Trial Run

  Trial Run

  Anne Metikosh

  Avon, Massachusetts

  This edition published by

  Crimson Romance

  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

  Blue Ash, Ohio 45242

  www.crimsonromance.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Anne Metikosh

  ISBN 10: 1-4405-5651-2

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5651-7

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-5652-0

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5652-4

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art © 123rf.com

  “The important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could become.” — Charles Dickens

  Contents

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  About the Author

  A Sneak Peek from Crimson Romance

  Also Available

  CHAPTER ONE

  The real turning point in a woman’s life is not the day she marries the guy or wins the promotion, it’s the morning she decides not to mail a letter, or the afternoon she sits at home and watches the woods fill up with snow.

  Or the evening she passes a newsstand where every headline banners the same story.

  In varying degrees of outrage, hostility and sensationalism, Tuesday’s headlines all reported that John Randall (Randy) Outray III had been arrested on charges of rape and murder.

  The Outrays were fixtures in the tabloids. For five generations the local lumber barons had provided as much pulp for the gossip mill as they had for the papermill, their every move gleefully examined at checkout counters and beauty salons across the county. Now they had advanced to the front pages of the dailies. I snatched up copies of the quickly disappearing Daily Express and Dahgue County Barker and stuck them in my briefcase for when I got home.

  I lived in one-fifth of a mansion whose glory days are long past. A couple of years ago a developer bought the property from a Dahgue county doyenne who was eager to trade the castle for capital. The developer had divided the house into five units, which he sold at a substantial profit to investors like me, who aspired to own something unique.

  My south-facing corner overlooked what was once the kitchen garden. I still cultivated a few clumps of parsley and basil there, but I’m not much of a cook, so the bulk of my little acreage was devoted to perennials. Every year I divided and transplanted, adding new bulbs and thinning old growth as whim dictated. The result was a satisfying mix of shape and color that I enjoyed year-round from the window whose box seat I have lavished with pillows.

  I kicked off my shoes, opened a bottle of red wine and curled up on the seat, making a small ceremony of filling my glass and toasting the air before shaking open the papers.

  Randy Outray smiled at me with monied arrogance from page one of the Dahgue County Barker. The story was replete with flattering details of his schooling, social, and sporting lives. Center stage was a florid description of the crime he had allegedly committed. At the bail hearing, Randy’s statement to inquisitive journalists had been a laconic finger, which the Barker published as “no comment” and the Press translated into probable guilt.

  Not being a graduate of the local college nor a member of The Clubbe, the publisher of the Concord-based Press owed nothing to Kingsport Pulp and Paper. Over the caption “Erring Heir,” he printed a photo of the Outray clan in deep mourning, acknowledging in the smallest possible typeface that the picture had actually been taken at Grandpa John’s funeral the year before. Though presented in less unctuous terms, the family history was again featured on page one. The victims’ names were mentioned on page two.

  I had never heard of Susan and Tracey Forrester. I had no idea of who they were or where they lived, what they fought or laughed or cried over, but I learned that night in horrific detail exactly how they had died. Their murder was a headline on the radio and a feature on the News at Six. In a voice full of pleasurable distress, the solemn, sincere male news anchor promised film at eleven. I wondered fleetingly how that was possible. Did they plan to stage a reenactment, some kind of amateur crime drama, using local thespian talent for the roles of murderer and victims? There was a brief shot of the widower, Ian Forrester, leaving the coroner’s office. Commentary still focused on the Outrays; journalists speculated on the defense to be mounted on Randy’s behalf. Twenty-four hours after their death, the torn lives and mangled bodies of Susan and Tracey Forrester had already assumed an aura of unreality, as if their pain had disappeared along with the people who suffered it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On Wednesday morning, I let myself in to Mel Deloitte’s house using the key he had given me. All my clients give me keys. After eight years, it still amazes me, that level of trust. After all, what do they really know about me, apart from the obvious: I’m free, white, and over twenty-one. My business card reads “Nina Ryan, Household Manager” which means that, for a fee, my clients can relax in the knowledge that their bills will be paid on time, their dogs walked, plants watered, houses cleaned, larders stocked, gardens tended, and travel arrangements made.

  They know so little about me, and I know so much about all of them.

  I don’t read diaries but I do read clues. I’m there when the phone rings. I straighten the cards on the mantle; I check for dust behind the headboards; I balance the ledgers. So I know who has half a million socked away in an offshore trust; I know who doesn’t sleep with his wife; I know who drinks, who gambles, who beats the dog. I recognize the signs of leaving. If push ever came to shove, I could make a fortune in blackmail.

  Deloitte looked startled when I entered his kitchen.

  “Oh, hi. You’re early.”

  I shook my head. “You’re late. It’s eight thirty.”

  The lawyer glanced at his watch and frowned. “Shit, this damned thing is broken again. Three thousand dollar watch and it’s in for repairs more than it’s on my wrist. I’ll be out of your way in a sec.”

  “No hurry. Finish your breakfast.”

  “Listen, do me a favor? Go into my study and bring me the big buff folder on the desk.”

  Deloitte’s study was the only room in the house to escape his ex-wife’s passion for Victorian-era decor. She was long gone, departed in a huff over the philandering that had made her the second Mrs. D in the first place, but hadn’t stopped after the ring went on her finger. Delo
itte was paying ten thousand a month for that mistake, which he probably considered a bargain. Number One had cost him more, because of the children.

  Deloitte liked to keep files on his desk, framed by open volumes of law journals and other learned tomes. He felt the clutter gave him an air of harassed overwork. To me it merely looked untidy but his clients seemed perversely reassured by the disorder. They took it as a sign that their man was indeed a working legal eagle, not a dilettante out to bilk them of their substantial savings. Twenty years ago, the firm of Deloitte, Hoskins, and Gold found a profitable niche among the socially prominent and awfully affluent of Kingsport and Dahgue County. It’s astonishing to me how many of them had difficulty keeping their hands out of the till and one another’s pants.

  The folder Deloitte had sent me to fetch was lying in the middle of the blotter. Loose papers, photocopies, and faxes spilled out the side. Judging from the time and date on the last one, the lawyer had obviously been at work in the wee hours. That was understandable; the name on the tab was Outray.

  I went back to the kitchen and handed Deloitte his file. He reached for it with one Bahamas-tanned hand while cramming a piece of toast into his mouth with the other. Not a crumb spilled onto his immaculate silk suit. Despite the late-night bags under his eyes, Deloitte looked like what he was; a successful, mature professional, graying into elegant middle age.

  “The marmalade spoils it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The marmalade on your chin. Doesn’t go with the suit.”

  “Shit,” he said. Using the toaster as a mirror, he swiped at his chin with the dishcloth. “Okay, I’m outta here.”

  “Have a good one.”

  “Right.”

  With the Outrays as clients, having a good one was going to be a stretch. According to the news, Randy had been arrested almost as soon as the Forrester’s bodies were discovered. There seemed to be no lack of evidence tying him to the crime and, so far, no denial of his involvement. I wondered how his lawyer planned to represent him.

  Deloitte’s house, like its owner, was high maintenance. The antique armoires and porcelain knickknacks gave a pretty fair indication of his hourly billing rate. A small army of people dusted and vacuumed, cooked and did laundry, washed the car and cut the lawn. I coordinated their efforts. I told them when to polish the silver and checked that none was missing when they were through. I paid the bills and balanced the checkbook, which is how I knew how much he paid his ex-wives and what his dues were at The Clubbe.

  The Kingsport Clubbe was exclusive by virtue of both its fees and the self-interest it promotes. By doubling a consonant and adding an “e,” The Clubbe had erected the facade of a fitness forum over the reality of a frat house. Well-muscled young men presided over state-of-the-art treadmills and weight machines but the lounges were staffed by nubile “hostesses” who chuckled all the way to the bank over the minor perversions and guilty secrets of Kingsport’’s rich and famous.

  Such duality made me anxious. It reminded me of a geyser, threatening the comfortable green world of the surface with a viscous mass bubbling out of control somewhere below.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I had an errand to run downtown. I had just spent an hour with two Labrador retrievers and I didn’t have time to go home and change before the main post office closed. I gave my sweater a quick swipe with the clothes brush I kept in the car. It only spread the dog hair more evenly. I sighed. My own good grooming would have to wait. I scuttled in under the disapproving gaze of the security guard who had to unlock the door to let me back out. I glanced at my watch. Five past six.

  The post office was just around the corner from my sister Kerrin’’s office, so I decided to drop in and touch base. Usually, she bore the intrusion politely.

  Kerrin’s office occupied the ground floor of a two-story house in what used to be a working class neighborhood. The working class couldn’t afford to live there anymore because the upwardly mobile had taken it over, aggressively turning houses into condos, offices, and faddish boutiques. Where lovingly tended gardens once bloomed, now stone cobbles lay heavy. A solitary oasis of green persisted at the far end of the block; ten square feet of grass, garnished with a spreading maple tree and a wrought-iron bench.

  Kerrin’s building stood opposite the green. The brass nameplate on the door read “K. Adams, Trial Consultant.” Renovators had sandblasted the dirt-streaked exterior and trimmed the interior with bleached oak and hanging plants. Reproduction watercolors in muted tones hung on the off-white walls. Coordinating fabrics cover chairs and windows, ambient lighting brightened the workspaces. It was almost painfully tidy. There were no scattered files here, no open reference books, no family photos cluttering the desk.

  When I walked in, Kerrin’s secretary, Louise, was tidying up the office for the night, her angular frame bent to retrieve a piece of paper that had slipped behind the copier. She glanced up as the door snicked shut behind me. Louise is a comfortable fifty-five, with a broad forehead, small nose and determined chin. Behind steel-rimmed glasses, her brown eyes look smaller than they are, which is probably the fault of the lenses. Laugh wrinkles pucker the sides of her mouth, giving her face a homey, lived-in look.

  “I like your hair,” I said. Corrugated gold waves encased her head like a helmet.

  “I know, it looks awful.” She made a face. “The best that can be said for it is it will grow out.”

  “Why gold?” I said.

  “It was one of Darlene’’s experiments.” Darlene was Louise’s teenaged granddaughter. She dreamed of becoming the next Vidal Sassoon.

  I nodded at Kerrin’’s office. “Is she alone?”

  Louise shook her head, waggling her eyebrows suggestively. I peeked around the open door. Mel Deloitte was sitting in the wing chair facing Kerrin’s desk.

  Fully half of Kingsport’s female population harbored a secret passion for Mel Deloitte. Kerrin’s secretary nursed a matchmaker’s hopes for her boss but Kerrin herself displayed not one iota of interest.

  Louise switched off the power bar that fed computer, copier, and fax machine. Without the background hum, Kerrin’s voice carried clearly into the outer office.

  “Be realistic, Mel, no jury is going to buy self-defense in this case. Your client hit a seventy-five-year-old grandmother. All the sympathy is going to be with the grandmother.”

  “The woman threatened him with a gun.”

  “Yes, which turned out to be plastic. It was her grandson’s cowboy pistol.”

  “The kid didn’t know that — he thought she was really going to shoot him.”

  “Mel, you know that’s not the point. It doesn’t matter what the kid thought, it matters what the jury thinks. And believe me, no jury will think that a six foot, hundred and eighty pound twenty-year old felt seriously threatened by a white-haired granny waving a toy pistol.”

  Deloitte sighed. “So what am I supposed to do? The truth is, my client decided to have some Saturday night fun robbing the corner grocery, and even though the cashier was a little old lady with a toy gun, he bopped her on the head before he took off with the cash. If I tell that story to the jury, I might just as well send the kid up now.”

  Kerrin frowned. “Don’t you have anything you can use in his defense? History of abuse, mental illness, drug use, even? Something that will get the court on his side, make them see him as a victim, too?”

  This was an absurdity that Kerrin had tried, unsuccessfully, to explain to me more than once. It was the job of the defense team to protect the accused, she said. Even if they can’t root for him, the trick, and their ethical duty, was not to let their personal feelings interfere with their efforts on his behalf.

  “The defense must always try its best for the client.”

  Over the years, Mel Deloitte had reached the pinnacle of the defense lawyer’s art; he could
sound as though he believed what he was saying even when he didn’t.

  My sister, the psychologist-turned-trial-consultant, was another matter. I remember the impassioned arguments she used to mount for the rights of the accused. Her vehemence had shocked my parents but her husband, Brian, had adored her for it. “I put myself in my client’s position, entirely,” she would say. “I don’t think about the victim very much, nor should I.”

  How many lifetimes ago was that? Dad and Mom were both gone now; Dad mercifully fast of a heart attack, and Mom slowly, in that long series of retreats into silence that left family and friends on the outside, hopelessly searching for the woman who was no longer there. It had seemed right, at the time, to put my life on hold for a while to look after her. Kerrin had been busy with her practice, with Brian and the baby. But somehow it meant I missed the next logical step in the progression from MBA to CEO, and by the time I was ready to get back in line, the next blow had fallen.

  Deloitte was making goodbye noises in Kerrin’s office. He paused in the doorway, shaking his head. “I didn’t really expect you to support a plea of self-defense here, Kerrin, but it would have been nice, just for once, not to have to jump through hoops trying to come up with an excuse for the inexcusable. Days like this, I wonder why I ever got into criminal defense work in the first place.”

  I was pretty sure it was the thrill of criminal activity, the titillation of sex and violence, that had him hooked, but I wasn’t about to say so.

  “Ho, hey there,” he said, catching sight of me in the waiting room. “I didn’t know you did offices. Kerrin, your cleaning lady’s here.”

  “She’s not my cleaning lady. She’s my sister.”

  Deloitte was too well-schooled to register surprise, but I could see the comparisons being drawn. Ten years my elder, Kerrin stood very tall beside me, sleek and quietly composed in her designer suit. My jeans and sweatshirt were rumpled from grooming the Sanderson’s dogs, curly hair pulled loosely into a knot on top of my head. They were surface contrasts, but they went personality-deep. Events that had hardened my sister to a narrow focus had left me as blurred as a clumsy photograph. Kerrin had spliced her life back together in patches of black and white. I still floundered in a miasma of gray.