Trial By Fury

Suddenly, I felt old and jaded. It didn't seem like that big a deal. Husbands screw around all the time. And wives put up with it or not, divorce them or not. And life goes on. In most cases.

Darwin Ridley had not survived his indiscretion, however. I wondered if we might not be treading on very thin Miranda ice. We had not read Joa

Peters and I waited patiently, neither of us saying a word. Eventually, she quieted, got control of herself.

"Does it have to come out? About the divorce, I mean."

I did my best to reassure her. "We'll try. If it has nothing to do with the murder itself, then there's no reason for it to go any further than this room."

She got up and walked away from us. She stood by a window, pulling the curtain to one side to look out. I knew what she was doing-distancing herself from us while she waged some ferocious internal war. Finally, she turned to face us.

"I guess I could just as well tell you," she said softly. "You'll probably find out anyway. I had a phone call that afternoon, about three-thirty or a quarter to four. From a man. He said I'd better keep that motherfucking son of a bitch away from his daughter."

"Talking about Darwin?"

She nodded.

"That's all he said?"

"No, he said I could tell that black bastard that his daughter wouldn't be at the Coliseum to meet him, that she wouldn't be at the game, and that if Darwin even so much as spoke to her again, he was a dead man."

Stopping, Joa

"I don't suppose the caller left his name and number," I said.

Joa

When I opened it, a single photograph fell out.

At first glance, it seemed to be a picture of a man embracing a woman in what appeared to be a motel room. Closer examination revealed the man to be Darwin Ridley, but the woman wasn't a woman at all. She was a girl. A blonde girl. She was still wearing a bra, but the camera had caught her in the act of slipping out of her skirt. A short, gored, two-toned skirt.

A cheerleader's skirt.

I shook my head and handed the picture over to Peters. He looked at it and dropped the picture on the coffee table like it was too hot to handle.

Captain Powell's sensitive case had just turned into Maxwell Cole's dynamite. I wondered briefly if it was too late to get the captain to put two other detectives on the case instead of us. I didn't think I wanted to be anywhere within range when this particular shit started hitting the fan.

I looked at Joa

And in that instant, I knew what she was feeling.

She had lost the man she loved, and now even her memories of him were being shredded and torn from her. I knew all too well that sense of absolute loss.

I got up and went to her. Somebody needed to do it, and Peters wasn't going to. He didn't understand what was happening. I reached out for her and held her. She fell against my chest, letting my arms support her, keep her from slipping to the floor. Everything that stood between us, every conceivable barrier, disintegrated as I cradled her against me.

"Did you kill him, Joa

"No, I didn't."

From that moment on, I never doubted for a minute that she was telling the truth.

CHAPTER 11

By the time Joa

With an impatient frown that was far more exasperation than concentration, he picked up the picture once more and examined it closely. His brows knit.

"Can you tell which cheerleader it is?" I asked him. After all, Peters had been the one who had spent the afternoon interviewing the Mercer Island cheerleaders the day before.

He shook his head. "Not for sure." He glanced at Joa

"No." Her voice was flat, her face devoid of expression.

Peters, reluctant to give up that line of questioning, took another tack. "Your husband never mentioned any of the cheerleaders to you by name?"

"Never."

Peters passed me the picture again. I examined it more carefully this time, looking at it less for its shock value than as an integral part of the puzzle that marked the end of Darwin Ridley's life.

I studied the background of the picture. Definitely a motel, and not a particularly classy one at that. The picture had evidently been taken through a window from outside the room. I don't know a lot about cameras, but I recognized this was no Kodak Instamatic. The clarity of detail, the finite focusing even through glass said the picture had been taken with topflight equipment. Scrutinizing the background of the picture, I wondered if someone in the crime lab could blow the photo up large enough to read the checkout information in a framed holder on the room door behind the fondly embracing twosome.

"Could we take the picture, Joa

All the fight had been taken out of her, all her strength. She nodded in agreement.

"Did you have separate checking accounts?" Peters asked suddenly. "Checking accounts or charge cards, either one?"

"No." Joa

"He had to pay for motel rooms some way or other. Do you mind if I look through his desk?"

"Go ahead."

Peters went to the little study, leaving Joa

Joa

"But you believed the man who called you. Instantly. Even before he sent you the photograph."

"It wasn't the first time," she said quietly.

"Another cheerleader?" I asked.

"I don't know. I don't care. Maybe the same one. It doesn't matter. The marriage counselor said Darwin was going through a mid-life crisis, that he'd get over it eventually if I was patient."

A part of me objected to the term mid-life crisis. It's a handy rationalization that covers a multitude of sins. I've used it myself on occasions, some of them not very defensible. "Counselor?" I asked.

"We went to the counselor together, last year, a lady family therapist. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn't know what it was. All I knew was that I wanted to stay married. Being married was important to me."

"And in the course of counseling you found out your husband was having an affair." It's an old story.

She nodded. "He promised he'd break it off. He said it was over, and I believed him."

"And you decided to have a baby to celebrate," I added.

"We both wanted one," she said. "We had been trying for years. It was an accident that I turned up pregnant right then. Besides," she added, "I thought a baby would bring us closer together."