Judgment Calls by Alafair Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

look at it from that perspective. You may win. But even if you don’t, you haven’t really lost anything.”
    She was right. I should feel good about what I did today. It was time to put aside the serious stuff and talk to her about the personal side of this case.
    “Oh, and I may have neglected to fill you in on the identity of one of the main investigators.”
    “Why would I care? Is he a cutey?” She feigned enthusiastic curiosity and gave me a wink.
    “Um… No! Well, I mean, yeah. I don’t really know. Look, what I mean is that for once this man actually has something to do with me and not you.”
    “Excuse me for assuming. I’ve gotten used to you never being interested. It’s been two years since your divorce, and you still act like men don’t get to you anymore, except… oh, lord, Sam, you’re not actually going to try working with Lucky Chucky, are you?”
    It’s been more than fifteen years since Chuck Forbes’s football buddies had come up with that nickname. Two of them had barged into Chuck’s house carrying a keg one weekend when his parents were out of town. I guess we didn’t hear them over “Avalon.” For the rest of high school, Chuck was Lucky Chucky. They finally stopped calling me Been-laid Kincaid at the end of senior year.
    “Can’t we move a little bit past that, Grace?”
    “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Chuck. It’s what’s wrong with the two of you. When are you going to realize that he makes you crazy? You either need to write each other off or lock yourselves in a room together until you get it out of your systems. You have this twisted love-hate, only-happy-when-you’re-not-getting-together kind of relationship. And every time you see him, you dwell on it for the next two weeks but won’t let yourself follow through. I am driven crazy by osmosis. Please don’t do this to me. Is that why you took this case?”
    “Oh, please. No, I swear, Grace. I would’ve taken it anyway, for all the reasons we talked about. But I don’t know how I’m going to handle this. Just reading the police reports, I find myself poring over every word of his, admiring what a good cop he’s become. I guess I’m just going to have to deal with it.”
    “Deal with it? You’ve only ever had one way of dealing with Chuck Forbes. You decide you can keep the relationship platonic. You start hanging out, kidding around, watching games on the weekends, all the things that friends do. But then the chemistry kicks in and the next thing you know you get scared and back off, he gets mad, and you both go off into your separate corners and pout until you once again trick yourselves into believing that you can make the friendship thing work and the whole damn cycle begins again. Did it ever dawn on you that Roger might have felt a little left out?”
    I stared at her. Roger’s my ex-husband. We met at Stan ford Law School. Dad thought Roger was too much of a blue blood but Mom and I thought he was perfect: a grownup who knew what he wanted and how he was going to get it. Smart, good-looking, and ambitious, Roger had wanted to marry me right out of law school so we could start our perfect life together back in New York. We moved into the Upper East Side apartment his family bought us as a wedding present, him working toward partnership at one of the country’s biggest firms, me working as an Assistant U.S. Attorney.
    The perfect life didn’t last long. Roger landed a job as in-house counsel with Nike, so we wound up moving to Portland after only a couple of years in New York. A few months later, I discovered that my husband had taken literally his new employer’s ad slogan encouraging decisive, spontaneous, self-satisfying action. We both thought I would be working late preparing for a trial set to start the following day, but the case had settled with a last-minute guilty plea. My intention was to surprise Roger by coming home early with dinner and a movie in hand.
    Instead, I found