Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) (19 page)

“It sounds like you may pull this one out.”

“Hah. It was Judge Cooley’s moment of greatness, not mine. I’ve got a long way to go to reasonable doubt.”

“You yourself had a lot to do with what happened today, sounds to me like.”

“I’ve got fingerprint and blood evidence to deal with and a client who brings unity to the masses in their hatred of him.”

“My money’s on you—or would be, if I could find anyone to bet me.”

“Well, thank you.”

“You haven’t lost a case yet.”

“Not a criminal case.” I gave him a smile. “I’ve never died, either. Do you think that means I’m immortal?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I can’t help thinking of you as a force of nature.”

He smiled, and Deeks gave my ankle a lick. I leaned over to scratch the top of his head—Deeks’s head, not Dr. McDermott’s.

“I’ve got nothing on Deeks in the force-of-nature department,” I said.

Mike called while I was making dinner—which is to say I had dumped salad from a bag into a bowl and was tearing up deli turkey on it.

“Mike,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Brooke says you’re going to talk to Sarah tomorrow.”

“Yep.”

“Let me know how it goes, okay?”

“Will do.”

There was a pause. “Brooke’s thinking you and Paul might like to meet for dinner or something.”

“Not tonight. I’ve already started dinner, and I’ve got some thinking to do.”

“About the case? I’d be willing to serve as a sounding board.”

“Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I need to be alone.”

I ate my salad. I fed Deeks. I brooded about the case, mentally replaying bits of the recent courtroom action, thinking about what was coming. I got some of my best ideas walking with Deeks, but that night I had one as I was getting a jacket out of the front closet.

I stopped with my hand on the doorknob, Deeks’s eyes on my hand.

“Want to go for a ride?” I asked him.

For a moment he didn’t move, then he spun and disappeared into the house. In the kitchen I paused to hoist my briefcase to the top of the counter to get out a pen and a blank subpoena. Deeks, already sitting at the door to the garage, gave me a glance, then returned his gaze to the doorknob, his thick tail sweeping the floor.

“I’ll take that as a ‘Yes, Robin, I do want to go for a ride,’” I said over my shoulder.

As I opened the door, he came up off his front paws in an eager bounce and then was through it. The garage door began to rumble up, but he paid no attention. I opened my car door, and he leaped into my seat, then over the console. He sat looking through the front windshield as if there were something to see—there wasn’t, just a paneled wall with a light switch and the controls to the garage door.

I got into the car, and he gave the side of my face a lick. “Oh, come on. We go for rides all the time,” I said. “Remember going to Mike’s house?”
Remember the
hot tub?
I might have said but didn’t. It would have been unkind to bring up unpleasant memories.

Deeks turned around on the seat and sat down again.

“You and I are living large,” I said, and I turned and backed out of the garage.

Shorter lived on the east side of town. I stroked Deeks’s fur absently as we rode, and he nosed occasionally at the passenger window. When he emitted a brief whine I gave in and opened the window a crack. He put his nose to the opening and breathed in the crisp, clean air of freedom. After we’d been on I-64 awhile, he started getting agitated again, and I unrolled the window enough for him to stick his head out.

“You’re not much of a conversationalist,” I said into the sound of the wind and the road noise.

His tail moved as much as the back of the seat would let it.

“Ah, the sweet scent of heaven,” I said.

The drive to Shorter’s neighborhood took twenty-five minutes, and by the time we got there it was starting to get dark. When I pulled up at the curb a block away from Shorter’s house, it occurred to me yet again that I should have brought a leash. I sat looking at Deeks, and he looked at me, encouraging me with little moves of his head to open the car door so we could get out.

“Can you heel?” I asked him.

He bobbed his head, which could have been a yes, but I was doubtful.

“See, what I’m worried about is protecting you from Larkin and company if they show up to harass us,” I said. “You’d go right up to them like they were our best friends in the world.”

His eyes on mine, he gave another little whine, and I sighed. I wished there was a place to park my car out of sight, but there was only the street. It wasn’t a fanfare of trumpets, but as a calling card my red bug was pretty unmistakable, even in the deepening twilight. Still, I hoped that since I wasn’t leaving it parked in front of Shorter’s house or Bill Hill’s, no one would associate it with me.

“Okay,” I said. I opened the door, and Deeks went right over me, taking no chances on getting left behind.

“You rascal.” I got out and closed the car door. To his credit, Deeks was waiting for me, ready to follow wherever I might lead—and in fact he stayed right with me as we walked along the bar ditch at the side of the road.

“Maybe I don’t give you enough credit,” I said. “Maybe you’re really a well-behaved dog.”

His tail thumped the side of my leg.

Still in my stealth mode, I let us into Bill Hill’s backyard on the side of the house opposite Melissa Stimmler’s. When we got to the chain-link fence that separated Bill’s backyard from Melissa’s, I said to Deeks, “You could jump this fence—couldn’t you, boy?”

He was getting enough size on him that he probably could, but maybe the dark in a strange neighborhood wasn’t the place to start. I fingered the twisted spikes that protruded above the fence’s top bar, looking down at him.

“Okay.” I bent next to him to put a forearm under his body just behind his front legs and another just in front of his back, then straightened, raising him like I was a human forklift. I had to hunch my shoulders and stand on tiptoes to get his legs over the fence; then I bent over the fence to lower him as much as I could. When the spikes started digging into my ribs, I had to let him go. He landed softly and did a quick circle to scout out the surroundings as I put a hand to the top bar of the fence and vaulted over, scissoring my right leg over, then my left.

Deeks joined me as I climbed the steps onto Melissa’s back porch. Her kitchen light was on, illuminating the curtained window panes in the back door. I tapped on the glass. There was no response. I got out my phone. I’d used her phone to email myself her photos, so I had her number.

“Hey, Melissa. It’s me Robin,” I typed. I pushed “Send” and waited.

“Ms. Starling?” Her frightened voice sounded from just inside the door.

“Yes. Robin,” I said. “Sorry to approach you like this.”

The door opened a couple of inches.

“I didn’t want to get you in bad with your neighbors by coming and going through the front door.” Deeks, who was, if possible, less patient than I, put his nose in the crack and pushed. Melissa jumped back from the door with a small cry, one hand going to her throat. It looked as though she wore the same housecoat she’d been wearing the last time I saw her.

“Sorry,” I said. “I should have mentioned I brought company.” Deeks hadn’t stayed for introductions but had trotted past Melissa into her living room and disappeared. “It’s my dog, Deacon. I call him Deeks, mostly, because Deacon seemed like too big a name for the little puppy I started with a few months ago.”

Deeks reentered the kitchen, his tail wagging, and stopped in front of Melissa, looking up.

“If you wanted to scratch the top of his head, he’d like that,” I said. “But you don’t have to. Deeks!”

He didn’t even glance in my direction, just stayed where he was, his eyes on Melissa as he awaited his due.

Tentatively, she reached out a pale hand, ready to snatch it back. Deeks didn’t react when the tips of her fingers touched his head, but the cadence of his tail wagging did pick up a notch as she moved her fingers back and forth against his skull.

“Hello, Deeks,” she whispered.

Deeks gave her housecoat a lick and came back to me.

“Okay,” I told him. I looked up at Melissa. “Do you have more Sleepytime?”

“Of course.” She hesitated, then picked the kettle off the stove and took it to the sink.

“Larkin was on the witness stand today,” I told her. “I don’t guess he’s been by this evening.”

Her thin back stiffened under the housecoat as she put the kettle on the stove and turned on the gas.

“The reason I ask, I used your pictures. I’m afraid there was no hiding where I got them.”

She didn’t look at me, just got down two mugs and the box of tea.

“He said he saw Bob Shorter the day Bill Hill died and that he was coming out of Bill Hill’s house.”

She separated the tea bags and put them in the mugs, then turned, finally, one hand on the counter as if to brace herself. “When?” she said. “When did he see him?”

“About four o’clock. He said Shorter had blood on him.”

“Do you believe him?”

“No. Do you?”

She shook her head. Steam began rise from the spout of the kettle.

“Because you saw both Shorter and Bill Hill after that.”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, I gave Larkin a pretty hard time on the witness stand. My fear is he might take it out on you.”

The kettle began to whistle. As Melissa took it off the stove and poured the boiling water over the tea bags in our mugs, I said, “I also came by to say thank you. Your pictures were a great help.” We sat at her small Formica table, spoons in our mugs and a saucer between us. Deeks got up from his position in front of the back door and resettled at my feet.

“How worried are you about your neighbors, Jenn and Val and the rest of them?”

“What do you mean?”

“If you’ve still got any reserves of resolve, I could use another favor.”

She looked so vulnerable, sitting there in her housecoat and looking at me with those wide eyes. I almost couldn’t say it, but I did. “I’d like you to testify about seeing Bill Hill on his patio the evening of the day he died—and I’ve got an idea that could take you off the hook with your neighbors. If I served you with a subpoena, you’d have to go. You could show it to your neighbors, complain about me barging into your home waving papers, put the whole thing on me.”

It was time to stop talking. I did, waiting for her response. Finally, she said, “You would do that? Force me to testify?”

I found I couldn’t meet her gaze. “Your testimony could be so important. Shorter walking by the house while Bill was sitting in his backyard . . . those are significant facts. It was halfway through the time period the coroner has established for Bill’s time of death.”

I expected an argument or at least some kind of response from her, but when none was forthcoming, I spooned my tea bag onto the saucer between us and took a sip from my mug.

“You know he killed him. Mr. Shorter,” Melissa said into her tea.

I looked up. “No,” I said. “I know he’s a bad man. I know it, you know it, everyone in the neighborhood knows it. The one thing we don’t know is that he killed Bill Hill.” I reached out to lay a hand over hers. “That’s what trials are for, to decide questions like that. It’s our job to get the facts in front of the jury to give them the best possible basis for the decision they have to make.”

“Your job.” She said it so softly that I leaned forward, not completely sure of what she’d said.

I sat back. “Well, yes. My job—but not just mine. It’s the responsibility of all of us as citizens.”

“Truth, no matter who it’s for or against.” She looked up finally and met my gaze. “I have something to show you.” She took her phone from the pocket of her housecoat. When she’d found what she wanted, she handed it to me. “This was last July.”

I was looking at a photograph of a man holding an upraised stick over a cringing dog. The man looked like Shorter.

“The dog ran up to him wagging its tail,” Melissa said. “I was at the window, and I saw it all.”

The dog looked like some kind of shepherd mix. “Are there more pictures?”

“Tap the screen.”

It was a video. I tapped the screen, and the stick came down, catching the dog soundlessly across its back. The picture shook and a woman sobbed as the stick came down five or six more times, the man stepping after the dog as it tried to get away. Finally, the dog stopped moving. The man stood looking down at it, then looked up at the camera and pointed with the ax handle.

Melissa whispered, “He saw me. He saw me with the phone, taking pictures of him beating that dog.”

I looked down at Deeks, thinking not only about him but about all the dogs I had treated when working with my father as his veterinary assistant. Quite a few of those had been shepherd mixes.

“I’ve been so scared.”

I nodded, feeling a stab of empathy that was almost painful.

“There’s no reason Mr. Shorter wouldn’t have killed Bill, if he’d felt like it,” Melissa said.

I sighed out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “No, there’s not,” I said. “Maybe the only question is, did he feel like it?”

“There’s another question. If Mr. Shorter didn’t do it, who did? Bill didn’t have much in the way of friends—mostly me, and I wasn’t much—but he didn’t have any enemies, either.”

“Except for Bob Shorter,” I said.

She nodded. “There’s no one else. You see that, don’t you?”

I opened my mouth to talk about Shorter’s right to a presumption of innocence, his right to be tried by people with open minds, but they were just platitudes. Applied to Shorter they seemed empty and even wrong. “Did he come to the door that day?” I asked. “Has he tried to hurt you?”

She shook her head. “When he walks by the house, he does that, though. Still. If he sees me in the window, he stops and points his equalizer at me, just like you saw.”

“This wasn’t Bill Hill’s dog, was it? This was another one.”

“Yes.”

I stood up, and Deeks scrambled to his feet, his toenails audible on the linoleum floor. “I won’t bother you anymore,” I said. “If Larkin Entwistle harasses you at all, if any of them do, give me a call. I’ll take care of it.”