Judgment Calls Read Online Free PDF

boatload of heroin, then beat her, choked her, sexually assaulted her, and left her to die in the woods. The case would be tough to prove, but it was looking better now with the information from the jail and Renshaw. There was enough for an attempted aggravated murder indictment and enough to get it to the jury. And even if a jury didn’t go for the attempted agg, it could still convict on the kidnap, assault, and sex charges.
    I spent the next couple of hours reviewing the reports that had been written on the case so far. I was impressed. Most of the time, if you read a cop’s reports after the case has been described to you, the reports and the verbal summary don’t quite match up. Either something was omitted from the conversation or, more commonly, left out of the written reports. MCT’s good reputation appeared to be well deserved. I was pleased to see that everything I already knew, and nothing else, was in the reports. And I was irritated that I couldn’t stop myself from paying special attention to the quality of Chuck Forbes’s work.
    Chuck had joined the bureau after college and had wound up on the fast track into MCT after he obtained a murder confession that eventually led to one of Oregon’s first capital sentences. I took a special interest in Chuck Forbes for more personal reasons: He had taken my virginity from me in high school (OK, I kind of gave it to him), and we had continued our bad behavior on and off throughout our youth. We bickered constantly back then, and we still argue today. However, I’d made a vow to stop mixing wild sex with the fighting almost a decade ago, the summer after my college graduation. Once I make a vow, I stick with it.
    We lost touch when I started law school in California, and my visits to Portland had dwindled and then stopped. But then the New Yorker I called my husband at the time took a job here, so I moved back. My friendship with Chuck and the accompanying spark had reignited when he showed up to testify as the arresting police officer in my first trial as a DDA. And now here I was, divorced and long past high school, trying to read his police reports without reminiscing.
    Deciding I needed to take a break, I put on my coat and walked over to the Pit for lunch. Tourists might assume that the Pioneer Place mall’s food court owed its nickname to its basement location, but they’d be wrong.
    My usual Pit selection is Let’s Talk Turkey, the only downtown deli that uses turkey from the bird instead of the pressed stuff. The good stuff you get on Thanksgiving beats slimy slabs of processed turkey food, hands down. However, healthy just wasn’t going to cut it today. I decided a corn dog on a stick and a chocolate milkshake promised the perfect balance of sugar and fat. It had been awhile since I’d indulged my weakness for food on a stick, but I soon remembered why I always felt guilty when I did. The poor girl working at Food on a Stick wore the same uniform that the unfortunate employees had been subjected to when I was in high school: short shorts, a scoop-necked tank top, and a hat that can only be described as phallic. Like the generations of Food on a Stick girls that preceded her, she had long flowing hair, thin arms and hips, and breasts that didn’t look like they wanted to stay in that little top. How does such a big company get away with never hiring a man?
    The floor of the food booth was elevated and surrounded on three sides by mirrors. She was bent over at the waist, bobbing up and down as she pumped the juice from a bucket full of lemons for the nation’s most famous fresh-squeezed lemonade. She seemed grateful to have a break from the thrusting to get my corn dog.
    As I walked away, I saw a group of prepubescent boys sitting on a bench by the escalator, enjoying the view of the resumed lemon-pumping. I knew they weren’t the first group of boys to cut class to hang out and watch a Food on a Stick girl at work. Hell, it was practically a rite of