Read Online Unleashed by David Rosenfelt - Free Book Online

employer looked at the way they were spending the money and the way they talked to Drew and decided they were too stupid to rely on or allow to live.”
    “You got a lot of big shots around here?” he asked, though he knew the answer.
    Burke nodded. “It’s the state capital; we’ve got a few.”
    “I think the plan was to reduce the number.”

 
     
    Reading the discovery material presents a bad news/bad news situation . As Thomas Bader had said, these are only the beginning in what will be a series of discovery documents. But what is here is damaging enough to Denise Price.
    Barry Price probably died of botulism poisoning; the injuries he suffered when thrown from the plane were all, according to the coroner, likely postmortem. It’s hard to tell exactly, since the effects of the poison had certainly set in long before the crash. It’s entirely possible that the impact mercifully finished the job.
    I take a few minutes to Google botulism, and the facts can be molded to fit the prosecution’s theory and time line, as I expected they would.
    There were traces of the poison found in a basement sink drain in the Prices’ house, which certainly tends to implicate Denise. She and Barry are the two obvious candidates to have had access to that sink, and he could safely be characterized as being in the clear.
    Another troublesome little tidbit is that Denise worked as a pharmacist’s assistant for two years before meeting and marrying Barry. It just contributes to the notion that she would have been capable of preparing the poison.
    There is no possibility of successfully arguing suicide in this case. It makes no sense that Barry would deliberately ingest a poison and then get on that plane. If he wanted to kill himself, he could have just taken the poison, or more likely just gotten on the plane and flown it into the ground. There is no logical reason to do both.
    The obvious conclusion, though not mentioned in the documents, is that the killer gave Barry the poison before he was going to fly, in the hope that the crash and subsequent explosion would incinerate the body and remove the chemical residue.
    This too points to Denise; she knew that Barry was making the flight.
    The police had moved quickly, and there are already interviews with friends of the Prices who claim that their marriage was a troubled one. None of them are yet ready to believe that Denise could have done it, but that will not be a help to her attorney. Somebody did it, and there is no reason the jury would consider her incapable of being the one.
    So that’s the bad news.
    And here’s the other bad news: I’m finding myself getting into it.
    I’m reading these pages as if I am Denise Price’s attorney, and worse yet, I’m semi-okay with that. It’s forcing me to think logically, to start to problem-solve, and rather than dreading the work, I’m sort of looking forward to it.
    Is industriousness contagious? Can you catch a work ethic from someone? And is there a cure?
    “This is your fault,” I say to Laurie, who is reading the pages as well.
    “What did I do now?”
    “You made me get involved with this, and it is stirring my long dormant freeze-dried work juices.”
    “You’re leaning toward taking the case?” she asks, obviously surprised.
    “Unless I wake up tomorrow having come to my senses.”
    “Are you reading something that makes you think Denise Price is innocent?”
    “Nope.”
    “Don’t misunderstand me, Andy. I think your getting back to work is great, but I thought your standard was you needed to believe in your client.”
    “It is. But these pages, this investigation, are the work of the prosecution. And I’m more interested in what I’m not reading.”
    “What might that be?”
    “I’m not reading that Barry Price was looking for a criminal attorney.”
    “So what if he was?”
    “Well, unless he was worried about being charged with felony masturbation, his crime had to involve other people. People he