Read Online Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_04 by Death in Paradise - Free Book Online Page B

August.”
    He glared at me pugnaciously from behind a paper-laden desk, his pockmarked face dangerously red. His office was small, four fake knotty pine walls and an old wooden desk. The grainy computer screen looked out of place.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I edged my chair a little closer to the open window and the small stream of fresh air.
    His quick green eyes flickered from me to the window. “Yeah, smells like shit in here, don’t it? I keep trying to quit.” He stubbed the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and the acrid smell of burning joined the fuggy odor of smoke. “Yeah. My wife says nobody smokes anymore but butts.” He gave a whoop of laughter that ended in a cough. “Used tobe the big clue, didn’t it? A cigarette butt. Or maybe a button. Or a strand of hair. What was it in the Lindbergh kidnapping? A piece of a ladder? Well, nobody left anything around for us when they grabbed CeeCee Burke—if anybody grabbed her.”
    I looked at him in surprise. “Her car was found with the door open, her purse on the passenger seat, a ransom note came the next day. What else could it be?”
    He clasped his hands behind his head, tilted back in his swivel chair, and stared moodily at a lopsided bulletin board decorated with a half-dozen yellowed Far Side cartoons. “We got crime around here. Sure. Guy gets drunk, beats his wife. Kids break into a store, steal cash and cigarettes and beer. We keep a close eye on some dudes, the ones who watch and see when the city people are gone, then break in and loot the houses. We smashed a pretty big burglary ring a couple of years ago. Every few years, we get a run of rapes. That don’t happen too often. Country people have dogs and guns. But big-time kidnapping for ransom? No, ma’am.”
    He jolted forward in the chair, grabbed at his cigarette pack. “That whole deal was as fishy as a bass derby. I kept trying to tell the feds it didn’t compute—but would they listen to a hayseed deputy? So”—he lifted his round shoulders in a sardonic shrug—“so screw ’em.”
    â€œI’ll listen.”
    His red cheeks puffed in a pugnacious frown. “Okay. I got a theory. ’Course, I’ll be up front with you. There’s a big damn hole in it—because somebody picked up the ransom money and if my idea’s right, that shouldn’t’ve happened. But here’s my take. She did it herself.”
    I suppose my face reflected utter surprise.
    â€œI’ll tell you, lady, suicide takes a funny tack now and then. A lot of times people’ll go to a hell of an effort to make it look like an accident. I think that’s what happened here. Because I been a deputy for twenty-two years and mybrother’s a homicide cop in Dallas, so I’m not the new boy in town when it comes to murder. Even if we’re not talking murder and kidnapping. But I’ve never known anybody to be snatched—then murdered with a painkiller. Never.”
    â€œPainkiller?” I was learning one new fact after another. “But I understood her body was found in the lake, two days after she disappeared.”
    â€œYeah. She drowned. But she’d had enough narcotic to drop an elephant.”
    â€œThat wasn’t publicly revealed.”
    â€œNope. The sheriff sat on that. Thought it might be useful.”
    â€œMaybe the kidnappers fed her something with a narcotic. To keep her quiet.”
    â€œLady, this wasn’t just a tablet or two. She’d had a bottle’s worth. No way it wouldn’t kill her. And that’s a weird way to kill somebody. Most kidnappers shoot somebody, crack ’em over the head, hell, bury ’em alive. No, the minute we got the autopsy report, I told ’em it was suicide. She dropped the Express Mail envelope in a slot on her way here. When she got up here Friday night, she set it up to look like she’d been kidnapped, then