Free Justice Hunter by Harper Dimmerman

at Kruger. The chances were slim to none she’d ever presided over one of his cases. His underlings took care of things at the Common Pleas level. There were a few fen-phen cases that had come down the pike a couple years ago, and Hunter was pretty sure Mancini took the lead on at least one of them. But he would’ve remembered if Sheila had been assigned to any of them. Hunter, along with about a dozen or so other associates, had worked on discovery. And although he didn’t want to piss Sheila off, Hunter couldn’t just let this one go. “Is it about a case? Did he cross you while you were still in private practice?”
    “It’s really nothing,” she answered defensively.
    Needless to say, his curiosity was piqued. “Look, if it’s something you aren’t ethically permitted to reveal…”
    Sheila stopped him, caving too easily. “Mancini and I used to be romantically involved,” she said self-derisively, sounding repulsed. “There it is,” she added, diverting her eyes in shame. It was obviously a regrettable affair, not one of Sheila’s finer moments. Although Hunter would’ve never suspected a love connection between the two, it wasn’t altogether inconceivable. Mancini was a charismatic and powerful high-flyer, which certainly counted for something on the attraction spectrum. Sheila tried to read Hunter’s reaction. “I would’ve told you eventually anyway. I just wasn’t sure where this was going, that’s all.”
    And that made perfect sense to Hunter. Sheila and he had only been together for a few months, and frankly, Sheila’s past wasn’t really any of Hunter’s business anyway. They had come into the relationship, if it could even be called that at this point, as fully consenting adults. They weren’t exclusive, at least on paper, although Hunter had no intention of treating this like a casual fling. He was falling for her and couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. “Was it serious?” asked Hunter.
    “Actually, it was. More than I’d care to admit,” Sheila replied. It was the first sign of vulnerability he’d observed since they met.
    “This was obviously after the divorce?” That didn’t come out right at all, he thought. Sheila had been divorced for a few years already. Her husband was a prominent Philadelphia dentist she’d met while they were both getting their graduate degrees at Penn. It wasn’t implausible that she’d dated Mancini at some earlier date.
    “Right,” she replied as she haphazardly readjusted her shoulder-length bangs. “It was right after. I guess you could say I was on the rebound,” she clarified. “Anyway, I’d known Mancini peripherally for a while.”
    “How peripherally?”
    “I used to see him, in all his self-proclaimed glory , at all the usual bar functions.” Her tone was acerbic.
    He must’ve really done something to piss her off. Despite the obscene number of lawyers in the Philadelphia community, everyone linked into the Philadelphia Bar Association seemed to know one another. At the very most, there were two degrees of separation. And Sheila used to be extremely active with the bar. Hunter was certain Mancini still was, or at least pretended to be. The associates at Whitman, on the other hand, were not necessarily encouraged to participate in bar activities. Unlike some of the other big firms in the city, Whitman didn’t count that time toward billables.
    “It wasn’t until a Lawyer’s Club function that we actually got beyond the pleasantries,” Sheila explained.
    The Lawyer’s Club was an organization that espoused social “intercourse” between the local lawyers and judges. And clearly it had achieved its objective with Sheila and Mancini. “It was a wacky time in my life, too. I was pretty new to the bench; Joe was still fighting me for custody of the kids. The way the marriage ended.” Her ex-husband had started “drilling one of his hygienists,” Sheila liked to say. “Frankly, Mancini was the last person on