“Coffee,” I muttered.

“Coffee,” he agreed.

We threw on some clothes and wandered toward the kitchen. Jessica was there already looking all bright and cheerful. God, I hated morning people.

“Morning Gab. Hello Braden,” she said cheerfully.

“Good morning,” Braden mumbled. I said something like “gemnneg.”

“Help yourself to some coffee. You’re in the office all day, Gab?”

“Uh huh. I was thinking that if I get enough done I might try to do some research and figure out how we might get those samples we discussed.”

“Ah, good idea. The plan at the moment seems kind of abstract.”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“Is there more?” Braden asked, peering soulfully into his now empty coffee cup. What, had he inhaled it?

“God, we’re like addicts,” I replied.

“I wish they made a caffeine IV,” he said.

“I just drink it for the taste,” Jess said brightly. Two pairs of tired unamused eyes turned on her. “Just sayin’.”

* * *

We all got ready for work and walked in together, stopping to pick up bagels and muffins on the way. We said goodbye to Braden as he headed toward his office and we headed toward ours.

“Sorry if we were kind of loud last night,” I said sheepishly.

“I only caught the end. I was walking in during the big finish.”

“I’ve never been like this before. I’m like a shameless harlot with him.”

“In other words you have a good sex life.”

“How did dinner and drinks go?” I asked as we crossed Market Street avoiding random taxis and bicyclists who were obviously out for blood. I could navigate city traffic on autopilot.

“It was fun,” she replied as we made it to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street and navigated around the line at a food cart that was blocking most of the sidewalk. Ah, the intricacies of urban pedestrian travel.

“Just fun? No spicy hot sexual chemistry?”

“I don’t think he’s interested in me.”

“It’s probably like when I didn’t think that Braden was interested in me.”

“Uh no.” She laughed. “No offense, but you’re one of those people who’s so smart that you’re oblivious, like professors who walk into walls. I, on the other hand, am very good at reading the signals that guys put out. Cam and I get along great, and I’m happy to have him as a friend, but that’s probably all that it will be, at the moment at least.”

“That’s so surprising.”

“Not really. I think he’s attracted to you. In fact, I think that he always has been. Maybe he just didn’t realize how much back when you were in college.” We steered around a group of pigeons surrounding a pretzel like they were having a meeting about it, and narrowly avoided a dog walker accompanied by the entire AKC Kennel Club.

“But he knows that Braden and I are together.”

“That doesn’t mean he can control how he feels. I’m sure he’ll work through it eventually, though, so I wouldn’t worry about it.” We finally arrived at our building and took the elevator to our floor. Cam was there waiting in our office.

“We brought you breakfast,” I said, dropping a blueberry muffin on his desk.

“Thanks!” he smiled at me brightly. “So, did Braden come visit you last night?” he asked nonchalantly. Now that Jess had been planting ideas in my head again I was watching his reactions. He and Braden had just made up after eight years on tension. I wanted to make sure that the truce lasted.

“Yep. We watched NOVA .We’re both PBS addicts.”

“Such a wild and crazy couple,” Jess teased. And she knew how wild and crazy we could be.

“Braden was always into that stuff. He’s a closet intellectual. He probably should have been an academic.” He had a little stack of files on his desk that he was going through – a baby public defender pile. I remembered those days.

“Me too,” I said. “Oh well, too late now.”

“You could still do something different,” Jess chimed in. “Maybe you could work for some kind of historical group or museum. They need lawyers, don’t they?” She started digging through the newly arrived grown-up public defender pile of files next to her desk that looked like if it fell it could crush a village.

“I’m fine doing this for now. At least I feel like I’m helping people and occasionally I even get a client who’s innocent. I told you about Ms. Murphy didn’t I?”

“Gabrielle Ginsberg, champion of falsely accused sexually frustrated women.”

“I should put that on my business card.” A pile of files arrived for me too. So nice that nobody wanted me to feel left out. The one I needed was, of course, on the bottom of the pile.

We worked on preparing our cases that morning and Jess took Cam with her to watch parole violation hearings that afternoon. I carved out a couple of hours to contact my handwriting expert, Steve Flynn, a former FBI special agent, and work on the problem of how to get the samples. Steve told me that even if the author of the note had been trying to disguise his or her handwriting there would still be similarities. The sample was small, though, so he might not be able to come up with a definite match. I told him that I just needed something to point me in the right direction.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I sat down at the computer and starting looking at everything and anything I could find about Cole Stephenson. There were the usual press release type things and publicity shots of him at various community events. Finally, though, my search brought up a weird link to a message board called “The Political Gossip Rag.”

I saw that it was a site for people who traded gossip about politicians like others did about celebrities. Cole was only small potatoes politically, so he didn’t have the amount of commentary that better known politicians had generated, but some of his proclivities had made him interesting enough to discuss. There were all kinds of rumors about him. One type of rumor kept reappearing, that he was in to kink. There was nothing first-hand though. Everyone had “heard” the story from someone else so it didn’t seem very reliable — but then, I guess that was pretty much what “gossip” was. If you could believe it, though, he liked to be dominated by women and treated like a bad little boy.

Then I got to a thread that was particularly interesting. It said that rumor had it he regularly attended underground sex parties in the Philadelphia area thrown by someone named Fanny Hill. I decided to try to find out more.