Serving Process

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Julia serves process in Corvallis, Oregon. One of the lawyers in her office warns her of the dangers her job poses, but she just needs two more years of interning to qualify for law school.

But her last subpoena of the day offers more than she bargains for—and holds more lives than just hers in the balance.

With its heart wrenching twists, "Serving Process" proves Kristine Kathryn Rusch's mastery of crime fiction.

"Kristine Kathryn Rusch's crime stories are exceptional, both in plot and in style."

—Mystery Scene Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Feb 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215809846

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. She publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov's Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.   

Book preview

Serving Process

SERVING PROCESS

KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

WMG Publishing, Inc.

CONTENTS

Serving Process

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About the Author

Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

SERVING PROCESS

The house looked abandoned.

Julia sat in the molded seat of her six-year-old beater, the windshield wipers making their familiar quick-paced thud-scrape-thud, but still unable to keep up with the pouring rain.

The entire neighborhood was winter gray. It didn’t help that the sky was gray at what should have been the lightest part of the afternoon, and the rain was falling so heavily that she had trouble seeing the road half a block away.

The bare trees were black against the dark sky, dead leaves piled on overgrown grass, the nearby sidewalk cracked so badly that it looked more like concrete chunks than an actual path that led to the house.

The house itself was maybe a hundred years old, with a pitched roof that might’ve been red at one point, gutters that clearly didn’t work, and windows that seemed like they led into blackness.

The stairs leading into the half porch were as ruined as the sidewalk, and the wood on the railing was so crumbled, she could see it from the driver’s side window. The front door itself, which might have been white at one point, looked ragged and flimsy.

She leaned over her half-full Starbucks cup, and grabbed the loose papers on top of the sealed manila envelope that she had placed in a plastic sleeve. She pulled the papers over and took the pen out of the unused second cupholder where she used to store her phone. Now she had one of those nifty phone holders that looked better in the store than it did attached to the dash of her car.

She checked off the names on the first page, which she should have done the moment she served them. But she was an efficient process server, and her boss, whose small Corvallis law firm had only three real attorneys, didn’t care if she followed procedures one hundred percent to the letter. She batched her reports, filling them all out when she returned to the office, and then going to the firm’s legal secretary who was also the firm’s notary to make sure that everything was as clean as it could be for court.

Julia could follow those procedures because Ethelina, the firm’s legal secretary, hated to go home at night. She often ate dinner at her desk, and finished up whatever tasks she could find, finishing up around eight. Ethelina put in twelve-hour days, as if she were a young attorney on the make, which she most decidedly was not.

She was a widow who hated her quiet house and loved the people she worked with. If Julia was a slightly different person, she’d convince Ethelina to sell the house and buy something closer to the office. But Julia had stopped messing in other people’s lives two years ago—at least in a personal fashion.

Now she messed in those lives in an