Verwandte Artikel zu A Clean Kill

A Clean Kill - Softcover

Stewart, Mike

 
9780440241348: A Clean Kill
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0440241340 ISBN 13: 9780440241348
Verlag: Dell Pub Co, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Kate Baneberry died with a whimper, not a bang. One moment she was alive, an attractive woman married to a successful businessman. The next moment she was dead, and no one had the slightest suspicion until a lawyer got involved–and shook the legal system to its core....

Living on Alabama’s warm, windswept Gulf Coast, Tom McInnes attracts troubling cases and troubled clients. With the help of Dr. Kai-Li Cantil, a gorgeous psychologist with a knack for unraveling other people’s secrets, McInnes pries into Kate’s death and soon knows it was no accident. In a world of multimillion-dollar lawsuits, Kate Baneberry signed her own death warrant when she did her civic duty and served on a jury. Because someone out there has grabbed justice by the throat and won’t let go–until all the right people die....

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Birmingham attorney MIKE STEWART is the author of A Perfect Life, Sins of the Brother, Dog Island, and A Clean Kill. A native of Vredenburgh, a small South Alabama sawmill town located in Monroe County, he grew up exploring the woods, rivers, creeks, and seashores of the Deep South that now play a central role in his fiction. As a successful corporate attorney, Stewart has more than ten years' experience representing clients before the state and federal courts of Alabama. Five years ago, he left his position as General Counsel of a large healthcare company to devote full time to writing. He is at work on his next novel of suspense, which Dell will publish in 2007.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One


Two little boys with blond bowl cuts were playing in the yard. Over and over, one tore across the lawn, holding a football overhead like the skull of an enemy, and then dove into a pile of dead leaves. The second kid piled on and they rolled around in the leaf pile, fighting like wild dogs over the football; then the victor would pick up the ball and take off for another running dive into a new pile. I remembered doing pretty much the same thing twenty years earlier in a different small town with my brother.

Some things are eternal. Young or old, rich or poor, human beings love to beat the hell out of each other.

I sat down on the brick front steps across from a pretty blonde woman, balanced a plate of food on my knee, and watched. She smiled, and I motioned at the kids. "Are they yours?"

She shook her head. "No. I think they're Sara's." I didn't know Sara, so I arranged some turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce on a fork and put it in my mouth. She said, "Looks like they're having fun."

I smiled and nodded and chewed.

"Relative or friend?"

I looked at her. "Of?"

She laughed. "Sorry. Of our hosts."

"Oh. Friend."

She kept looking at me with her eyebrows raised, as though I wasn't through talking.

As a general rule, I try not to fill in conversational blanks. At worst, it can get you in trouble. At best, well, it's just babbling. But it was Thanksgiving. And, I thought, what difference does it make? "The woman I would have been with today just moved back to the Midwest, and my elderly parents are on a holiday Caribbean cruise for elderly parents." I pointed my empty fork at the sky. "So, here I am."

She took a sip from a mug of coffee. "Oh, I know who you are. You're Tom McIntosh, aren't you?"

"Close. I'm Tom McInnes."

"Oh, sorry. Nice to meet you. I'm Sheri Baneberry. Our hostess, B.J., said I should talk to you."

Sheri had really large, spectacularly white teeth. Other than that, she was a perfect compilation of mediums--medium nose, medium build, medium-length hair. The overall impression was of a pretty, twentysomething woman completely devoid of sexuality--sort of a universal, upper-middle-class mom-in-waiting. Of course, I realized it was entirely possible that I wasn't turning her crank, either. Anyway, that's what I was thinking when a bloodcurdling scream pierced the crisp fall air, and I spilled gravy on my pants.

The slightly smaller bowl cut was wailing and cupping a tiny hand under a nose streaming blood from each nostril. I started to stand, but the hurt little boy didn't wait for help. He sprinted up the bricks between me and my dinner companion, holding his nose and crying and screaming for his mother. The bigger kid froze for two beats and then hightailed it around the back of the house.

I blotted at the gravy on my pants with one of those hand-embroidered linen napkins that pressure guests to struggle through the meal without actually having to wipe their mouths. I nodded in the direction of the little boy who had just galloped up the steps between Sheri Baneberry and me. "Dinner theater."

She smiled. "Which one were you?"

I stopped to think about what she meant. "I guess I was the nose breaker, since I was older. But my little brother wouldn't have run for Mom. He'd have gone to find a baseball bat."

She laughed. "Do you two still have the same loving relationship?"

More than a year after his death, I still missed a beat before saying, "His name was Hall. He died last year."

"I'm sorry."

"Thanks. Me too."

Sheri Baneberry turned sideways on the steps and pointed her knees at me. "But in a way it brings me to the thing I wanted to talk to you about. My mother passed away, well, it'll be two weeks ago this Saturday."

I told her I was sorry for her loss.

She just nodded and went on. "It was some kind of food poisoning. She was just forty-six, which surprises people. But she had me when she was twenty-one, which is younger than most people have kids nowadays, and she was pretty young-looking. So . . . anyway, Mom checked into Bayside on a Saturday afternoon. She'd been sick all morning with the kind of stomach and intestinal problems you get with food poisoning. And the short version is that something went wrong and she died that night."

I set my plate on the bricks between my feet and folded my thirty-dollar napkin to hide the gravy smear. "I'm sorry, Sheri, but I don't do malpractice, if that's where you're heading. I do go to court--I'm not a green-visor, transactions kind of lawyer--but I tend to represent clients who're involved in business disputes. An argument over a contract, something like that."

She flashed those big teeth, but it didn't seem friendly. "So you're not a slimy plaintiff's lawyer?"

"No, that's not what I'm saying. There are some bad doctors out there, just like there are bad lawyers and bad Indian chiefs, I guess. And there are good lawyers who do that sort of thing. It's just not what I want to do. So I don't."

"And B.J. tells me that if you don't want to do something, you just don't do it."

I looked into her medium-brown eyes. "Sounds almost unflattering when you say it."

She forced a small laugh. "Sorry, I guess I'm not at my best. It's just that I need someone I can trust to look into what happened to Mom. I was talking to B.J. inside, and she says that even though you can be kind of . . ." Sheri hesitated, and a rose blush crept up either side of her neck.

"The last time I checked, B.J. was a friend of mine. So it couldn't be that bad."

"Well, she just said you're kind of headstrong. Maybe a little difficult sometimes. It was nothing much worse than that. But she also said, quote, 'Tom McInnes is as trustworthy as a Boy Scout.' "

I didn't really know what to say to that, since I wasn't sure it was true, so I just looked at her.

"She also says you're supposed to be . . . well, 'smarter than God' is the way she put it."

I smiled. "That's what I keep telling people."

"Anyway, my father's on the warpath. You know. He wants to sue everybody and their uncle, and I don't want a lawyer who'll look at him and see dollar signs."

"Are you asking me to talk your father out of something? Because I can't do that."

"No. Definitely not. I'm looking for someone I can trust to take a look at what happened to my mother and give us an honest report." Sheri took a sip of coffee from her mug as her eyes darted around our Thanksgiving hosts' front yard. "I guess it's obvious I don't think Dad needs to sue anyone. Just putting the whole thing behind us is what I'd like to do. But if one of the doctors or the hospital did something god-awful, then, you know, I guess we need to know that."

Across the lawn, what had been a series of neatly raked and rounded piles were now jagged circles of brown and red and yellow leaves. I turned back to examine my new client's face. "Okay, Sheri. As long as you know what you're getting and what you're not getting. At this point, all I feel comfortable agreeing to do is analyze what's there and give you a report, but the way we're talking about doing this won't be cheap. A regular plaintiff's lawyer would take it on contingency, which means he or she would only charge if you win. I don't work that way, especially since I wouldn't be investigating with the goal of collecting a big verdict at trial. What I do is charge two hundred an hour, which...

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Verlag
Dell Pub Co
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0440241340
ISBN 13 
9780440241348
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
341
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Dell GmbH
6997927350
DE.CustomerSupport@dell.com

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