Free A Murder of Justice by Robert Andrews

Frank had made the connection.
    “Where’s your truck?”
    Tom Kearney lowered the frying pan and returned to the range. “Up at Judith’s.”
    “Oh.”
    His father’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you mean that?”
    “What?”
    “That ‘Oh’ of yours.”
    Frank grinned. “Just happy to see you in town. I ran into Judith the other day, coming out of Dean and DeLuca. She seemed happy too.”
    “Really?”
    It was clear, the way his father asked, that Judith Barnes’s being happy was important.
    “Getting serious, Dad?”
    Tom Kearney cocked his head, and his eyes drifted off into mid-distance somewhere above Frank’s head. “Yes,” he said slowly, “yes, it is.” He set the frying pan down and leaned back against the counter. A man coming to a conclusion he’d been working on, thinking about, but notputting it into words. “For a while after Maggie’s death . . .” he trailed off. “No . . . for a long time after . . . I prided myself for getting on with my life. I fixed up the millhouse, got into serious cabinetry. Got to believing I didn’t need anybody . . .”
    “Then Judith?”
    “Then Judith.” Tom Kearney nodded. “You live long enough, you get to know something about yourself. I’m one of those people who has to share. If we don’t . . . if we can’t . . . there’s something good in us that atrophies. It just withers away.”
    He stood there, thinking about that, then turned and picked up the frying pan.
    “Scrambled? Or fried?”
    F rank sat at the harvest table, sipping coffee, and watched his father at the stove. He traced the ancient scars in the tabletop with an index finger.
    Been what? Five? No . . . six months.
    Six months since the early-morning phone call and the strangled words. Then the long weeks later, watching his father grit his way through physical therapy. During those grueling sessions, Frank understood how a younger Tom Kearney had gutted it through World War II—jump school at Fort Benning, parachuting into Normandy, and, finally, in muddy combat boots and no longer young, drinking captured champagne in Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.
    Fast forward—the murder of Mary Keegan, the frantic search for her killer, and the lives that search changed. Among them Judith Barnes’s and his own father’s.
    “Hello, furry one.”
    Tom Kearney looked down at Monty. The big cat had come out of nowhere and was winding around his legs.
    “A little egg?”
    Monty sat staring raptly at Frank’s father.
    With one hand, Tom Kearney found a saucer in a nearbycabinet and, with the other, deftly scooped up a heaping tablespoon of scrambled eggs.
    “He won’t eat eggs,” Frank said.
    Monty was into them before Tom Kearney could get the saucer on the floor.
    Frank shook his head. Cats.
    His father had moved easily. No left-side dragging. The stroke might as well have not happened. Except that it had. And it had brought with it a sense of mortality closing in.
    It’s not all bad—knowing how near death always is. We’re here. Then we’re not. And the world moves on—
    Frank realized he’d missed something his father had said. “What?”
    “Skeeter Hodges.” Tom Kearney put the plates on the table. He pulled up a chair opposite Frank and sat. “Tell me about it,” he said, cutting into a sausage. “Begin at the beginning.”
    “Hoser and I got the call . . . Friday night . . . about eight . . .”
    Bayless Place . . . flashes of blue and red . . . the Orioles . . . Teasdale . . . isn’t one bunch of gang-bangers, it’s gonna be another . . . Pencil Crawfurd in the ICU . . . Marcus and Skeeter’s mother . . .
    His father listened, interrupting only to ask an occasional question.
    Frank finished. Tom Kearney sat quietly, somber, reflective. Frank remembered his father’s days presiding in court.
    “The seventies and eighties in this town were awful,” Tom Kearney said. “I thought we were on the edge of anarchy. If it had