Free Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) by Michael Monhollon Page B

talk.”
    “Are her personal crises still your business?”
    “No. Of course not, though maybe I wasn’t as clear on that this morning. I thought maybe this crisis was something I ought to clean up.”
    “And it turned out not to be anything you could clean up.”
    He sighed, shook his head.
    “You need to let her go, Mike.”
    “I know. I have.”
    I took a sip of my water.
    Mike said, “I don’t know why she’s so insecure about this.”
    “Well, you are marrying someone else.”
    “I meant Brooke.”
    “I know what you meant. I have to say, it’s not like her. I’ve never known her to be insecure or clingy. It may be a reflection of the uncertainty she has about getting married generally—the permanence of it, the loss of freedom . . .”
    “She’s not losing her freedom! She can do anything she wants, work late, hang out with you, take up long-distance running—”
    “Listen to rap music at full volume,” I continued for him. “Have MSNBC on the television whenever she’s home. Keep her clean laundry piled on the sofa to fold whenever she decides to take the time . . .”
    Mike was beginning to look a little panicked. “You know her better than I do,” he said.
    I grinned at him. “I’m kidding. But you see what I mean. There’re a lot of ways a person might find a permanent roommate constricting.”
    “So you’re telling me I’ve found myself yet another woman who loves me but doesn’t want to marry me.”
    “Not at all. She said she’d marry you, didn’t she? She wants to marry you. There’s just a lot of uncertainty in her life at this point. Having a dark-haired beauty like Sarah Fleckman bumping around the edges of yours doesn’t help.”
    He sighed, then nodded. “I’ll do better.”
    “I know how I’d feel if one of Paul’s old girlfriends kept turning up.”
    “Really?” His mouth quirked upward at the corner. “I’d think you’d either chew her up and spit her out or ignore her entirely. Besides, Paul doesn’t have any old girlfriends. He’s always fallen for hot women who were out of his league and worshiped them from afar. Until you.”
    “Ah. Probably good for me to be taken down a peg.”
    “I didn’t mean that. You’re as far out of his league as any of them. This is just the first time he’s managed to develop a relationship with one of the goddesses he’s fallen for.”
    “Oh, wow,” I said. What was it with me and Aphrodite?
    “I didn’t mean it quite that way, either.”
    “You mean I’m not a goddess?”
    “Just flesh and blood. Impressive as hell, but just flesh and blood.”
    “I can settle for impressive as hell.”
    “So are you going to tell Brooke about this?”
    “No.” I shook my head decisively. “That would be like throwing a gas can onto a fire.”
    Mike exhaled carefully as some of the tension eased out of him.
    “But you are,” I said.

Chapter 7
    The Monday after Shorter was bound over for trial, I cleared my desk except for the autopsy report on Bill Hill, the police reports, and the exhibit list I’d gotten from the prosecution. On the wall I pinned the crime scene photos. I was sitting at my desk, drumming my fingers and looking at my wall of photos when Brooke stuck her head in.
    “Hard at work, I see,” she said.
    “As usual.”
    Brooke came in and sat down. She said, “I thought you were going to say something about how late I was, but I stopped off at a client’s.”
    “I’ll make a note of it.”
    As I’ve mentioned before, Brooke’s business seemed to grow like kudzu, while mine still lurched from case to case. I wasn’t jealous of her success, but it was a continuing point of comparison.
    “So what are we looking at?” Brooke asked, her eyes on my wall of photos.
    “Crime scene photos. I’ve got a client sitting in jail and a trial in three weeks. Take a look at this print of his neighborhood off Google Earth. See, here’s the murder victim’s house, and here, just around the corner, is my