Gone Ballistic (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2015

  A Kindle Scout selection

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Robin Starling Legal Thriller Series

  Chapter 1

  The short-barreled pistol slid from the Priority Mail box amid a jumble of styrofoam peanuts. It landed with a clunk on my desk, where it lay bristling with switches and sights, its matte black finish absorbing light. “Whoa,” Brooke said, stopping in the doorway of my office. “You got yourself a gun.”

  I looked up. “I didn’t. It came in the mail.”

  “Somebody sent you a gun? Who?”

  I looked at the flat-rate box the gun had come in. My address was hand-printed in block letters. There was no return address. “No idea.” I looked inside the box, then shook out the remaining peanuts. No packing list. The styrofoam peanuts were all there were.

  “Why?” Brooke asked.

  “If I knew who, I might know why.”

  “I’ll bet Paul ordered it for you for protection. He’s worried about you ever since. . .you know.”

  Ever since I’d been shot in the head. I did know.

  “This doesn’t seem like Paul,” I said. “And why wouldn’t there be a packing list?”

  Paul Soldano—my boyfriend, for lack of a better word—had an unusual knack for showing up whenever we talked about him, but this time my doorway remained empty. He did have a job, after all, and as a bank examiner for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, he was often not even in town.

  I picked up my trashcan and used the empty box to sweep the styrofoam peanuts from around the gun and off my desk. The pistol lay by itself on the polished surface. Brooke leaned over it.

  “What?” I said.

  “It smells like firecrackers.”

  I leaned over it and took a sniff. “Okay,” I said.

  “I think that means it’s been fired.”

  “I didn’t know you knew guns.”

  “I don’t really. Well, I know this one’s a semiautomatic and not a revolver, but that’s about it. On TV, though, people are always sniffing gun barrels to see if they’ve been fired.”

  “Ah.”

  “I wonder if Rodney’s in his office. I’ll go check.” The executive suites where we had our offices took up an entire floor, but Rodney Burns was close. He had the third office in our cluster of three. A private detective who looked a little like Don Knotts with a caterpillar stapled to his upper lip, Rodney had always done good work for me. When he came back with Brooke, he was pulling on a pair of latex gloves.

  “So that’s the gun,” he said.

  “I was hoping for a little more in the way of expert analysis,” I said.

  He sniffed it. “What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Has it been fired?”

  “At some point. You don’t know who sent it?”

  I held up the box. “No return address. No packing slip. Just the gun and a bunch of plastic peanuts.”

  He picked up the gun, gingerly, despite his latex gloves, and ejected the magazine.

  “Is there an exploded cartridge in there?” Brooke asked.

  Rodney smiled at her. “There’s room for another bullet,” he said, pressing down on them, “so one might have been fired since it was loaded. This isn’t a revolver, though. It ejects the empty casings as the bullets fire.”

  “Oh.” So Brooke really didn’t know more about guns than I did—maybe even less. I had been forced to read up on them since I’d started representing murder defendants, though my knowledge was largely academic.

  “Why would someone send it to me?”

  They both looked at me.

  “Right,” I said. “How would you know?”

  “Let me get the serial number,” Rodney said. “I can find out who the last registered purchaser was.”

  The elevator doors were sliding shut as Brooke and I pushed through the glass doors of the Executive Suites, but they bounced open again without quite closing. One of the newer tenants smiled at us as we got on with him. He was a small man who looked like Rock Hudson might have looked if he’d been five-six and had oily hair and a big hooked nose—which I suppose is another way of saying he didn’t look like Rock Hudson at all.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Thank you. It’s not every day I get to share an elevator with two such beautiful women.”

  The expression I gave him was about halfway between a grimace and a smile.

  “Carter Fox,” he said, holding out a hand.

  “You’re the new lawyer who just moved in, aren’t you?” I said as I shook his hand. “There are three of us now.”

  “Then you’re Robin Starling. At least, you don’t look like you could be Dave Johnstone.”

  “No. Not very easily.” I retrieved my hand with a small jerk.

  “Not without extensive surgery, anyway.” Carter gave a honk of laughter. “Sorry. Not funny. Are you ladies going to lunch?” The elevator doors opened on the ground floor.

  Brooke gave me a hard look over his shoulder as we got out.

  “We’re meeting someone,” I said.

  “The reason I asked, I’m new to downtown, and I need to find a good place to take on fuel for the battles of the afternoon.”

  “The restaurant in the basement of this building’s not half-bad.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll just tag along with you ladies, see where the natives eat, you know. Don’t worry about me horning in on your lunch party. I wouldn’t do that. Besides, I brought along my favorite dining companion.” He held up a mini-tablet with a pebbled black cover, possibly a Kindle.

  He walked between us as we went down Main Street toward Twelfth. The sky was blue, and the sun was beginning to cut through the morning chill.

  “It looks like it’s going to be a good day,” I said. “We could have left our jackets.”

  “A redhead and a blonde,” Carter said, not to be distracted by talk of the weather. “If my old fraternity brothers could see me now.”

  I was the blonde in the mix. Goose bumps broke out on my arm closest to him as the skin tried to crawl away.

  There was a line at our usual burger place almost to the door.

  “This is it, huh?” Carter said as he stepped forward to pull open the door for us. “The favorite eating spot.”

  “Well, today,” I said.

  “I’m looking forward to it. When the top woman lawyer in the city of Richmond likes a place, I’m willing to give it a try.”

  On the other side of him, Brooke rolled her eyes. There were maybe a dozen people in front of us, but usually the line moved pretty fast.

  Carter turned to Brooke. “What do you do for a living?
I mean, beyond gladdening the hearts of men everywhere?”

  For a moment I thought she wouldn’t answer, but she said, “I’m an I.T. person. Mostly I help small and medium-sized businesses put together their computer systems.”

  “Wow,” he said. I thought he would let it go at that, but he added, “Beautiful and smart. I have to tell you, that dark red hair is really special, and your clothes make the most of it. You have excellent taste.”

  By the time we got to the counter, he had us as well oiled as a couple of limp French fries. I ordered a hamburger with mustard and all the vegetables. Brooke, more virtuous than I, got a grilled chicken sandwich. As Carter stepped up to order, Brooke led us decisively to a table in the corner with no empty tables around it. When Carter turned with his own tray, he was left with the choice of a couple of empty tables on the other side of the restaurant.

  “He’s going to see we weren’t really meeting anyone,” I said as he headed away from us.

  “So?”

  “Unless Mike is getting back from Farmville.”

  She shook her head. “His hearing was at ten. Or maybe ten-thirty. I wasn’t really listening.”

  “It’s only an hour drive, an hour fifteen minutes. He could be back any time.”

  Neither of us did a very good job of keeping up with our men. Mike had actually asked Brooke to marry him, but so far she’d avoided giving him an answer. Technically, I guess, she had agreed to marry him, but had avoided setting a date. Returning to our mistreatment of the oily Mr. Fox, I said, “He’s a new guy with no one to hang out with, and we’re just as cliquish as they come.”

  “You can’t make me feel bad about it.” She bit violently into her sandwich. “I feel like I need a shower.”

  “Oh, come on. He likes you. He likes your hair, your taste in clothes, probably your neat little figure and everything else about you.”

  She swallowed. “It makes me sick. Surely you’re not falling for all glib flattery, Miss Top-Woman-Lawyer-in-the-city-of-Richmond.”

  “You thought that was insincere? I just took it as my due.” I bit into my hamburger and chewed reflectively. When I’d swallowed, I said, “The woman-lawyer qualification always gripes me, though. It’s like I don’t compete in the same category as men, as if trial work were like track or basketball.” In college I’d played basketball on a team that made it to the Final Four—Division Three, but still. Even so, our team wouldn’t have beat the men’s, despite its losing season.

  “See? You don’t like him either,” Brooke said.

  “I never said I liked him. I was just wondering how it would feel to be a more charitable person.”

  When we’d finished eating, Carter Fox was only halfway through his hamburger, reading his Kindle or his iPad mini or whatever it was and glancing at us from time to time. I took a breath and stood up. “I’m going to buy him an ice cream cone.”

  “Robin!”

  “Don’t argue. I feel myself in danger of becoming the kind of woman I despise.”

  Carter looked up as we approached, then nearly knocked over his chair getting to his feet.

  “We got stood up,” I said. “Here. We bought you desert.”

  “Well, thank you. Thank you very much.” He took the ice cream cone and stood it on its base beside his tray. “I look forward to eating it.” He seemed uncertain as to whether to sit or to remain standing, so I put him out of his misery by pulling out a chair and sitting in it. Brooke sat, too, and to her credit refrained from scowling.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, who would stand up two such beautiful women as yourselves?”

  “My boyfriend’s out of town. Brooke’s fiancé was supposed to be here, but evidently he’s still on his way back from Farmville.”

  “Who’s the lucky man?” Carter asked her, and Brooke looked at me inquiringly.

  “Lawyer named Mike McMillan,” I said.

  “He practice here in Richmond?”

  “He does. Has his own practice.”

  “So when’s the big date?”

  I looked at Brooke, who now looked annoyed.

  “We haven’t set it,” she said. “We. . .” She broke off, shrugged.

  “Every man needs a wife, especially a lawyer,” Carter said, sounding wistful. “When you go out into the world, you need someone tending the home fires, someone to be there when they carry you home on your shield.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Brooke said, standing. “I guess if I’m going to be there to tend the home fires for Mike this evening, I’d better get some work done.”

  “Especially since no one’s with him to carry him home on his shield,” I said, standing too.

  Carter picked up his ice cream cone. “I’ll walk back with you,” he said, picking up his tray with his other hand. “If I’d realized how big the burger was, I wouldn’t have gotten fries.”

  “Well, that was a bust,” Brooke said when we were back in our office cluster and Carter Fox had gone back to his lair deeper in the labyrinth of the Executive Suites. “Mr. Oily walks us to and from lunch, and all the time we’re not having to talk to him, you’re feeling guilty about not talking to him.”

  “That last reference to my long legs went a long way toward curing me,” I said, reaching into my purse for my keys.

  “Don’t forget your athletic physique.”

  “Don’t remind me.” Carter had also wanted to know about my lucky man, which I somehow found more intrusive than his questions about Brooke’s. I looked down into my purse, which I held open with both hands. I had a wallet in there, my cell phone, a comb, a pen, some ChapStick, a PocketPak of Listerine breath strips. . .but no keys.

  Rodney came out of his office. “Have a good lunch?” he said.

  I opened my mouth to tell him not to ask, saw Brooke with her mouth open, evidently to tell him the same thing, and burst out laughing. She closed her mouth, smiled, and started laughing, too. Rodney looked back and forth between us.

  “What?” he said. “Did I say something funny?”

  He hadn’t, of course. What he had done was get a name, address, and phone number for the purchaser of the Smith & Wesson semiautomatic that was in my desk drawer.

  “I left my keys on my desk,” I said. “Let me get Carly to let me in, and I’ll come see what you have.”

  I went to find Carly, and Brooke went down the hall to off-load the tea she’d had with lunch.

  “I always put my keys in my purse,” Carly said virtuously. “That way I don’t forget them.”

  I sometimes did that. Other times I dropped them on my desk or the credenza behind it. . .or sometimes on a bookshelf.

  “This is only the second time you’ve had to unlock the door for me,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Or third,” I amended.

  She pushed my door open and stepped back. “It’s okay. All part of the service,” she said.

  I intended to put my keys in my purse immediately, but I didn’t see them. I opened the drawer to put my purse away, saw the automatic, and closed it again. I left my purse on the floor in the desk’s kneehole and headed for Rodney’s office, glancing into Brooke’s on the way to see if I had left my keys on her desk. No such luck.

  When I dropped into one of Rodney’s client chairs, he tore the top page off a yellow note pad and slid it across the desk to me. On it he’d written the name Christopher Woodruff along with a Richmond address on West Seminary Avenue and a phone number. I thanked Rodney for being so quick to get the information for me.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Oh, I know. It’ll be on my bill.”

  “And the phone number is no longer in service,” he said.

  “So the address may not be good either?”

  “According to the Richmond Real Estate Assessor, he still owns the house.”

  I went back to my office to pack my briefcase, and while I was doing it Brooke stuck her head in.

  “You haven’t seen my keys, have you?�
�� I asked, looking up. “I can’t find them.”

  “I thought I saw them on your credenza this morning. Where are you going?”

  “In search of the person who sent me the handgun.”

  “Maybe you swept your keys into the trashcan with all the styrofoam peanuts,” Brooke suggested.

  “Ah hah!” I lifted the trashcan onto the desk. It was nearly half-full of peanuts, but no keys were buried in them.

  I sat down.

  “What are you going to do?” Brooke asked.

  “I have a spare key to my Beetle at home.”

  “Very useful.”

  “I don’t guess you’re ready to leave for the day,” I said.

  She looked at her watch. “I’ve got someone coming in at two,” she said, sounding regretful. “I don’t know how long it’ll take.” Brooke had started her business about the same time I had, but her business was exploding. Within the year she’d have to hire someone, or she’d be turning away work.

  “Maybe I could borrow your car,” I suggested.

  “Sure. I’m stuck here all afternoon.”

  Seminary Avenue ran north and south out of the campus of the Union Presbyterian Seminary. West Seminary proved to be a mile or so north of the seminary, where the road split into east and west and the houses got smaller and less majestic. I took the left fork. Christopher Woodruff lived on the left in another half a block. I drew Brooke’s Honda CR-V up against the curb opposite the house and got out.

  If I had to describe the house, and I guess I do, I would call it a cape cod with Tudor pretensions. Instead of two small dormers, it had a cross-gable on one side with exposed half-timbers. I walked up the flagstone sidewalk. Though it was early afternoon, the sky had clouded up again and already the day was turning brisk.

  I rang the bell and waited, hugging myself against the chill. There was no answer. I looked at my watch. It was really too early for anyone to be home from work. I rang again, not hoping for much, then retreated to Brooke’s car. I wasn’t going to get to talk to Christopher Woodruff, but there were compensations. I had time to go home for my spare car key before heading back downtown.

  For a minute or so, though, I sat in Brooke’s car, looking at the house and thinking. No point in looking in a window, I told myself, and going through the gate in the chain-link fence to check out the back was probably an equally bad idea. Leave a note. I got a pen and a business card from my purse and wrote, “I have something of yours. Call me.”