Holland Taylor Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

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    I glanced at her photograph on my desk. She was dressed in blues, her hat hiding a wave of brown hair, the bill shading hazel eyes. The photo was taken the evening the St. Paul Saints won the Northern League minor league baseball championship. We had donned our uniforms and snuck into Midway Stadium, pretending to be security. A photographer who works for the Pioneer Press sports department took the picture for me; Annie doesn’t know I have it.
    Annie’s photograph was next to Laura’s. Laura, my wife. All golden hair and blue eyes. Laura had worked in advertising as an art director; the photograph was taken when she won a gold push pin or some damn thing at a Twin Cities advertising club awards show.
    She and Anne had not liked each other. Anne dismissed Laura as being frivolous, questioning her occupation, her hobby of collecting antique dolls and toys, her interest in fashion. Laura found Anne obsessive, preoccupied with “the hunt,” placing her job above all else including her family. Anne called Laura “the artiste.” Laura referred to Anne as “Kojak.” They never spoke except to send messages to me. The evening Laura was killed she had asked Annie to tell me that since I was working late, she would take Jennifer to her swimming lesson …
    Poor Laura. The man who killed her was given a lousy thirty-six-month sentence. Thirty-six months for her and thirty-six months for my daughter, to be served consecutively. And then he did only forty-eight…
    Wait a minute! The usual sentence for criminal vehicular homicide is twenty-one months per count. John Brown was sentenced to a total of thirty months more because public outrage over the case generated by the Mothers Against Drunk Drivers—and by my being a cop, some say—compelled the judge to ignore the state sentencing guidelines. On the other hand, Joseph Sherman did six years for criminal vehicular homicide. Assume he was a good boy and walked after serving two-thirds of his sentence. That means the judge originally gave him nine years. Who the hell did he kill?
    To find out I dialed up VU/TEXT, the database of the St. Paul Pioneer Press , and instructed the computer to drag it for any local or state story containing Sherman, Joseph’s name. Up popped a menu containing eleven items in chronological order. I pulled the text of the last item, the most recent article. The headline read:
    D RUNK D RIVER P LEADS G UILTY
IN R EPRESENTATIVE’S D EATH ;
S ENTENCED TO N INE Y EARS

    Dynamite. A clipping service would have taken a week and five hundred dollars, yet I had everything I needed in thirty seconds for a fraction of the cost. I prepared a manila file folder, labeling it “Brown, John,” and noted all pertinent information culled from the newspaper articles chronologically on a yellow legal pad.
    To start from the beginning, Terrance Friedlander had been running for his eighth term to the Minnesota House of Representatives. The minority party, anticipating defeat, offered only token resistance, specifically a young, unknown attorney whose political experience consisted solely of writing nasty letters on behalf of the Department of Transportation. The lawyer’s name was Carol Catherine Monroe …
    â€œSo, that’s how she got her start,” I mused, noting the name on the yellow sheet.
    With less than three weeks remaining in the campaign, Friedlander held a twenty-three-point lead in the polls. Yet, he was still out there pressing the flesh, distributing flyers door-to-door, flyers with his smiling countenance under a red, white and blue banner that read VOTE FOR TOMORROW; people actually glad to see him, happy to shake his hand, asking, “What’s this new tax bullshit, Terry?”; “Hey Terry, you’re not gonna let ’em move the airport, are you?”; and Terry smiling back and saying, “Not to worry, not to worry,” until he went to cross the street and