Dark Harbor by David Hosp Read Free Book Online Page A

peg-knocking, it’d be you.”
    “You’re not going soft on me, partner, are you? Did you see the look on his face before he left? Pure violence. Hell, if it wasn’t for Little Jack, I’d be lookin’ at this guy as our perp on the Caldwell murder.”
    Flaherty had seen the look; she couldn’t deny it. But she’d also seen something else. Something more complicated, buried deep inside Scott Finn. She couldn’t put her finger on it yet, but she knew it was going to gnaw at her until she did.
    “Yeah, well let’s focus on Little Jack for the moment,” she said as she and Kozlowski walked out of the ME’s office.

Chapter Seven
    F INN GOT BACK TO his office around six-thirty, although it felt much later. He was tired, and strung out, and confused. He’d been pushed too far by that asshole Kozlowski, and he’d reacted badly. It seemed that no matter how far he got from the streets, a piece of them remained. He couldn’t change that— particularly when he was challenged.
    Most of the firm’s support staff cleared out at five o’clock, but the lawyers were still there. The days when big Boston firms were more “collegial” than their New York counterparts had passed. Law firms had all gone the way of big business, and the image of the Boston bar as a righteous and gentlemanly institution remained only as a facade. The focus was now on increasing revenue, and that put an inordinate amount of pressure on the young lawyers, who were counted on to accumulate ever higher billable hours.
    Finn went to his office and closed the door. He sat at his desk for a moment with his head in his hands.
This isn’t possible
, he thought.
It can’t be happening.
But he knew it was. Any fantasy that the police had gotten it wrong and Nat was still alive had been shattered when the coroner pulled back the sheet to reveal her body. There was no doubt that it was Natalie on that cold, hard slab.
I’m not looking my best
, she probably would have joked if she’d been alive, but he knew her face too well for there to be any doubt. Every rise and fall to that beautiful face was etched permanently into his mind.
    He shouldn’t grapple with this here, he realized. If he let himself acknowledge how deeply he felt Natalie’s death he’d lose control—a cardinal sin for a lawyer. Lawyers deal with other people’s tragedies every day, and they’re expected to remain unflappable. Finn was particularly good at it. Perhaps as a result of his brutal childhood, nothing ever got to him: not the tobacco plaintiff who had to answer questions at his deposition from his hospital bed through a computerized voice generator because he was missing most of his throat; not the widow of the steelworker who slipped from his sixth-story perch and fell halfway to the ground before he was impaled on a twenty-foot length of rebar—surviving for nearly thirty minutes as the fire department and the city works department debated the best way to cut him down; not the three-year-old who gamely crawled around on the two stumps that protruded from her hips, still unaware that her parents’ insurance company’s intractability had cheated her out of a normal life. None of it penetrated Finn’s shell, and that’s why he was so good at defending those accused of monstrosities. It was what made him stand out from the pack.
    He had to get out of the office. If he was going to lose control, he wanted to do it in the privacy of his apartment, not in front of his colleagues. He began throwing some materials into a briefcase. Before he could finish, there was a knock on the door. He cleared his throat and steeled himself.
    “Come on in,” he shouted.
    The door opened and Preston Holland’s head peered around the corner. “How are you doing?” Holland asked. There was a look of deep concern on his usually stoic face. His thick white hair was combed neatly back from his forehead, and his trademark bow tie was neatly arranged over his pressed collar, but Finn could