Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) by Michael Monhollon Read Free Book Online

the poles attached to the top board, I worked it through the crawl space door. It was painted gray on both sides, with a pretty good rendition of a skull in one corner. Most of the board was covered with stenciled lettering:
     
    Here lies Jenn
    Died in her sin
    This 10-foot trench
    Won’t hold her stench
    1190
     
    The three-quarter-inch plywood was cut in the shape of a tombstone, although one shoulder of it had been hacked away, exposing raw and splintered wood. The poles were four-foot pieces of rebar that were attached to the back of the wooden tombstone with U-bolts; bits of dirt still clung to the rebar. Assuming the tombstone had been planted in Shorter’s yard last Halloween, it was more evidence of his deliberate harassment of his neighbors, if more was needed.
    A tapping started somewhere overhead, sounding as if it might be coming from the back door rather than the front. At least whoever was doing it was still outside the house. I ignored the tapping and dragged out another board by its rebar stakes. It turned out to be another tombstone even larger than the first.
     
    Old Man Rehrer
    Cut his wife from ear to ear
    She died, he fried
    Now they’re together
    Side by side
    1820
     
    The tapping stopped. “Ms. Starling! Ms. Robin Starling!” The voice was muffled, but I thought it might be Valerie Shaw, which was appropriate enough given that the third board was a mock-up of another tombstone, this one directed at her.
     
    At 48
    Val had no mate
    Now at last
    She’s met her fate
    1724
     
    Upstairs all had fallen silent. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I pulled out the last board, this one cut in the shape of an arrow. Red-and-green circles had been painted along the edges like a border of lightbulbs. The lettering said only, “Insane Asylum.” Whose house had it been pointed at, I wondered, and was this another Halloween decoration, or was this Shorter’s version of a cheery Christmas greeting?
    I propped up the tombstones and the arrow pointing the way to the insane asylum, and I used my phone to take a picture of each of them—not because I had a professional use for the pictures, but because I thought Paul would get a kick out of them. When I was done, I stacked everything back in the crawl space and shut the door.
    I went up the stairs, stepping over the squeaky third step, and looked out the mullioned windows that made up the top half of the back door. Whoever had been there tapping was now gone.
    I left the house through the front door, turning to lock it carefully behind me, then stood on the stoop a moment looking out over the neighborhood, at Jenn’s house and Mark’s, at Bill Hill’s and Melissa Stimmler’s. Several of the houses needed paint, and patches of weeds added bits of green to the thin March lawns. I knew where everyone lived but Valerie Shaw. I wondered if her house was one I could see from Shorter’s front stoop.
    I was halfway to my car, stepping flagstone to flagstone to keep my heels from sinking into the lawn, when I noticed that someone had written on my car windows with what looked like white shoe polish. “Devil’s Advocate” was written on my rear windshield in tall, narrow letters, and “Mouth of Satan” covered most of the windows on the passenger side. The neighbors seemed to have adopted Bob Shorter’s method of discourse: We killed Robin, and nobody’s sobbin’ . . .
    Glittering stickers with the numerals 1192 marked Shorter’s mailbox. I looked over at Jenn Entwistle’s mailbox and saw that her street number was 1190, which had been the date of death on her tombstone. Shorter wasn’t leaving much room for doubt about the target of his gibe.
    Shaking my head, I walked around to the driver’s side of my car. “Evil’s Whore” was scrawled on the driver-side windows, and the front windshield’s message was in such fat letters that it was going to be difficult to drive. It said, “Lawyer Bitch.” I scanned the nearby