Diminished Capacity by Stephen Penner

Author:Stephen Penner [Penner, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780578435121
Published: 2018-12-13T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

With no motions allowed prior to trial, the trial approached that much faster, psychologically speaking anyway. If there were really such a thing as psychology, that is.

The Friday night before trial found Brunelle going for a walk after the sun had set and the crispness of the night air had settled onto the city. Casey was working a late shift, so he didn’t have any other plans, and he didn’t feel like working on a trial—even one only days from starting—on a Friday night. So a walk would give his legs and his thoughts free roam, and if he ended up someplace where they served a good Manhattan or Old Fashioned, he didn’t have to worry about driving home.

The walk led him back up to Capitol Hill, or the outskirts of it anyway. Not quite to the well-lit, commercialized Broadway, complete with Starbucks and Urban Outfitters. But the older, grittier, more personal Capitol Hill. Not the one he’d shared with Casey and Carlisle weeks earlier, but the one he’d shared with Robyn well before that.

Before he realized where those legs and those thoughts had taken him, he was there. He stopped, hands in his pockets, and looked up at the building that had previously housed the Cucumber Club, one of several no-questions-asked clubs up on the Hill. He’d prosecuted a case from there. It seemed like forever ago. But it wasn’t.

The Cucumber Club was gone. A business like that doesn’t do well with dead bodies and live cops inside. There were other places for the sexually diverse to congregate, places away from the prying eyes of law enforcement, whether it be a cop in a uniform or a prosecutor in a suit. Brunelle looked down at himself. Sure enough, he was still wearing his suit. He hadn’t bothered to change. Change clothes, that is. Maybe he never changed at all. Maybe he hadn’t changed since then. He looked back up at the storefront.

There was a commercial real estate ‘For Lease’ sign in the corner of one of the whitewashed windows. The sign for the club had been taken down, leaving just gray concrete and red brick. If you hadn’t known it was there, you never would have known it was there. Brunelle felt a pang of regret as he imagined a coffee shop or organic market moving in. Something daylit and wholesome. Didn’t the world still need dark, troubling places?

Didn’t he?

A light rain started. That Seattle rain that was always possible, too light to bother with an umbrella, but heavy enough to cause a middle-aged man to squint against it and wonder if it would last long enough to require his suit to go to the dry cleaners before he could wear it again.

He frowned at his own thoughts. Reckless about his suit. They weren’t cheap, and he didn’t make that much working for the government. He should treat them better. He should have treated a lot of things better. A lot of people better.

Robyn.

Kat.

Victoria.

It was a long list.

He smiled again when he thought of Casey, initially telling himself he’d been treating her well.

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