Dark Valentine by Jennifer Fulton Read Free Book Online Page B

failed to turn up a single enemy or embittered ex-lover who could take the stand to reveal another side of Ms. Goody Two-shoes. There was no short-lived stint as an exotic dancer, no nude photos on the Internet, no sleazy MySpace revelations, no secret affair with a professor, no credit-card debt, no DUI, not even a parking ticket.
    The only boyfriend they’d found was a computer geek who said he had respected her too much to hassle her for sex, so they dated, but their relationship was platonic. Lamb’s best friend, Mimi Buckmaster, was a cello-playing vegan whose worst vice appeared to be baking eggless muffins no one liked. Other close female friends included a Sunday-school teacher, a social worker, a bank clerk, and a woman who designed Hallmark greeting cards. All in all, they had zip.
    No one at Sagelblum could believe it. Rhianna Lamb did not wear tight jeans, chew gum, smoke, or drink beer. She attended church, listened to blues, and friends said her favorite movies were Forrest Gump and Titanic . She was, in fact, so boring and decent, at the age of twenty-eight, that she was universally described as “nice.”
    Jules could not imagine a more condemning epithet. Personally, she was thankful no one would ever say that about her, but professionally, she was bothered. In her experience no one was so “nice,” so consistently, that they had nothing to hide. The investigators had to be missing a piece of the puzzle.
    Irritated, she tuned in to the client once more. Werner Brigham was still waxing lyrical.
    “She runs, so she has that athletic build but,” he pronounced in an approving tone, “she’s still feminine and graceful. She probably had ballet lessons as a girl. You can see that in the way she holds herself.”
    Ballet lessons. This was the first time she had ever heard a sex offender speculate on his alleged victim’s background in dance. And Brigham was an offender; Jules felt dead certain about that. He had freely admitted to stalking Rhianna Lamb and to an incomplete sex act he insistently described as “a consummation.” In his version of events, these actions were the culmination of a courtship and a preliminary to marriage. Brigham was a man who believed his own fiction.
    “She has similar refined tastes in clothing to my mother,” he shared in a reflective tone. “I think the two of them will be good friends. That’s an important consideration.”
    And a sentiment best left unshared with members of the jury. Brigham was apparently a stranger to the norms of dating. Was he also a stranger to reason? Several of the senior trial attorneys on the team thought so. Their private notes, for her eyes only, were circumspect but ominous.

Mr. Brigham displays a marked inability to perceive his actions as they may be interpreted by others…

…if the client was not a well-connected man of wealth and education, he would be at risk of certification…

…the manner in which the client professes his devotion to the plaintiff must be adjusted and controlled by counsel if he is to take the stand.

    Finally, there was Sid Lyle’s assessment. Never one to mince words, he’d passed her a scrawled note during her first pre-trial conference. It read, This guy is a fucking fruitcake.
    In a half-decent world, they would plead him out and he would serve time, or at least end up in a state mental hospital. But Salazar, Hagel & Goldblum had a reputation to keep up and high-end real estate to pay for. They took cases to trial.
    Jules had no problem with such pragmatism. She hadn’t worked her ass off for the shingle on her corner-suite door to start sweating about shades of guilt and innocence. If she didn’t like defending well-heeled clients who had made errors in judgment, or were innocent and targeted for the wrong reasons, she could always trade in her Mercedes, sell her costly hideaway on Lake Tahoe, and cross the street to the DA’s office. None of which were options she planned to explore anytime