Read Online A Killing Spring by Gail Bowen - Free Book Online

terminals. On Ed’s door was a sign: “Of all life’s passions, the strongest is the need to edit another’s prose.” Beside it somebody had spray-painted the words “Fairy-Loving-Bum-Fucker.” I closed my eyes, but I could still see the words, and I knew Ed’s sign was right: at that moment, I hungered for a paint canister of my own and a chance to do a little judicious editing.
    Sick with disgust, I turned and doubled back towards the front door of the building. I wanted to be outside where my dogs were waiting; the air was sweet and the bluebirds had come home.
    When I pulled up in front of our house, Taylor was sitting on the top step of the porch, with Benny on her knee. She was still wearing her nightie, but she’d added her windbreaker and her runners. “Winter’s over,” she said happily.
    “It certainly feels like it,” I said. “Now let’s go inside and get something to eat. I’m starving.” I made coffee and pancake batter. Taylor, who had already eaten a bowl of cereal and a banana poured batter in the shape of her initials onto the griddle; when she’d polished off her initials, she made Benny’s initials. I was watching her devour these and waiting for my own pancakes when Alex came.
    “I haven’t even had a shower yet,” I groaned.
    “You look good to me,” he said. “After yesterday, you deserve to laze around.”
    “I wish,” I said. “I feel like I’ve already put in a full day.”
    I took the pancakes off the griddle. “Do you want these?”
    “You take them, but if there’s plenty …”
    I handed him the bowl and the ladle. “Taylor makes hers in the shape of her initials.”
    He smiled. “She’s such a weird little kid.” He went over to the griddle and poured. “Okay. Fill me in on your day.”
    I watched his face as I told him about the vandalism at the university. He listened, as he always did to whatever the kids and I told him, seriously and without interruption or comment.
    “I guess it could have been worse,” I said. “At least whoever did it vented their spleen in words. Nobody was hurt.”
    “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,” he said, and there was an edge of bitterness in his voice that surprised me. “Did Mrs. Gallagher get in touch with you last night?” he asked.
    “She made a house call. She brought her keys over because she’s going to her sister’s in Port Hope.”
    “She told me she might do that.”
    “So she did talk to you.”
    “Of course. She’s a good citizen. She wouldn’t leave town without telling us where she’d be. Anyway, I was glad she called. I had some questions; she answered them.”
    “What kind of questions.”
    “Just tidying-up-loose-ends questions. I wanted her to go over again what she knew about where her husband was in the twenty-four hours before he died. She didn’t have much to add except …”
    “Except what?”
    “Except I still don’t think she’s told us everything. For one thing, I have a feeling that yesterday wasn’t the first time she’d been in that rooming house on Scarth Street. When I took her there, she started down the hall on the main floor as if she knew where she was going.”
    “But Reed’s body wasn’t on the main floor.”
    “No. It was upstairs, on the top floor. Actually, we have a witness who thinks he saw Gallagher going up the fire escape at the back at around quarter to nine.”
    “I don’t understand how you can let Julie go when you think she might be holding something back.”
    “Jo, when someone dies suddenly, everybody who knew them holds things back. There are a hundred reasons why the living don’t choose to disclose everything they know about the dead, but as long as those reasons don’t have a direct bearing on our case, we don’t push it.”
    “So Julie doesn’t have to stay in Regina.”
    “There’s no legal reason why she should. Her husband’s dead, and human decency might suggest that she hang around till