Sedona Law 6 by Dave Daren (best non fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

some of my old high school friends, I mean like, really hanging out with them. And you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

“Is that right?” she said. “Because Julianna Spencer invited us to a game night at her house tomorrow.”

“Julianna, huh?” I sighed.

Julianna and I had been theatre counterparts in high school, and we spent a lot of time together, so most people assumed we were unofficially together. We never were, although there was something between us. But in any event, we both grew up and went our separate ways. I went to law school, and she moved to New York, where she performed in a nude dance troupe and lived in a five way relationship.

Then a couple of months ago, she moved back to Sedona, and was accused of killing her former lover. We defended her, got her off on the charges, and remained professional the whole time.

But, when she and her current boyfriend casually invited Vicki and I to have group sex wth them, I knew things could get really weird if we didn’t keep our distance.

“We’ll see,” I said.

“Come on,” she said. “It will be fun.”

I grabbed her hand over the console as I drove and lightly brushed my tongue over her fingers.

“Or,” she said. “We could do that.”

I laughed. “Sounds like more fun than playing Headbanz, that’s for sure.”

We arrived back at the cottage perfectly timed for the sushi delivery. I signed for it, and we went inside.

“So what are we binging tonight?” Vicki asked as she slipped out of her work clothes.

“I don’t know,” I said as I unpacked the sushi boxes.

“I know,” her face brightened. “Let’s watch one of those house building shows on HGTV.”

“Are you kidding me right now?” I responded.

“Seriously,” she said. “You’ll be into it. I promise.”

She flipped it on, and I actually found it quite mesmerizing.

“I had no idea you could do a window seat that way,” I said as I pulled out my phone. “Maybe I should text that to Jim.”

“No,” she stated firmly and took the phone out of my hand. “If we’re going to watch this, we have to leave poor Jim alone.”

I laughed and she tossed my phone onto the dresser. My phone was surgically attached to my person. No one in the world could or ever had dared to take my phone away from me. And yet, I didn’t care. This woman had done something to my head.

We curled up in bed and watched some home decorating show and ate sushi. I thought about what AJ said.

That we needed to be out and about in the social scene. She might have been right. But, laying here with Vicki it occurred to me that we were doing something far more important.

We were building a marriage.

Chapter 12

“We still don’t have anything concrete to go on,” AJ said. “A lot of loose ends that look suspicious.”

Vicki, AJ and I sat around our conference room, sipping coffee. This was our checkpoint meeting. A lot of times when these big cases got too muddled, we’d whiteboard out everything we knew to find out where to go with it.

AJ was at the whiteboard, and she was great at that mind mapping technique. Clouds, arrows, and multi-colored words. It worked for her, but I was more of a lists and bullet points in black kind of guy.

“What do we know?” I said.

“We know that Kelsi was arrested the day after James’ death because she was found to have elephant tusks in her backyard.”

She drew a quick elephant with a frowning face.

“That looks like the Republican elephant,” Vicki said.

“I know,” AJ said. “It’s an easy way to draw it.”

I scanned the original police report. A lot of times when we did these meetings, we would go back to the original source material and ask ourselves questions we already knew.

“And they knew this about the elephant tusks  because...” I prompted.

“Because elephant tusks started showing up on the black market, and there was a tip from Irwin Montague that Kelsi was his supplier. And then they found tusk in her backyard.”

“And they know it wasn’t James’, or a plant because of the airline tag on the suitcase it was clearly smuggled into,” Vicki supplied.

“Right,” AJ said.

“So allegedly, “Vicki said. “While these tusks were in her backyard shed, James dies on local television.”

“Yeah,” AJ said. “What’s up with that? Did we ever find a cause of death on that?”

“We got the coroner’s report by accident,” I said. “But in the end, it’s not our circus, not our monkeys,” I said.

“Or our elephants,” AJ laughed at her own corny joke.

“Ugh,” Vicki threw a wadded up piece of paper at her and she laughed and dodged it.

“But we actually do think that the death and smuggling are related,” AJ clarified.

“We think that,” I said. “But we have no real reason to believe it. So we have to leave that part out for now.”

She drew a tombstone in the top corner with the name James, and a big question mark.

“We also know the whole band had just come back from Africa,” I said. “Where James had had a secret donation meeting with a wildlife charity.”

“Did we ever investigate them?” Vicki asked.

“I looked into them a little bit,” I said. “From what I can tell, they’re all on the up and up.”

“Let’s look further into them,” Vicki said. “I don’t like them.”

“I’ll do that,” AJ said, and she jotted it down on her own notepad.

“Then there’s the guys in the band,” I said.

“Roy,” I said. “The manager.”

“Ugh,” AJ said. “That guy gives me pervy creeps.”

She drew a stick figure in a t-shirt and labeled it ‘Roy.’

“Roy has had a fling with Kelsi,”