Free Lovers and Madmen(Sasha McCandless 4.5) by Melissa F Miller

CHAPTER 1
     
    February 13th
     
    Sasha woke with a start.
Had someone been rattling the knob on the condo’s front door?
    Her heart thumped. She strained to listen for the
noise that had woken her, but all she heard was the faint hum of the building’s
heating system, low and distant, and Connelly’s soft, even breathing next to
her.
    Just a bad dream. Another bad dream.
    She checked the glowing numbers on the alarm clock’s
display. 4:24 a.m. She nestled beside Connelly, curved her body around his, and
waited for the rhythm of his slumber to lull her back to sleep.
    He turned in his sleep and threw his right arm and
leg over her body, pulling her closer. She ran her hands along his strong,
broad back and pressed her head against his chest.
    Despite Connelly’s warm presence, she already knew
her efforts to recapture sleep would be futile. Her pulse was still racing, and
her mind was keeping pace with it. Sleep would elude her for the rest of the
night.
    Might as well be productive.
    She eased her legs from beneath Connelly’s thigh
and slipped out of the bed without a sound. She crept down the three steps that
led from the loft into the hallway and hesitated before walking to the front
door to confirm it was, indeed, locked and chained.
    She padded through the dark living space to the
leather reading chair that sat beside a floor-to-ceiling window, tucked her
legs under a pale blue chenille blanket, and pulled her laptop off the side
table.
    She powered it on. The display’s light was harsh and
bright, and her eyes watered for a moment before they adjusted. While the computer
cycled through its start-up procedures, she rolled her head from side to side
to loosen her tight neck muscles.
    Then—just as she had done so many times in the
past four months—she read and reread the rules of professional conduct that
governed the behavior of attorneys practicing law in Pennsylvania. Logic
dictated that the rules hadn’t changed since her last sleepless night. But she
couldn’t resist the urge to check again.
    She’d always thought of the rules of professional
conduct as an attorney’s crutch, a tool to lean on in making hard decisions.
    But since October, she’d come to see the rules as
a set of handcuffs. Or maybe a straitjacket—an impediment to justice that refused
to yield.
    It didn’t matter how many times she read them or
how cleverly she parsed the language, the rules prevented her from telling the
authorities what she’d learned only too late: her client had bashed in his
pregnant wife’s skull with a hammer and left her to die in a parking garage.
    After her initial shock had worn off, she’d talked
to Larry Steinfeld, the experienced criminal defense attorney who’d helped her
in her representation of the Lady Lawyer Killers. Larry had been sympathetic
but firm: Rule of Professional Conduct 1.6, Confidentiality of Information,
prohibited her from sharing any information with the authorities that was
adverse to a client’s interests, even after the representation had ended.
    Larry also tried, with limited success, to
convince her that she should be pleased by a job well done, pointing out that
most criminal defense attorneys represent people who did, in fact, commit the
crimes of which they’d been accused. Intellectually, she understood that he was
right. But, emotionally, all she knew was she didn’t have what it took to
practice criminal law.
    Boxed in by the rules of ethics, she had to resort
to hoping the district attorney’s office would stumble across the truth without
her help. Because there had been no trial, there was no double jeopardy issue. But
with a man already behind bars, who was widely perceived to have committed the
murder, the district attorney had little incentive to go looking for a new
suspect.
    She walked into the kitchen to sip some water and
clear her head.
    Richard Vickers, the man charged with the murder
of Clarissa Costopolous and her unborn child as well as the murder of