Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller) by Joel Goldman Read Free Book Online

the barstool, steadying herself and gritting her teeth.
    “Where the hell do you get off, Rossi? I was fucking acquitted, you miserable asshole! So take your bullshit psychology and stick it up your ass with your fucking lump of coal.”
    Rossi’s face was a pool of calm. “You want my advice, Counselor, I’d get a grip on that anger. Makes you hard to live with.”
    Alex didn’t answer. She dropped a dollar on the bar and left without looking back.

Chapter Nine
    THE PUBLIC DEFENDER’S OFFICES were on the twentieth and twenty-first floors of Oak Tower at Eleventh and Oak, one of Kansas City’s first skyscrapers. The original fourteen stories were doubled in 1929, and in 1974 the terra-cotta exterior was blanketed in stucco, a sad example of style buried by progress. Its days as class A office space long behind it, Oak Tower was perfect for public defenders, who didn’t have to worry about impressing clients. Lawyers who dealt in life and death had bigger issues than the pale rose paint chipping off the walls and the threadbare carpet lining the halls.
    On her drive downtown the next morning, Alex bounced back and forth between how Judge West had blackmailed her with the photograph and how Hank Rossi had dissected her psyche. Both had unnerved her in spite of the show she’d put on, leaving her feeling raw inside and out.
    When Alex got off the elevator, no one was at the receptionist’s desk, the secretaries’ stations were abandoned, and the halls were empty. She’d started toward her office when Grace Canfield came out of the bathroom, wiping her swollen red eyes with a tissue.
    Grace was one of the investigators in the PD’s office. Middle-aged and stout, her black hair cut short and spiky and flecked with gray, she was a lifelong resident of Kansas City’s east side, home to many of the African American clients Alex defended. She went to church with their families, worked their cases, and went to their funerals, giving her more street cred than any lawyer in the office; even the gangbangers called her Miz Grace.
    “Grace, why are you crying? Where is everybody?”
    “Oh, Alex,” she said, fighting back tears, her voice catching. “It’s Robin. She was killed last night in a car accident. They’re all in the conference room.”
    Robin Norris had spent thirty years in the public defender’s office, the last twenty running the operation. She hired Alex straight out of law school, raising her from a pup, as Robin put it after Alex won a case no one thought could have been won, and she took Alex back after the Dwayne Reed case when everyone bet she wouldn’t. Her death left Alex numb, the reality not yet registering. Though she’d heard the words, part of her brain refused to accept the news, believing instead that someone must have made a mistake. She slumped against the wall, wide-eyed and gut punched.
    “What happened?”
    “She was out somewhere up north and lost control of her car and ran off the road. She was dead at the scene.”
    “Oh, my God!”
    Grace sniffed and straightened, wiping her hands against her sides. “I know. I know, but if I don’t get to work and get my mind on something else, I’m going to spend the whole day crying, and that’s only gonna make me feel worse.”
    Alex went to the conference room, pushing the wooden doors open and stepping into a sea of sorrow. People were hugging as they sobbed or staring out the windows, dazed and mute. Others were milling around the room, lost. Alex moved from one to another, squeezing a hand, rubbing a back, and giving a hug, tears rolling off her cheeks, everyone muttering that it couldn’t be real, that it didn’t make sense, and that it wasn’t fair, all of it true.
    Looking out on the city, she saw the muddy Missouri River rolling past the north side of downtown on its way to St. Louis. A century and a half ago, bluffs a hundred feet high hid the view of the river until ancestral Kansas Citians carved through them, laying the