In the Clearing Read Online Free Page A

crime, let alone been charged. She is innocent until proven guilty, and that presumption of innocence applies here. The only issues here are Mrs. Collins’s ties to the community, whether she is a flight risk, and her criminal history, with which I will start. The defendant has never had so much as a parking ticket. She has been an upstanding member of the community. She has a seventeen-year-old son who lives with her, as well as parents who live in the area. She is far from a flight risk. We would ask that the court release Mrs. Collins on personal recognizance.”
    Mairs looked to Cerrabone.
    “Your Honor,” he said, “Mrs. Collins purchased a handgun while the couple was in the midst of a contentious divorce that was approaching trial. She admitted in a 911 call that she shot her husband. She also admitted that she called her attorney. When officers arrived at the home, she again admitted to shooting her husband, and she asked to be read her Miranda rights. All of this is evidence of someone operating with all of her faculties, and possibly evidence of premeditation. As for self-defense . . . she shot Timothy Collins in the back.”
    “She bought the gun because of a long history of physical and verbal abuse by her former husband,” Berkshire said, not waiting to be asked to respond, “including the night of the shooting. And she asked for her Miranda rights at her attorney’s instruction.”
    Mairs sat forward. She’d clearly made up her mind, and she was ready to get on with it. “I don’t believe the defendant is a flight risk, nor do I believe she is a danger to the community. I am going to order that she surrender her passport and any weapons she possesses. The defendant will be placed on home confinement with an ankle monitor. Bail will be set at two million dollars.”
    “May I be heard on the amount of bail?” Berkshire said.
    “No.”
    “Your Honor—”
    “It’s a murder case, Counselor. Bail will remain at two million dollars. Madame Clerk, call the next case.”
    Berkshire took another moment to speak softly to his daughter before she departed. Angela Collins would be taken back to jail, processed, fitted with an ankle monitor, and released, assuming she could come up with a couple hundred thousand dollars and a bail bondsman willing to cover the difference. That likely meant signing over a deed of trust on the house to the bail bondsman, or borrowing from her father.
    Tracy and Kins followed Cerrabone out of the courtroom and into the hall. “I have another hearing. I’ll call you later,” Cerrabone said.
    As the prosecutor departed, Tracy made her way outside the courthouse with Kins. On a Friday afternoon, Third Avenue was already congested. The commute home was likely going to be a bitch. She and Dan O’Leary, the man she’d been dating a year, had no chance of easily getting out of Seattle on their drive south to Stoneridge, a small town on the Columbia River.
    “I’m sorry to be bailing on you,” Tracy said to Kins as they walked up the hill to the Justice Center. She and Dan were attending a funeral—for the father of Jenny Almond. Jenny had been the only other woman in Tracy’s Academy class.
    “Don’t sweat it,” Kins said. “Faz says you promised him a lunch if he helped out. You should have just bought him a car. It would have been cheaper.”

CHAPTER 3
    B y the time Tracy and Dan rolled their suitcases into the lobby of the Inn at Stoneridge, the sun had already set. The restaurant and garden patio had closed, and rather than the “awe-inspiring images of the mighty Columbia carving its path through canyon walls,” as the inn’s website proclaimed, the river looked like the world’s largest blacktop highway.
    At least the room was as romantic as advertised. The soft light of the bedside lamp colored the cedarwood walls gold, and soft jazz played from the nightstand stereo. Dan pulled back the curtain covering a sliding glass door. “Can’t see the mountain,”