Evidence of Guilt (12 page)

"He had a way of finding trouble in spite of it. Maybe if we'd--"

"We did the best we could." Grace's voice was sharp. "And he's never seemed to appreciate any of it."

Jake's jaw tightened.

Grace touched her husband's hand, offering an apol-

ogy for her snappishness. She turned to me. "As you can tell, this is something of a sore point between us."

"I imagine raising children is never easy."

"No, it isn't," Jake said with a laugh. "Let me get more wine." He went inside and returned with the bottle.

"I take it Wes didn't grow up in this house," I said as Jake refilled my glass.

"We moved in the year he left home," Grace explained.

The year Wes was sent away, I amended silently.

Jake finished refilling the other glasses. "When I started my practice here I lived in that little place on Elm that Wes has now. Used to make house calls in those days. A terribly inefficient way to practice medicine, but you do get to know your patients."

"How did Wes end up in the house on Elm?"

"We moved to Pine Hills right after we were married, but we kept the old house as a rental property. It came vacant again just when Wes moved back to town. The place needed work and he agreed to fix it up in lieu of rent. He's done a good job too."

"As far as it's gone," Grace amended.

From Jake's expression it was clear they'd been over this ground before. "Grace thought we should hire a professional," he explained. "Get the whole thing fixed up quickly and sell it."

"With Andrea headed off to college, we could use the extra money."

"We're doing fine without it. Anyway, Wes has been taking his time with the renovation--sanding the wood, stripping the old wallpaper off before painting, replumbing the fixtures, that sort of thing. No question it's slow going, but he was doing it the right way."

"I suppose I should be glad he found
something to
do right. Lord knows there hasn't been much of that." Grace raised her glass to her lips, then set it down abruptly. "I think I'll check the roast. It should be about ready by now."

"Wes's arrest has been hard on her,"Jake said, when she left. "She's worried about what will happen to him, worried about what it will do to the girls. She's even afraid that it might affect my medical practice. Although I must say that so far people have been very understanding."

"I should hope so," Sam humphed. "Anyone who's raised a kid knows you don't have a damn bit of a say in how they turn out."

Just then a lanky, barefoot and bare-legged girl appeared in the doorway.

"Speak of the devil," Jake called out good-naturedly. "Pammy, come meet Ms. O'Brien."

"Kali," I amended, hoping he wasn't one of those parents who insisted their children address every adult by surname.

Pammy wasn't particularly interested either way. She murmured a "Hi," stole a quick sip of her father's wine, gave him an impish grin when he started to protest, then grabbed a handful of chips and headed back inside. "Mom says dinner's about ready," she called over her shoulder.

Jake laughed. "Case in point. The girl has a mind of her own. You can be sure that whatever I say to her goes in one ear and out the other." He stood. "I'll go see if I can give Grace a hand."

I started to follow, but Sam cornered me and we hung back for a moment.

"How'd it go yesterday with Wes?" he asked.

I shrugged. "The man has an attitude."

"Wouldn't you, if you were looking at murder one?"

"I guess it would depend on whether or not I was guilty. In either case, the last person I'd want to piss off is my attorney."

"Got to you, did he?" Sam's bushy white brows pulled tight above his eyes. "If you're going to survive in this business, Kali, you've got to develop a thick skin. Concentrate on building your case and don't let Wes, or anyone else, get to you."

"How are we going to build any kind of decent case when all the evidence lines up on the other side?" I told him about the lab report Curt had shown me the evening before.

"I got a call about that myself, yesterday afternoon."

"So, what do you think?"

He sighed. As I had predicted, his response was philosophical. "I think we're going to have to find a way to deal with it."

Inside, Grace was busy with the salad, Jake with the wine. Andrea was no longer clutching the phone to her ear, but she held it in her hand as she put die finishing touches on the table. I seized the opportunity to slide down the hall to the bathroom. Only I suppose in this instance, powder room would be a more apt description. Marble floor and vanity, polished brass fixtures, large mirrored walls and a display of fancy soaps and lotions. It was the sort of place where you end up wiping your hands on your slacks because you don't want to dirty the towels.

By the time I rejoined the others we were ready to sit down for dinner. Andrea had detached herself from the telephone but looked as though she'd rather be clutching it than her dinner fork. When Grace introduced us, she forced a smile, then looked away.

Except for the expression of utter boredom, Andrea was a pretty girl, with shoulder-length hair, blond like her mother's, and a clear, pale complexion. She wore the black leggings she'd worn earlier, but she'd changed the oversized tee for a silk shirt. She lifted a brow at her sister's loose-fitting cutoff overalls.

"You're coming to dinner like that? You look like you should be milking cows."

Pammy mooed in her face.

"Girls, please. We have company."

"Which is exactly," Andrea huffed, "why she should make an effort to look presentable."

Pammy gave us a silent but dramatic version of "who? me?" Not as pretty as her sister, Pammy had a mouth full of braces and hair that was neither blond nor brown. Though it had been permed at some point in the past, it was now more unruly than curly, and would probably have obscured half her face without the barrettes that held it in place. But there was an appealing perkiness about her that Andrea was lacking.

Jake cleared his throat. "I understand you grew up in Silver Creek," he said, nodding in my direction.

"Yes; in fact, Wes and I were in school together for a while."

Grace looked up from her roast beef, confused. "You were a friend of his?"

"Not a friend, really. We had a couple of classes together."

She nodded, apparently relieved. "It would surprise me if anyone in that group of his amounted to much."

"It certainly was rough there for a while," Jake said evenly, "but Wes has turned out just fine. Not everyone has to go to college or be a superstar."

Andrea snickered. "Auto mechanic, my life's ambition."

Grace gave her a stern look, then turned back to Jake. "That's not what I meant," she said pointedly.

"Have you done much criminal work in the past?" Jake asked, directing his question my way.

"Some, not a lot."

"Kali knows her stuff," Sam said.

Jake made some more inquiries, mostly about my education and training, then hit me with the big question I'd known was coming.

"What's your assessment of the case? Are the odds as bad as they appear?"

"It's kind of early to tell."

"I'm not asking for promises, just your gut-level feeling."

I shook my head. "Feelings don't bear on much of anything at this point."

Grace cut a string bean in half, then set her fork down next to her plate. "Don't the police have quite a bit of evidence against Wes?"

"There's no shortage of evidence the DA can use, but none of it's conclusive. We're hoping to chip away at most of it. We're also exploring other angles."

Jake was refilling the wineglasses. He looked up. "What other angles?"

"Nothing specific just yet. We thought we'd look into Lisa Cornell's background. She's relatively new to town. Also, there's a homeless man who lives in the woods near the Cornell place. It's possible he saw or heard something that could help us."

Sam's head nodded in agreement. "Apparently there's been quite a bit of interest in the property Lisa Cornell inherited from her aunt. That's an avenue we'll pursue as well."

Grace pushed the string bean around on her plate. "Don't you think the police have done that already?"

"Not necessarily," Sam said. The police see what they want to see. Once they identify a suspect, they focus on that person to the exclusion of all others. They build a case against him based on their interpretation of the evidence."

He paused to tear off a piece of roll, then held it in his hand while he continued. "But there are a lot of twists you can put on the facts. That's one of the approaches we take in trying to counter the prosecution's position. But the police also reach the wrong conclusion sometimes simply because of a missing piece they've overlooked. That's why we want to explore every possible angle."

Jake appeared thoughtful. "I understand that Lisa Cornell was engaged. Don't statistics show that women are killed most often by a spouse or lover?"

"What the statistics show," I explained, "is that most people are killed by someone they know. With women it's often someone they've been involved with romantically, but there can be other connections as well."

"Don't you think it's worth exploring?" Jake's tone was patronizing, and I bit back the urge to tell him so.

"I'm sure the police talked to the boyfriend," I said, "but I intend to also. If nothing else, he's likely to know about Lisa's recent activities. His name is Philip Stockman. His family owns the Big Bob Hardware stores."

Pammy bobbed to attention. "You're kidding. His son goes to our school." She looked at Andrea. "Danny Stockman. He's a year behind you, I think. Do you know him?"

"Great," Andrea huffed, her voice thick with sarcasm. "This gets better and better. As if it's not bad enough having a murderer in the family, now it turns out his victim is

practically related to someone I went to school with. Thank God I graduated so I don't have to face all that when school starts."

"Your brother has been charged," Jake said, emphasizing the last word, "not convicted. You watch what you say, understand?"

Andrea lifted her chin and met his gaze. "Half-brother," she corrected.

"Danny's mother was killed in a boating accident when he was a baby," Pammy said. "He wrote a story about it for the school literary magazine."

"Are you sure it's the same family?" I asked. "If this guy has a sixteen-year-old son, he must be quite a bit older than Lisa."

Andrea arched her perfectly tweezed brow and looked at me as though I were unbelievably out-of-it. "So?"

I shrugged. Maybe I was.

Jake drummed the table lightly with his fork. "I'd like to be kept apprised of these other leads you're following. I've got my own network of connections, and I may be able to help out. I'm always amazed at the volume of information that travels via the grapevine."

Throughout the discussion Grace had remained quiet, pushing the food around on her plate without ever taking a taste. Now she folded her hands and looked up. "What about trying to work out some sort of deal with the DA's office?"

Jake's eyes met hers. "Grace, we've ..."

She turned to me. "Do you think there's a chance they'd let him plead to a lesser charge?"

"Wes doesn't want that, I'm afraid."

"Maybe you could talk to him, change his mind."

Jake placed a hand over hers. "We've been over this, Grace. You don't want him to spend the rest of his life in prison if he's innocent."

She pulled her hand away. "It's better than being dead, isn't it?"

Jake's expression was pained. I wondered if, like me, he wasn't so sure.

After dinner Grace retreated to the kitchen, steadfastly refusing my offer to help. Sam and Jake moved to the living room with glasses of brandy. I passed up the brandy and instead stepped outside to drink in the freshness of the night air. The sun had set and a few stars glimmered above, but the sky was still cast in gradations of blue and gray, I took a seat, leaned back and gazed out at the hills, lulled by the pleasant drone of crickets and the faint rustle of the breeze in the grass. I wondered, fleetingly, what sounds greeted Wes's ears right then.