Free A Killing in the Valley by JF Freedman Page B

area, sitting erect and still like a bird on a wire. It was a few minutes before eight; she was his first appointment.
    “I hope you don’t mind that I came early,” she said as she got up. “I was awake and I had nothing to do, so I just drove in.”
    “Of course not.”
    “Your associate was nice enough to get me some coffee,” Juanita said, looking over at Margo Howells, Luke’s stalwart paralegal and all-around girl Friday.
    “Good.” Luke smiled to himself. He liked that Juanita had called Margo his “associate,” rather than “secretary.” She was an old lady chronologically, but she was modern in the world.
    He ushered Juanita into his office. “Hold everything,” he instructed Margo, as he closed the door.
    “To answer your question, I’m all right, personally,” Juanita told him as she sat down. She carefully placed her coffee cup on the edge of his desk. “Distracted.”
    “I can imagine,” he replied sympathetically, sitting down opposite her. “That must have been quite a shock, a murdered girl found on your property.”
    “It was,” she agreed. “Horrible. That poor girl. And her mother.” She shuddered. “Outliving a child is a parent’s worst nightmare.”
    “I hope I never know.” An older parent, Luke was over forty when the first one was born. A compartment in a far recess of his brain was reserved for worrying about them. Most of the time the drawer was closed, so that he didn’t feel anxious about them consciously, but he knew it was always there. “So,” he said, positioning a legal pad on his knee, “how can I help you today?”
    “I need some legal advice.”
    Luke sat back, perplexed and a bit disturbed. When Mrs. McCoy had called and said she had an issue to discuss with him, he had cleared his calendar to fit her in right away. But there had been an unsettling itch as he wrote her name on his schedule. McCoy and Dixon, her late husband’s law firm, handled her legal affairs. Why was she coming to him? Was she in some kind of trouble she didn’t want them to know about? Was there a criminal issue with that murdered girl? Henry’s firm didn’t do criminal work.
    “Two police detectives came by yesterday,” Juanita said. “They were trying to find out how that girl wound up on the ranch, who might have put her there, was there anything I knew that could help them.” She hesitated for a moment, then spoke again. “I told them I didn’t know, which I don’t ,” she said emphatically. “But there was one thing I didn’t tell them, because I didn’t remember it at the time. But now, thinking back, I realize I didn’t fully answer a question they asked me.”
    All right, Luke thought. Here’s the reason she came to a criminal-defense lawyer. “Which was?” he prompted.
    She adjusted her position on the chair. “They asked how many people have access to that section of the ranch. And they also mentioned the security gate on the road that leads to it. I explained who comes and goes—hardly anyone—and then they moved on to other questions.”
    She fidgeted some more; he picked up on it. Something was stuck in her craw, and she was having a hard time coughing it up. “What I didn’t tell them,” she said, “because I simply forgot, was that there had been someone at the ranch, about the same time the girl disappeared.” She shifted around in her chair yet again.
    This is uncharacteristic for her, Luke thought, because normally this woman was a rock. Something was really troubling her. “Who was it?” he asked, his ballpoint poised over the yellow pad.
    “My grandson, and a friend of his,” she said with a nervous catch in her throat. “They showed up the morning of the day the police say the girl disappeared. They had been on the road for a couple of weeks and they stopped by to see me before they went back to college. In Tucson,” she added with precision. “Steven—my grandson—is a senior at the University of Arizona. So is his friend.