Read Online Guilt by Association by Marcia Clark - Free Book Online Page A

welcome,” he said with a little smile
     of his own before he moved down the bar.
    I almost groaned out loud. “You’ve got to be kidding, right?” I whispered. “He’ll boink you once and then bounce you out.
     You doremember that I live here, and you’ll have to keep meeting me here after it’s over?”
    “What makes you so sure he hasn’t ‘boinked’ me more than once already?” Bailey took a sip of her whiskey. “Besides,” she said
     matter-of-factly, “nobody bounces me out.”
    If I took this any further, I’d wind up with either too much or too little information. Neither option appealed to me, and
     besides, I had bigger fish to fry at the moment.
    “Whatever,” I said dryly. “So tell me what’s up with Jake’s case.”
    “The FBI has officially moved in,” Bailey replied.
    I took a drink of my Bloody Mary. The first sip went down like oil in a rusty engine. I inhaled deeply and finally began to
     relax.
    “So now that the Feds are in, are you guys out?” I asked.
    “Not yet. We’re ‘cooperating’ with them.”
    “Who’s the liaison?” I asked. Usually, when agencies worked together, each one had a point man to make coordinating the work
     more efficient.
    “Hales. You know him?”
    “We’ve met,” I said noncommittally, taking another pull of my drink.
    Bailey caught my evasive tone. “Tell me you’re not one of them.”
    “One of what?”
    “Don’t give me that ‘one of what’ crap. One of his babes.” She took a long sip of her drink. “He’s got a friggin’ fan club
     of panting pussies,” she said, her mouth twisted in disgust.
    “That’s lovely, Emily Dickinson.”
    “Call ’em like I see ’em,” she replied. She popped an almond into her mouth.
    Bailey’s “grossitude” notwithstanding, this meant that if Toni was right, Hale’s interest in me was no cause to pop out the
     Dom—it was just another day that ended in “y.” Never one for crowds, I decided I could take a pass on joining Hales’s Hotties.
    “Please,” I said as I reached for another olive. “Have I ever been anyone’s ‘babe’?”
    I looked at Bailey, who conceded the point. “Not that I’ve ever seen.”
    “Right.”
    I told her how I’d met Lieutenant Graden Hales. Bailey nodded, serious for a moment. When I’d finished, I drained what was
     left of my water and attacked the Bloody Mary again.
    Bailey looked at me speculatively. “He may be a little too popular for my taste, but I have to tell you, Hales does seem like
     a good guy,” she said as she lifted her glass. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to try and move past Daniel.”
    I opened my mouth to argue that I
had
moved past Daniel, that it’d been a year since I’d broken up with him. But I knew what Bailey meant, and although I hated
     to admit it, I knew she was right. It hadn’t been a clean break. Daniel Rose, a world-class criminal defense attorney, had
     become one of the most sought-after Strickland experts—lawyers who give expert testimony on the competence, or lack thereof,
     of other lawyers—in the country. I’d met him when a rapist-murderer, whom I’d gotten life without parole, had tried to get
     his conviction overturned by claiming his lawyer was incompetent for failing to present an insanity defense. I’d put Daniel
     on the stand to refute his claim, and from our very first meeting, I could feel the electricity in the air between us. I’d
     had no idea that he’d felt it too until the day we won.
    Daniel’s testimony had torn the defense ploy to shreds. Within minutes after Daniel left the stand, the judge denied the motion
     to overturn the verdict. Daniel had called me at the office that evening to find out how the judge had ruled, and when I told
     him, he proposed a celebratory drink. The drink had turned into dinner, hours of talking until the wee hours, and then lunch
     the next day. By the end of the week, we had plans for the weekend.
    What we had in those first few