convicted, she went after Huggins—publicly and with a vengeance. Police didn’t listen, but everyone else did. Eventually, Huggins’s neighbors shunned him, contractors fired him, and his own pastor asked him to leave the church for the sake of the congregation. His wife’s classes in sculpture emptied of what few pupils she had left. Sixteen months after Justin’s trial had ended, John and Maggie Huggins moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, to try to start over.
    Erin Sims followed. Within weeks, she had papered the city with posters declaring him a sexual predator, drug dealer, and murderer; gotten herself interviewed on TV; and published an editorial in the paper. For John and Maggie, life in Raleigh never got off the ground. Sims found herself at the hard end of a slander suit and a restraining order but neither fazed her. For the next ten years, while Justin lost one appeal after another, she hired private investigators and hounded police departments, but no one took her seriously. In the margin of one report, Nick found a note scrawled from one cop to another:
JD—don’t waste your time. A loose screw.
    Loose screw or not, Erin Sims earned a doctorate during those ten years, becoming a victims’ advocate for the Dade County court system. She had a reputation there as a pit