for doing his damn job. Where the hell was the loyalty? Where was the goodwill? Not liking his thoughts, Spenser walked around his spacious apartment, his eyes half seeing the furnishings, the other half somewhere else.
He never told anyone, but he had decorated the place himself. Everything was stark, black and white. Because that was the way he thought, either something was black or it was white. Either there was proof or there was no proof. End of story. Period. Chrome and glass with colored Jackson Pollock prints on the walls that added color. He always had fresh flowers delivered every other day. He liked flowers for some reason. He looked around; the place looked like a war zone in Beirut, with papers and files and folders everywhere. He’d given Yolanda, his housekeeper, a six-week paid vacation to visit her family in Guatemala to get her out from under his feet. Besides, he liked to reward loyalty, and Yolanda had been with him from day one. She’d certainly have her work cut out on her return. Which, in turn, would require an extra bonus.
Spenser stomped his way into his bedroom. He eyed the messy bed, the clothes he’d dropped wherever they fell. He wasn’t a slob by any means, but, over the past weeks, all desire for neatness had vanished. His bed linens needed to be changed, he needed clean towels, and he needed to do his laundry and hit the dry cleaners. Maybe he could call them, and they’d pick up his things. Well, he knew how to clean and make beds. It was the first thing that had been drilled into him at boarding school. Just because he knew how to do it didn’t mean he liked doing it.
Spenser shed his clothes, donned a pair of creased shorts and a snappy white T-shirt that said he loved Atlanta. Which he did. An hour later, his bed had fresh linens with hospital corners, his towels were in the washer, his dry cleaning sat in a bag by the front door. He forgot his desire for a drink and made coffee. While he waited for it to drip into the built-in coffeemaker, he eyed Yolanda’s favorite kitchen tool: a Crock-Pot. He needed to eat some nourishing food, and there was no way in hell he was going to go out to a restaurant, where people would gawk at him and whisper all kinds of things about him out of earshot. He opened the freezer, took stock of his food supply, and yanked at several different packages. He unwrapped everything and dumped it into the Crock-Pot, along with some chicken broth, some seasonings, then put the cover on it. Done.
Spenser wondered if his father had ever eaten anything out of a Crock-Pot. Unlikely. His father had a gourmet palate, unlike his own. Thanks again to summer camps and boarding school. He’d grown up on mac and cheese, stews, spaghetti, and anything that could be cooked in one pot. And he liked it. The only thing he and his father had in common was their appreciation for fine wine. He realized in that moment that he really didn’t like his father very much. Hell, he didn’t like him at all. He didn’t much care for his socialite mother, either. How could he? He had never been around them long enough to form any kind of attachment when he was a child.
The coffeemaker made one last cheerful gurgle, then went silent. Spenser peeled a banana and forced himself to eat it before he poured and carried his coffee into the living room. He brushed aside papers, set the cup down, and let his mind race. He needed to come to terms with what was staring him in the face, and he needed to do it
Spenser let his mind go back ten years in time. The police had called his office the moment they realized Audrey Star was dead. His office was always the first notified when a high-profile case came into being. He had dropped everything and raced to the Star mansion. He knew within seconds that this was the one big case that could make or break him. The media were everywhere, twenty-four/seven. He’d lost count of the interviews he’d given, always careful to speak the truth and to stay inside the letter of the law.
Spenser remembered his first thought when he entered the death room and saw the pretty little nurse, the dead woman who wasn’t so pretty in death, and the handsome husband. Triangle. Money. The husband was going to inherit the Star fortune. Sadly, to his dismay, he soon found out that wasn’t the case since Star had already had the fortune, and it had been turned over to him long before the wife had her tragic accident. It was still a triangle. A love triangle. Pretty young nurse with stars in her eyes, a handsome man, and an invalid wife. Anyone with half a brain would have thought the same way he did at the time. He’d burned the midnight oil, getting by on as little as two hours’ sleep a night in his quest to get to the truth.
The pretty little nurse had a squeaky-clean background. Orphan, friends in the city, put herself through nursing school, sterling affidavits from friends and teachers, glowing testimonials from those do-gooder nuns at St. Gabriel’s. It wasn’t computing.
He’d interviewed Adam Star personally at least a dozen times before the trial. He was adamant that there was nothing going on between the nurse and himself. Spenser actually believed him. He tried another tack: Sophie Lee was enamored of her boss, a secret love crush. Star had scoffed at that. Sophie Lee, he said, had always been professional. He’d gone on to say he never understood why she’d stayed on because his wife was so verbally abusive. Until Sophie came, they hadn’t been able to keep a nurse more than a week. Star had said he actually asked her why she stayed, and her response had been, “Your wife needs me. She needs a constant. They’re just words, Mr. Star, and they’re a result of her medications and being an invalid with no hope of recovery.” Star had gone on to say, because of her dedication, he always gave her a bonus in her paycheck to show his appreciation. She always thanked him and said it wasn’t necessary. Star said no one, and that included Spenser, could ever convince him that Sophie Lee had killed his wife.
“Well then, Mr. Star,” Spenser had said, “that just leaves you as the guilty party.”
“Prove it,” had been Star’s challenge. He lawyered up with eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers; not one, not two, not three, but four of them. Within hours of Audrey Star’s death, he had the mayor, the chief of police, and everyone else with a title in the state of Georgia covering his back. Star was right, there was no hard proof, not so much as a shred. So, Spenser concentrated on Sophie Lee and his theory of a secret, unrequited, one-sided love affair. It was weak, and he knew it, but he ran with it anyway because he had nothing else to go on. There was a dead woman who demanded justice be served, and he had to serve Audrey Star.
The medical laptop computer that belonged to Dr. Hershey Franklin had yielded nothing. On his daily visits to check on his patient, Dr. Franklin had typed in his orders, and Sophie Lee initialed them. She recorded everything on the computer every fifteen minutes, even Audrey Star’s abusive comments. Kala Aulani had argued to the court that those entries were all the proof a jury needed to show that Sophie Lee was a dedicated nurse.
Sophie Lee had arrived with her own outdated, beat-up, secondhand laptop, Adam Star had said. But when she realized she didn’t need it, she’d taken it back to her apartment. He’d confiscated that, too, but there was nothing on it to incriminate Sophie Lee. Then he had decided maybe it was a conspiracy between the doctor, Star, and the nurse. Well, that had been a shitstorm to equal no other. Franklin’s lawyers had come on like bulldozers and he had to back off that theory and actually offer an apology to the doctor. That left him with Sophie Lee and his unrequited-love theory. Audrey Star was dead, and if her husband didn’t kill her, that left only Sophie Lee. All he had to do was convince a jury of Sophie Lee’s peers that she was guilty. And he had successfully done that.
Had Sophie Lee killed Audrey Star? In his heart of hearts, he didn’t think so. What he personally thought did not count in a court of law. Spenser thought Adam Star had killed his wife. He just couldn’t prove it. He had hoped, in the dark and silence of this very apartment, late at night, that Adam Star would own up to what he had done at some point. But he never had, so he gave the case everything he had, and Sophie Lee was convicted.
Okay, that was his side of things. Spenser finished his coffee, trotted out to the kitchen for a refill, and brought it back. He rummaged until he found Kala Aulani’s opening statement. He read it, reread it, then read it a third time. What jumped out at him were the words: Audrey Star had kept a journal. He’d grilled Adam Star about the journal- Star had referred to it in old-fashioned girly terms as a diary. On the stand, Star had said his wife kept a diary long before he had ever met her, and that she continued to write in her diary during the good years of their marriage, and as far as he knew she hadn’t done it since the accident. Then he had corrected himself and said maybe she had kept one, but if she did, he didn’t know where it was, and no, he had never felt the need to pry into his wife’s secret thoughts. In her deposition, Sophie Lee said there was such a diary but she referred to it as a journal and that Audrey wrote in it on her “good days.” She said Audrey kept the journal either under her pillow or in the drawer of the night table that she could reach by the side of her hospital bed. She said also in her deposition that Audrey used to clip articles or things of interest out of magazines, again, on her “good days,” and kept them in the back of her journal or would tape them to pages in her journal.
Spenser’s instincts back then had been on the money, but the suits who charged $800 an hour had successfully gotten Star out of it, leaving only Sophie to prosecute. The son of a bitch had never confessed until he himself was dying. He wondered how those eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour suits were sleeping these days. No better than he was, he hoped.
A warrant to search the Star mansion and Sophie Lee’s apartment did not turn up a journal, a diary, or even a notebook. At trial he had hammered home the point that only Sophie Lee had direct knowledge of the journal and that she had gotten rid of it before the fateful day she’d decided to kill her patient. On the stand, Adam Star had
