At the courthouse, I filed a Petition for Probate with the clerk and then shot the breeze with the bailiffs working the metal detector. The docket was already underway. Only stragglers would arrive for court at this hour. A few folks like me would drift in and out throughout the day to drop off papers or visit the Office of Land Records. The bailiffs leaned back on antique wooden chairs that used to be around the trial tables, but had been replaced and demoted to the hallways.
Instead of the usual sports banter, the two men discussed the morning news. They asked if I had heard about the dead guy found floating in the Chesapeake Bay last night. The details were sketchy even after a press briefing. No name. No cause of death. Not much at all.
I gave a half-hearted nod. “Yeah, the local TV stations are covering it.” There was no reason to mention how I had spent last night with the sheriff and her team of scuba divers. Under the circumstances, the less said to anyone, the better.
The tall bailiff with a crewcut whom everyone called Bruno, though I thought his real name was Arthur, lowered his newspaper. “Some o’ them fishermen drink all day long. Probably drowned in crappy beer ‘fore ever hittin’ the water.”
The chubby bailiff seated next to him said, “Could be. The three reasons most people die around here are beer, bourbon, and bad clams.” The guys started to debate pitchers in the World Series, so I told them I was heading back to the office and would catch up with them later. Chester County did not see a lot of suspicious deaths. Maybe Richard Kostas had died of natural causes or an accident, and the sheriff overreacted. Then I recalled how the coroner had sent the body directly to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, so I put that thought out of my mind. I pressed through the heavy security doors and stepped outside.
The morning sun had burned off the fog, and a warm autumn breeze rustled dead leaves across the courtyard. Prisoners in orange jumpsuits raked the leaves into piles near the curbs. The breeze was winning the battle and blowing leaves over the areas they had finished, but the prisoners did not seem too bothered.
I paused on the concrete steps, the same steps that smiling young couples walked up to apply for marriage licenses and worn-out middle-aged men and women walked down after their divorce hearings. Embittered felons, prosecuting attorneys, crime victims, State’s witnesses, and anybody with a civil complaint, frivolous or otherwise, entered the courthouse through these doors. They all searched for that strange combination of vengeance and compassion that blended into something called justice. No one ever had the same definition of justice as anyone else, but they all walked up these same steps. If you boiled any case down to the facts, you might stumble across a little justice now and again. Uncovering the facts was always the challenge. Most litigants just wanted to get to the truth, but of course not all of them wanted that.
The gray slate roof of the turret atop my Victorian home was visible from the courthouse. The walk from door to door took only a few minutes. Entering my house from the back door prevented clients in the waiting room from thinking that I had just arrived, but I was not expecting anyone today. I came in through the back door anyway, mostly out of habit.
My paralegal, Hailey Ramirez, sat at her tidy and organized desk, a holdover from her years as a secretary for a colonel in the U.S. Army. She sorted the mail with her back to me, apparently not noticing that I had returned.
“Morning, Hailey, how’re things?”
“Oh,” she replied a bit startled. “All right, so far. You’re back early.”
“Just a quick errand at the clerk’s office. I filed that new estate today. Any checks come in?”
“Nope.” She handed me a stack of envelopes, the monthly bills. I stuffed them into the pocket of my blazer without flipping through them. I already knew which companies would be kind enough to send me friendly reminders. She frowned slightly as she tossed the unopened junk mail into the trash bin.
Hailey asked, “Permission to speak freely?”
I had to laugh. “Okay, granted.”
“It’s really not my place, Bryce, but … something needs to change. You had a fantastic government job with a regular paycheck, benefits, prestige. Maybe this county seems beneath you, but you chose to quit and come here. On the Eastern Shore, the work is mostly divorces and criminal defense. Let’s take on some of those cases and build the practice, at least until something shows up that you like.”
The stack of bills tucked inside my blazer felt bulky, and I wasn’t in the mood to argue, embarrassed that my situation had become obvious to my employee. “You’re right. Seems like I have no choice.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Thanks, Hailey. I mean that.”
She adjusted her tortoise-shell glasses and turned toward her computer screen. “And you can start with the citation I’m going to get from a speed camera this morning.”
“Oh, okay,” I teased her. “Now I get it.”
“No, really. I didn’t see the speed camera and flew right past it.”
“And you want me to fight it in court? You could just pay the ticket. Where was the camera and how fast were you going?”
“On Cafferty Road coming into town. I was doing, um, sixty. Maybe sixty-five.”
“What’s the speed limit there? Forty-five? You’d better bring your toothbrush to court. The judge might lock you up.”
“Very funny. Just get me off, okay?”
I fished my cellphone out of my blazer and opened an app. “I think you’re in the clear. There’re no speed cameras anywhere in the county right now. See.”
I showed Hailey the daily update of an app that identified the locations of speed cameras in the state. Red images of old-fashioned cameras dotted the map
