Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) Read Online Free

attorneys for New York County, he’d been drawn to her classic Italian features, the petite but curvy body, and the way her soft, molasses-colored curls framed her face. Not even when she lost an eye opening a letter bomb intended for him, way back when they were first dating, had he thought differently.
    However, the past few years had been rough on her and the rest of the family. After leaving the DAO, Marlene tossed aside her lawyer’s shingle and gave the private sector a shot as a gumshoe for hire. Fate, karma, circumstances—whatever you wanted to call it—had taken her down a road in which she found herself dispensing vigilante justice on behalf of abused women, and then again when her family was attacked—a not uncommon experience. All of her behavior could be justified in an “eye for an eye” way, but she’d found herself caught up in a web of violence that she couldn’t seem to extricate herself from. And it had taken its toll on her physically and emotionally, and on their marriage. As the district attorney for the County of New York and a man who believed in “the system,” for all of its failings and imperfections, he opposed vigilante justice on principle. That his wife was in the middle of it had strained their relationship to the breaking point.
    But they managed, he thought. He’d watched her making focaccia the other night, kneading the dough, lost in her own thoughts. She’d looked up and caught him gazing at her, then smiled and went back to her bread.
    Lately, she just seemed… What’s the word I’m looking for…satisfied?…Yes, she seems satisfied.
    And yet, it had only been a few weeks since she had almost single-handedly stopped a terrorist attack on the New York Stock Exchange. If the terrorists had succeeded, the nation’s economy could have collapsed, ruining lives and throwing the country into pandemonium. She’d killed several men to prevent it from happening, but it would have been hard to argue that every drop of blood wasn’t justified. Still, there was the added trauma of nearly dying with her daughter…and the old bugaboo about people she loved getting caught up in the violence that hovered around her.
    Of course, Karp worried that some new incident would push her back down the stairs of mental health. She’d get a taste of some act of violence and like an alcoholic who’d been on the wagon for many years and then tries “just a sip,” she’d be hooked again. So he’d watched for some sign of distress—a warning that the old addiction was kicking in again. But after she’d taken a few days to hang out with their friend John Jojola in the New Mexican desert, she’d seemed to bounce back to her new normal as devoted wife and mother.
    Maybe it’s been too easy , he thought, but then chided himself for doubting that she was coming to peace with who she was and her role in the world. Her present mischievousness seemed genuine enough. He smiled and held out his hand for the letter. “Come on, give it up, gorgeous.”
    “Hmph, well, if you’re going to say nice things like that, you will spoil all my fun,” she said, pretending to pout. “Anyway, I was going through a box with some of your old law school papers and found this…I guess you could call it a letter of recommendation, from Robert H. Cole.”
    “My torts professor?” At the mention of his old Boalt Hall law professor at UC Berkeley, Karp smiled. He recalled many a fine classroom debate with Cole; he’d realized only after the fact that the professor was using those debates to push his headstrong and occasionally overly emotional pupil to perfect his use of reason and logic in order to win the argument.
    “Good old Bob Cole…what a mentor that guy was for me,” Karp said. “He was a master at the art of logic and persuasion. I learned more about how to problem solve from him as anybody before or since, except maybe Garrahy.”
    “Well, the man certainly had you pegged.” Marlene giggled.