“What can I do for you, Counselor?” Sally Grace said.
“I’ve got a weird question for you.”
“Many of your questions are weird. What do you want to know?”
“Did you do the autopsy on Morris Quinlan, the retired detective who was stabbed to death yesterday?”
“I did.”
“And you autopsied Robert Chesterfield?”
“Yes.”
“Were the two methods of murder similar?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“I can’t tell you now, but I’ll tell the DA if my guess is right.”
Grace hesitated. Then she said, “Both men were killed by a single thrust to the heart in a way that makes me think that the same person may have killed both people. But that’s not something I would swear to in court.”
“Thanks, Sally.”
Robin hung up the phone and stared into space. Was there really a connection between the three murders and the attempt on Regina, or did she have an overwrought imagination? Regina, Beathard, Chesterfield, and Quinlan had all been involved in the Randall and Gentry cases. Chesterfield had been charged with the murders, and Regina’s and Judge Beathard’s actions had led to the dismissal of the charges. But Quinlan had arrested Chesterfield and had nothing to do with the magician’s escaping justice. And the Gentry and Randall cases happened a long time ago. Why would someone try to kill the participants now? It didn’t make any sense.
Robin buzzed Mary Stendahl. “Do you know where the files from Robert Chesterfield’s old cases are?”
“Probably in our storage locker in the basement.”
“Can you get them for me?”
“I’ll go down and look.”
“Thanks.”
Twenty minutes later, Mary stuck her head in the door. “Where do you want these?” she asked, pointing at a dolly loaded down with Bankers Boxes.
“Put them in the conference room.”
Robin decided to take a break from the brief. Mary had taken the files out of the boxes and stacked them on the conference table. They covered it, and Robin realized that it would take the rest of the day to go through them. She sighed. The issue in the brief was very complicated, and the deadline for filing it was roaring toward her. She couldn’t spend the day going through hundreds of pages of transcripts, police reports, and evidence when she had no idea what she was looking for, so she went back to her office.
It was almost dark when Robin finished the draft of the brief. She closed her eyes and stretched. She was tempted to grab some sushi and head home, but duty called. The hearing on pretrial motions in David Turner’s case was coming up. She was too tired to work on the legal issues, but the police reports of the witness statements in Turner’s case were strewn around the floor of her office, and she wanted them in a trial notebook, where she could get to them easily if Ragland called someone as a witness at the hearing.
Robin was putting the statements in alphabetical order when she found Samuel Moser’s statement. Robin remembered that she had not been able to place the name when she encountered it the first time she and Jeff had gone through the reports. Now she remembered why it had sounded familiar, and she wondered why Samuel Moser would pay money to see the person who had been accused of trying to murder him.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The next morning, Robin started on the pretrial motions in David Turner’s case. There weren’t many issues she could raise. She had a theory for suppressing the statements Turner had made at the Imperial, but she didn’t think she would win. She also wanted to get the judge to rule that Ragland couldn’t tell the jury about his accomplice theory unless he had evidence pointing to a specific person.
Robin finished her work on the motions at ten thirty. It was too early for lunch, so she went into the conference room and began going through the old files in the Gentry–Randall cases. An hour later, Robin got to the file containing the report of Sophie Randall’s autopsy. A photograph from Randall’s autopsy was in the file. It made Robin sad to see someone so pretty and, from what Regina had told her, so happy on a coroner’s slab.
Robin started to read the autopsy report when she frowned. Randall looked familiar, but Robin had never met her. She stared at the photograph. An odd thought struck her. She shook her head, as if to dislodge it, but the idea hung on with enough tenacity to force her to return to