Read Online First Degree by David Rosenfelt - Free Book Online Page A

murder of a cop. If he’s going to try to better that, it’s more than just a desire to get the conveyor moving, or to appease the higher-ups in the police department. There’s something here that’s interesting and waiting to be discovered.
    “Do the best you can,” I say. “But my guess is that the day Garcia gets out is the day the jury comes back.”
    He shrugs his disappointment. “Then I guess we’re finished here.”
    “Not according to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals,” I say.
    “What is that supposed to mean?” he asks.
    The fact is that it doesn’t mean anything; it’s simply a significant-sounding non sequitur of the kind I occasionally drop to get the other side curious and thinking unproductively.
    “You want me to do your homework for you?” I ask, and then turn and walk to the door. He doesn’t stand up as I leave. I guess pretending to be pleasant can really tire a person out.
    On the way home I call Edna, who is still in a state of shock that I would turn down a prize like Stynes and take on a loser like Garcia. I tell her to call Kevin Randall, who was my second chair on the Willie Miller case, and ask him to meet me in the office first thing in the morning. I ask Edna if Laurie has called, and the answer is no. It wasn’t the answer I was hoping for.
    Then I call Lieutenant Pete Stanton and ask if I can buy him dinner tonight. He says that’s fine, as long as he can pick the restaurant. When I say it’s okay with me, he tells me he’ll leave the choice on my machine, after he prices a few out and comes up with the most expensive one.
    By the time I get home, he has already left the name of a French restaurant which, in his tortured attempt to pronounce it, sounds like La Douche-Face. There is no message from Laurie. I call her, but she’s either out or screening my call, so I leave word on her voice mail that I’d like to talk to her. Our last conversation has left me with a sort of throbbing emotional ache, which my work-related activities haven’t been able to mask.
    The restaurant Pete has chosen looks like a French villa, and when I arrive, he is at the bar drinking from an old and no doubt very expensive bottle of wine. Pete is generally a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, unassuming and easily able to get by on a lieutenant’s salary. Imported beer is usually too fancy for Pete’s taste, so it’s obvious that his intent is to reduce my financial level to his own.
    Pete and I have gotten to be pretty good friends. The relationship began when I helped get his brother out of a legal situation brought on by drug use, and his brother has since turned his life around. Pete and I started playing an occasional game of racquetball, though we haven’t played in a while. We still refer to ourselves as racquet-ball partners, but that’s only to maintain the guise of exercise.
    Our friendship takes occasional hits, most notably when we’re on the opposite sides of a case, but we seem to get through it. The Garcia case presents no such danger, because Pete is not directly involved in the investigation.
    We get the menus, and after a quick glance I assume the prices are not just for the food but also for a down payment on the property itself. Or maybe they charge so much because they have to pay for the twelve different forks that are provided for each of us.
    The menu is in French, but that doesn’t really concern Pete, since he’s only interested in the numbers on the right. Pete points to what he wants, and when he gets to the chateaubriand, the waiter explains that it is for two. Pete shrugs and says, “That’s no problem, I’ll bring what I don’t eat home for my dog.”
    Once the waiter has left, I waste my time by pointing out, “You don’t have a dog.”
    He nods, acknowledging that truth. “It’ll give me incentive to get one.” He looks around. “I think we need another bottle of wine.”
    “I can get information cheaper from paid informants,” I complain.
    He