Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the back. There were two pairs of shoes and one slipper lying on its side, nothing I’d call evidence. Whatever there had been, the police had taken it with them.
    The doorbell rang as I straightened, and it continued to ring as I went down the short hall to the living room. The three diamond-shaped windows in the door were covered with aluminum foil, so the only ways to see who was there were to peel it back or open the door.
    Jenn stood on the front stoop, her lank brown hair lying on the shoulders of an orange top that was a size too small. “I knew it was you,” she said. “I recognized that Volkswagen of yours.”
    “Guilty as charged,” I said. “I am indeed me.”
    Her upper lip rose, showing her teeth. “You think you’re funny, don’t you?”
    “Not very. Do you think you’re Jennifer Entwistle?”
    “How would you know my name?” she said, narrowing her eyes.
    “You gave it to me yourself the first time we met. Also, I saw it on some papers recently. Your phone calls worked, by the way. The magistrate denied bail, which is why Shorter’s still in jail.”
    Her nostrils flared. “Hallelujah,” she said. “Hallelujah.”
    I waited. “Would you like to come in? I haven’t inventoried the kitchen yet, but I can probably offer you a glass of water.”
    “Why would you want to do that?”
    I shrugged. “Social lubricant? We could sit here in the living room with our waters and talk a bit.” I gestured at the furniture—a sofa and matching love seat, both upholstered in a garish pattern, and a large, well-worn recliner. At the end of the room, a twenty-five-inch console TV stood like a museum piece, a bit of 1970s Americana.
    “I don’t have nothing to talk to you about,” she said.
    “And yet here you are.”
    “To tell you Bob Shorter is just where he needs to be, and you need to leave him there.”
    “It’s not up to me. If the prosecution proves its case, he’ll go to prison, maybe even be executed, but all that’s up to a jury.”
    “Suppose the prosecution can’t prove its case?”
    “Then we don’t know that prison’s where Shorter needs to be.”
    She exhaled with a sharp sound of disgust. “That’s just a bunch of lawyer double-talk.”
    I shrugged. Lawyer-talk was what I had. “It’s been nice seeing you.”
    She stuck out her chin, her lips compressed, then turned without speaking and stalked back across the weeds and dirt toward her own home. When I closed the door, I noticed an ax handle leaning in the corner behind it. I picked the ax handle up, and a chill began to work its way up my arm. I dropped it back into the corner and stood rubbing my arm as I looked at it. Either the ax handle emanated evil, or I was letting my imagination run away with me. Neither would be a good thing.
     
    Shorter’s other two bedrooms were small. One had a metal desk and a battered wood filing cabinet. The other bedroom was piled so full of boxes, chairs, box springs, and other discards that I couldn’t get the door all the way open. Rather than wedge myself through the narrow opening, I went back to the home office and pulled out the top drawer of the filing cabinet.
    It held books: a fat tome by Thomas Hobbes, smaller books by Michel Foucault and Machiavelli. All of them were philosophers of some sort, I thought, though I’d read only The Prince . On the bottom of the stack was a slim paperback by Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil .That book, in contrast to the pristine condition of the others, was well thumbed through, with a lot of underlining in red pencil and several dog-eared pages. One of the underlined sentences read:
     
    The lofty, independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, and even the cogent reason, are felt to be dangers, everything that elevates the individual above the herd, and is a source of fear to the neighbour, is henceforth called evil , the tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, self-equalizing disposition, the mediocrity of desires, attains to