Against the Law Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Jay Brandon

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Jay Brandon

  The Edward Hall Series

  AGAINST THE LAW *

  The Chris Sinclair Series

  ANGEL OF DEATH

  AFTERIMAGE

  SLIVER MOON

  GRUDGE MATCH

  RUNNING WITH THE DEAD

  * available from Severn House

  AGAINST THE LAW

  Jay Brandon

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY

  This eBook edition first published in 2018 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2018 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2018 by Jay Brandon.

  The right of Jay Brandon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8770-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-885-9 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-947-3 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  This, like one of my favorite earlier books,

  is dedicated to Elizabeth and Sam.

  And for Becky.

  ONE

  Edward was enjoying watching dusk erase the buildings and thinking about getting another beer, when he faintly heard his phone ringing. He felt only a mild curiosity about who might be calling, but then the front door opened and Mike leaned out and tossed the phone at him.

  ‘You might want to take this,’ he said. ‘I already accepted the call.’

  Accepted the call? What did that mean?

  But then the recorded voice said, ‘Hold for the inmate call.’

  Edward sat upright with a strange swirl of dread and nostalgia suddenly roiling his stomach.

  ‘Edward?’

  ‘Amy? What are you doing calling from the jail?’

  ‘I’m in it, Eddie. Booked in. This is my one call. You know, the famous one call? Tell me I didn’t waste it.’ He recognized the panic in her voice, knew it intimately.

  ‘Of course you didn’t. What in the world, Amy? What did you get arrested for?’

  She started crying. He stood up and walked into the house, through his roommate Mike’s concerned stare and into his bedroom. Don’t let them see you cry, Edward thought. Don’t show the other inmates any sign of vulnerability. Cons may have few other life skills, but they knew how to zero in on the weak. Maybe the rules were different on the women’s side, but he doubted it.

  ‘Edward, can you get me a lawyer, a really good one? I figure you’d know the best.’

  ‘Of course. You know I will, Amy. But what the hell? I need to prepare the lawyer for something. What’s the charge?’

  She hiccupped and her crying paused. In a tiny voice that reminded him of Amy as a child, she said, ‘Murder?’

  ‘My God. I’ll be right there.’

  After he got dressed Edward dug an old address book out of a drawer. On his way out he said to Mike, ‘Stay close to your phone, OK? I may need you.’

  ‘Sure. What’s up?’

  ‘My sister’s been arrested for murder.’

  They kept him waiting nearly half an hour, on the attorney’s side of the visitor’s booth of the Harris County Detention Center. He wasn’t on Amy’s visitors’ list – she didn’t have one yet – but he’d gotten in by showing his bar card, which felt very strange. Good thing he hadn’t followed his first inclination after being disbarred, to cut it up into little pieces and throw it into Buffalo Bayou.

  Amy looked like hell. That was no surprise, almost everybody did after the arrest and booking process, but what interested him was the way she looked like hell. Her eyes were wild, not only red but darting around, and her hands shook when she put them on the counter in front of her, on the other side of the thick plastic. Check, check. Standard signs. But her hair was beautiful. Higher on her head than he remembered, thick and lovely, brown like his own but with red highlights and obviously coiffed. Her mouth still showed traces of lipstick, though of course the jail had confiscated her jewelry. She must have looked great a short time ago.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Edward. I didn’t know if they’d let you see me.’

  ‘They did. As your lawyer. For now. Saturday night, Amy, not that easy to get in touch with lawyers right now.’

  ‘You’re here as my lawyer … But didn’t you get – you know – disbarred?’

  ‘Yes. You know what? They don’t have a ceremony and strip off your pinstriped suit and break your briefcase in half.’ He held up his bar card. ‘They don’t take the card away. And some people here still remember me fondly.’

  ‘So you’re impersonating a lawyer?’

  ‘Are we going to talk about my crimes? Which one of us is free to walk out of here? No, let’s talk about you, Dr Amy. What happened?’

  His harshness was deliberate. You often had to do that with clients, especially ones in jail.

  She recovered herself a little, so it had worked. Her eyes skittering away from his, she said, ‘Is this covered by attorney-client privilege? You know, when you’re not actually – an attorney?’

  ‘Let’s say it’s covered by the brother-sister privilege. Do you think I’d betray you?’

  There was an awkward pause.

  In a calm, reassuring voice, Edward said, ‘Amy. I would never tell anything you asked me not to tell. No matter what. OK?’

  She finally looked at him. Something in his face made her sit up straighter and nod. ‘OK.’

  ‘Who did they arrest you for killing?’

  She maintained eye contact, to her credit. ‘Paul.’

  That didn�
�t come as a great surprise. Somehow he’d figured.

  ‘What makes them think you killed him?’ Sometimes you jumped right into the ultimate question with a client, usually you circled around it.

  ‘I guess I’m the natural suspect, right, the estranged wife? Plus, I found his body.’

  Edward managed not to wince. Estranged was supposed to mean not seeing each other, so if Amy had been there, well, he understood why police had questioned the situation.

  His silence had the same effect as a question. Amy leaned forward, hands flat on the countertop, with that urgency to make her listener understand that cops count on when trying to get a confession.

  ‘Yes, we’d been seeing each other again. I hadn’t told anyone because I didn’t want to put that pressure on us. As a matter of fact, we were supposed to make our public debut tonight. There was a medical awards dinner. Paul was nominated. He asked me to go with him. Not suggested we go together. Asked me out.’ She dimpled slightly, enough for her brother to see how much that had meant to her. Which meant Paul was still the love of her life, maybe.

  On the other hand, that’s who murderers usually kill.

  ‘So you went to his house. That’s when you found him? Was he supposed to pick you up and when he didn’t show you went over there?’

  ‘No, I went to his place. We’d planned to meet there. He said he didn’t want to sit in my living room waiting for me to be ready. So I went over there. The door was unlocked, but I knocked anyway, just to be polite. That’s when I heard the shot.’

  ‘You actually heard it?’

  She nodded, her head going up and down in tiny bobs. ‘I panicked. I didn’t recognize it at first. I thought his stove had exploded. It scared me. I just stayed out there for a minute. Then I opened the door and called his name. I thought I heard the back door close. That’s when I smelled it. Gunsmoke. Did you know that’s a real thing? I had no idea. But I smelled it. It’s still in my nostrils.’

  She was still panicked, words skittering out of her mouth, but Edward didn’t say anything to calm her. Sometimes this initial gush carried the best information, unfiltered by a screening brain.

  ‘So then I ran. I dropped my purse and my wrap and I ran to the back of the house. The smell got stronger. He was in the bedroom, on the floor. It looked like he’d fallen back on the bed and slid off. I turned his body over. He’d been shot. He was still alive, Edward. He looked at me. He couldn’t speak, but his eyes were so frightened. Then they just glazed over. I was screaming his name, I think. I started doing chest compressions, but that was just making him gush more blood. I saw his phone on the nightstand and called 911. I just left the line open while I tried to revive him. I was yelling at them, telling them to hurry. I couldn’t remember the address right then, but of course they had it, from the phone.’

  So they’d been able to place her at the scene at the time of his death. And she’d undoubtedly been covered with blood when police arrived. No wonder she’d gotten arrested.

  ‘I kept working. I think I had him back at one point, I’m pretty sure I did, but by the time EMS came—’

  ‘Amy. Look at me.’

  She did, coming back from a long distance. He looked levelly into her eyes and asked, ‘Was the gun there?’

  She nodded. ‘Right there on the floor. I kicked it out of the way to get to Paul.’

  Please tell me you didn’t pick up the murder weapon. ‘Was that the only time you touched it?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t even see it again. I’d kicked it under the bed. That’s where police found it.’

  So it looked like a clumsy attempt to hide it. Again, he couldn’t fault the detective who’d arrested her.

  ‘What about the door closing? Did you follow up on that?’

  ‘I was trying to save his life, Edward. I was trying to bring my husband back from the dead. No, I didn’t run to the back door and look out.’ Edward didn’t respond and she calmed down a bit. ‘I was sort of trying to listen with one part of my mind, but I didn’t hear a car starting up or anything. I guess the killer just ran across the backyard and over the fence to the alley.’

  ‘Any idea who that might have been?’

  ‘I haven’t even thought about it. I’ve been replaying what happened, wondering what I could have done differently. If I’d just managed to get his heart beating again for five minutes. EMS were on their way. If I’d had a defibrillator …’

  It may have been true that she’d been trying to save him. It must have been horrible for her, a medical doctor, to feel that life so close at hand and not be able to grab it and force it back into Paul’s body. To see the man you loved lying there, looking almost like he had when he was alive, his last panicked look begging you to bring him back and you helpless to do it. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t shot him, having second thoughts after committing a murder was very common.

  And cops thought linearly. If you couldn’t give them another suspect, the investigation never went in any other direction, except deeper into why their one suspect must have committed the crime. He was being Amy’s lawyer now. It was his job to think better than she could at this moment.

  ‘Do you have any ideas?’

  She looked at him blankly and he knew she didn’t understand the question. But before he could even draw breath to rephrase it, Amy pulled herself together. Her eyes focused. She’d always had the best concentration in the family, even better than their father’s. When she was a girl he imagined he could actually see the thought bubble forming over her head, her will to understand was so strong.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have no idea. We’d been separated for nearly six months; I don’t even know who Paul’s friends were lately. What he was into.’

  Edward steeled himself to be her lawyer, not a brother sparing her feelings. ‘Had he been dating someone else before you?’

  She shrugged. ‘Of course he was. He was a doctor in the big city, separated from his wife. Do the math. There could have been women waiting for years to fling themselves at him. But I don’t know details.’

  He waited, watching her while thinking himself. What else would police want to know? What might they have read into the scene? If she’d told them why she was there, they would have started trying to discredit that story already.

  He realized he was thinking like a prosecutor, adopting the cop’s viewpoint, trying to figure out why evidence would be admissible rather than otherwise, thinking of ways to discredit the client’s story rather than supporting it. Interesting. He’d been away from the game long enough that he’d reverted to his roots, his early training as a prosecutor. The years of overlay of being a defense lawyer had fallen away. Not a good thing, if he was going to take care of his sister.

  But it was her story that set off this response. It was so easy to pick apart.

  All right, then. Let’s beef it up.

  Amy’s eyes remained distant. She was still in that bedroom. Edward did the meanest thing he could have done in that situation. He said her name.

  ‘Amy.’

  She looked sharply at him, eyes widening. Even replaying the scene of her dying husband was preferable to the current reality; this sordid, cold cinder block room, the thick plastic between them smudged with handprints of desperation.

  ‘How long had you and Paul been going out together again?’

  ‘Three weeks. I can tell you the date. It was our anniversary.’

  ‘Your anniversary’s in June.’ It was March now.

  ‘Yes, I know, Edward.’ She spoke reprovingly, as if she were the one who got to criticize his answer. ‘This was the anniversary of our first – a different anniversary.’ She didn’t quite blush, though her mouth closed down to as thin a line as it could. Amy stared straight at him. Again he could see the girl she’d been, the playful teenager with a secret she wouldn’t keep for long.

  ‘OK, so three weeks. Was it usually like this, you going to his place, or would he pick you up?’

  ‘Neither, at first. We’
d meet at a restaurant or bar. Places where we’d never gone before. Then he came and picked me up a couple of times. Tonight was only the second time I’d been to his house, almost as if he didn’t want me to know where it was. The secret lair. The fortress of solitude.’ She smiled. Sitting on that plastic chair, in her thin jail coverall, she actually smiled at having penetrated his defenses.

  ‘Who else knew you and Paul were seeing each other again?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Amy. You haven’t kept a secret for three weeks in your life. And this was a big deal. Who did you talk to about it? Jean? Roy?’ He was shooting in the dark, trying to remember names.

  ‘I’m not sixteen any more, Eddie. I don’t have best friends. I have colleagues and I have old friends I don’t have time to see any more. What about you? Who did you call when you first got—? Sorry, that was mean.’

  Her apologizing to him in this situation was so absurd he had no answer. He reverted to lawyer talk.

  ‘OK, what other clues might you have left? Was it a new dress you were wearing tonight?’ She nodded. ‘Where’d you buy it?’

  ‘Lord and Taylor’s. The Galleria. It’s beautiful, Edward. It’s a little off the shoulder, deep blue—’

  ‘Do you still have the receipt?’

  ‘Yes. In my desk drawer at home.’

  ‘Anything else new for the occasion? Earrings? Perfume?’

  Her mouth went small again, but she opened it to say, ‘Underwear. Victoria’s Secret.’ Her eyes were flat, daring him to say something.

  Edward went on quickly. ‘OK. Good. The details support your story. Is there any other hint that might say what tonight was? A diary? Note to yourself? Facebook?’

  She shook her head, then stopped. ‘Wait. Yes. It’s in my appointment calendar on my desk at home. Just Paul’s name and an asterisk. Oh, and his new address on a page about a week earlier, from the first time I went there.’

  That combined with the fact that the awards dinner was happening tonight should help.

  ‘OK. Amy, here’s my most important question so far. Is there anything incriminating at your house? Anything at all, even something a dumb cop might misinterpret to mean you were making plans to kill your husband? Or not even plans, but that you might be mad at him, or the conflicts had escalated? Anything at all like that. Think very hard about this.’