IT WAS, JULIA told herself, her own fault.
Not twenty-four hours earlier she’d exulted in the startlingly rosy turn her life had taken. The last time she’d felt that way—happily married with a brand-new law career and a baby on the way—two frozen-faced Marines in dress blues had paced up the walk to her door and blown it all to hell.
The insults heaped upon her in the past day would never exceed the magnitude of that body blow, but in terms of sheer volume, they were impressive.
She ticked them off as she stomped back along the long hall from Decker’s office into the warren of glorified closets that housed the assistant public defenders.
The murder charge against Ray.
Adonis brought in on the case.
A likely end to family outings with Dom, under the circumstances.
And the sound of voices coming from her office, which reminded her of the final indignity: the intern.
She paused and summoned resolve. Marie St. Clair wasn’t going to further spoil her day. She stood outside the door, taking a breath, holding it and blowing it out, a calming technique advised by the useless long-ago grief counselor assigned to her after Michael’s death. It hadn’t worked then and it didn’t work now.
Was that laughter? Not something she’d expected from her first encounter with the dour Marie. A man’s laugh boomed louder still.
She opened the door to see Deputy Sheriff Wayne Peterson perched atop her desk, legs swinging, and Marie at the desk once occupied by Claudette. Julia would be damned if she thought of it as belonging to anyone else.
Marie’s pasty cheeks flushed pink at the sight of her.
“Hey, Julia.” Wayne lifted a hand. “Ree and I were just catching up.”
Ree?
“Catching up?”
“She was one of our high school cadets.” The cadet program immersed high school students in the sheriff’s department, taking them on ride-alongs or field trips to the training academy or even the state prison, with an eye toward enticing them into careers in law enforcement. A move that had failed when it came to Marie, Wayne said now.
“We thought sure we’d see her back with us when she finished college. But no, she opted for the dark side. Not just law, but the Public Defender’s Division.” He mock-frowned.
The glower that had greeted Julia the previous day was back. “This was the only place that would take an intern early.”
Which made a cockeyed sort of sense. The public defenders defined overworked and underpaid. Someone had probably thought an extra body would lessen the load, without taking into account the distraction that training and mentoring an intern would involve. Or, Julia thought, more likely she’d offended Deb in some way and this was Deb’s revenge.
“Be careful not to piss her off,” Wayne warned Julia now. He made his thumb and forefinger into a gun and aimed it at the wall. “Nine times out of ten, she outshot me on the range. Bang.”
He lifted his forefinger to his mouth and blew.
Marie’s blush deepened. “I haven’t been to the range in weeks. Law school gets in the way of everything fun.”
“Added to your collection lately?”
“Picked up a Beretta Bobcat last week as a reward for how well I did on my fall semester finals.”
Wayne whistled. “That’s a decent little pocket gun. More accurate than most.”
Great, thought Julia. Bad enough she was stuck with an intern, but it looked as though Marie was one of those cop-loving, tough-on-crime law students who ended up in the prosecutor’s office and made her life hell until they settled down and realized compromise was in everyone’s best interest.
And she was a gun nut too. Julia didn’t have a problem with guns—people in Duck Creek fanned out each fall into the surrounding mountains in search of elk to fill their freezers—but she drew the line at handguns or the excessive firepower of semiautomatic rifles. She eyeballed Marie’s utilitarian purse, sitting on the shelf behind her, and wondered what it concealed. Although, given what she was fast learning about Marie, if the young woman carried, the gun was probably on her person, maybe strapped behind her hip, just below her the waistband of her skirt, safely hidden beneath her boxy blazer.
“Anyhow.” Wayne held out a stapled sheaf of paper. “I just came by to drop off the affidavit for Ray Belmar. Figured you’d want it first thing.”
Marie sat up a little straighter in her chair, her pale eyes darkening with interest. She held out her hand.
“Easy there, Speedy.” Julia snatched the affidavit from Wayne.
He raised an eyebrow. “Time for me to get back to work. Ree, come downstairs and find me if she ever gives you time for coffee.”
“Mm-hmm.” Marie nodded assent but never took her eyes off the pages in Julia’s hands.
Julia said good-bye to Wayne, scanned the pages, then made a show of unlocking her file cabinet and slotting the affidavit inside.
“I was hoping to get a look at that. Maybe start doing research into the perp and the vic.”
“Alleged perpetrator. Alleged victim.” Julia wondered if her use of the full words even registered. She turned the tiny key in the file drawer’s lock and dropped it into her pocket. “You can just print out the affidavit, you know.”
“I don’t have a login to the computer system yet.”
“You should call IT. Deb can give you the number.”
“I already asked her. I called. They said it could take two or three days.”
“Sounds about right.” She retrieved the files on her day’s cases from her in-box and zipped up the parka she’d never removed. “I’m off to jail to interview today’s clients before the funeral. See you later.”
“Can I go with you?” Marie half rose from her chair. But she addressed a closed door.
Julia was gone.