Dark Valentine by Jennifer Fulton Read Free Book Online Page A

There it was. The tip of his tongue crept along the parting of his lips, moistening them. His pupils dilated. The Adam’s apple bobbed briefly above his blue shirt collar. He gave himself away so completely, the jury was going to see a pathetically fixated predator. That would have to change, along with the clothes. The necktie would be a problem, if today’s choice was any indication. The knot was too large, the sheen too costly, and the pattern too bold. This was the tie of a man with an ego. Or one so impressionable he had seen the likes of Puff Daddy sporting this look and wanted to convey similar panache. Neither would play well with a Denver jury.
    Jules was pretty familiar with their whims, having led a number of criminal defense teams this side of the Rockies. Sagelblum was a national firm that sent its senior trial attorneys all over the country to work with local counsel from its regional offices. Jules usually enjoyed her Denver assignments. The place had somehow managed to weld its historical Western sensibility and friendly informality with progressive urban development and efficient infrastructure.
    Most of the district court judges were efficient and reasonable. They would be well disposed toward the client, she thought. The Brigham name carried some clout in Colorado, and while the man himself had a certain old-money aura that could raise some hackles among jurors, he also seemed earnest enough to secure their sympathies.
    She tested his reactions again. “Is Rhianna beautiful?”
    The question seemed to take him by surprise. Blinking, he said, “Very.”
    “Please,” she prompted with an attentive smile, “describe her for me, Mr. Brigham.”
    “She is a classic beauty,” he replied promptly, “not one of those cheesy Deal or No Deal models. You know what I’m talking about. They all look like they were made in the same factory. She’s not trailer trash with a lot of makeup and a fancy hairdo.”
    Jules gave an encouraging nod. “Elegant?”
    “Yes, although not in that studied sense.” He warmed to his theme. “She’s more demure than obvious. I would say ‘classy’…the marrying kind.”
    “I still don’t have a strong sense of her.”
    This was untrue. Jules had looked through photographs, video footage, and an extensive file on the woman Brigham was initially accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting. Rhianna Lamb was a prosecutor’s dream plaintiff, a natural blonde with long hair framing an innocent face with wide, soft cheekbones and enough puppy fat to make her look about sixteen. She had a clean record and a sexual history roughly comparable to that of a nun.
    At the time of the alleged assault, she had held down a job in a traditionally female occupation, working as a fashion buyer at a department store in the upscale Cherry Creek shopping precinct. She volunteered at an animal-rescue shelter and took turns caring for the severely disabled child of a neighbor. She was a dutiful unmarried daughter, one of three respectable siblings who had never had a day’s trouble in their registered-Democrat lives. She had placed her house on the market and left town after Werner Brigham was released on bail, and would only provide the DA with her parents’ address, claiming she was “traveling” and not at any fixed abode.
    Jules concluded from these maneuvers that the woman was not completely helpless. She’d had sufficient presence of mind to get out of Dodge and hide where Brigham could not find her. People did not abandon home, job, friends, and family without cause. Whatever the client said, one thing was perfectly plain. He had terrified the shit out of this Lamb woman.
    From all accounts, the plaintiff had been a model student at her local high school and, later, at the second-tier college her parents had scrimped to afford. Naturally, she had waitressed at a family restaurant to help pay her own way. Months of dirt-digging, and thousands in private-investigator fees, had