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“Nah, this job is hard enough without someone riding shotgun on your ass. Besides, I’m out of here tomorrow for a long weekend back home. But it’s kind of an interesting case, so if you don’t mind, I might check in with you from time to time for an update.”
    “I figured you might.”
    “And with your blessing, Linc, I’d like to tell Dixon what I’ve learned here tonight. He’ll get it out of me anyway, and he could probably quietly arrange for access to some federal resources if you needed them for any reason.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind. And if, upon learning what happened, the good Judge were to learn something and confide in you …”
    “You’ll be the first person I call.”
    “Right,” Coolidge replied and then, with a tinge of sarcasm, added, “Because you’re not a shill.”

CHAPTER THREE
“Meredith.”
    S t. Paul.
    Meredith Hilary motored east along Ford Parkway through the intersection with Cleveland Avenue and turned her Mercedes right into the parking lot of the two-story office complex and searched for a parking place during the busy noon hour. She finally found a spot and slipped into the tight parking slot, shut off the engine, exhaled, and steeled herself for what she was about to hear. Five minutes later, she was admitted to the office of Private Investigator John Biggs.
    It was not Meredith’s first brush with Biggs. Four years ago, Meredith’s first husband hired Biggs to follow her. Biggs caught her having an affair with her then boss and current husband. Now, four years later, she had the same suspicions about her husband once again having a wandering eye. Biggs was quite familiar with J. Frederick Sterling. He was the natural choice to see if he was once again straying.
    As she sat herself down in the guest chair in front of Biggs’s desk, she saw the brown expandable folder with Sterling written on the white label. Her answers were inside, and she pretty much knew what the answers were.
    “So, Mr. Biggs, what have you found?”
    Biggs sat forward in his chair, his elbows on the desk, has hands clasped in front of him. “That your suspicions were well founded.”
    “And is the affair with his client, Ms. Gentry?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you’re sure?”
    “Quite sure,” Biggs replied. “I have photographs, and I have video. In fact, I have video from two nights ago in a hotel room in Bismarck.”
    “Can I see the evidence?”
    “You sure you want to?”
    Meredith nodded.
    Biggs turned his computer monitor towards her chair, pulled up a series of files, and clicked on the first one. Fifteen minutes later, Meredith had seen her husband kissing Gentry in his rental car and then the two of them having sex in his hotel room. How Biggs managed to essentially get inside the hotel room and get the footage, she did not know, or maybe even care to know, but he had the goods on her husband. Meredith watched as the woman writhed on top of her husband, and she watched as he then rolled Callie Gentry over and made love to that woman just the way he used to make love to her. It was shocking to see and hard to watch, and the anger slowly boiled inside her. Even worse, there were pictures of Frederick taking her to their house out on Lake Minnetonka. He was using their lake house for the affair. Meredith bitterly shook her head. Her husband was doing the same things now that he did with her four years ago.
    Frederick was as caught as any man could be. She’d just witnessed the naked truth and, when being completely honest with herself, she wasn’t surprised. The signs had been there for awhile now, both that he may have been straying on a wife once again and that their marriage was not what she thought it would be. She scolded herself for thinking she could be the one to tame him. J. Frederick Sterling wasn’t a man who could be tamed.
    “So what are you going to do?” Biggs asked.
    “I’d like to kill him” was her initial response. After a moment of thought, she realized,