Read Online Some Like It Hawk by Donna Andrews - Free Book Online Page A

much better than no alibi at all.
    Just then Chief Burke stepped into the room. Randall handed me the phone again.
    “Hello?” Rob’s voice was faint, but I could tell he was anxious.
    “Hang on a sec, Rob,” I murmured into the phone. Then I hit the mute button.
    “Welcome, Chief,” Randall was saying. “Those cowboys give you any trouble upstairs?”
    “None that I didn’t give them back with interest,” the chief said. “What happened?”
    “I was coming down to parley with Phinny, with two Star-Trib reporters and Meg along to witness,” Randall said. “We were just entering the courthouse when shots rang out. We followed the toy soldiers down here and found the body.”
    “Who is she?”
    “Colleen Brown. Works for the Evil— for First Progressive Financial.”
    “The reporters get a good look?”
    “And a few snapshots before we shooed them out with the toy soldiers.”
    The chief winced.
    “And one of the guards found what may be the murder weapon,” Randall added. “Gun thrown down in the no-man’s-land between the two barriers.”
    “Wonder what made him think to look in there,” the chief muttered.
    Randall shrugged elaborately.
    “You can see what this looks like.” Randall pointed to the body and then to the barricade. The chief nodded.
    “Meg,” the chief said. “Is your cousin in town?”
    I nodded. I had several hundred cousins, if you counted all the second, third, fourth, and once- or twice-removed ones, the way Mother did. But I knew exactly which cousin he meant—Horace Hollingsworth, who worked as a crime scene investigator in our hometown of Yorktown, and through a longstanding intercounty arrangement, here in Caerphilly when needed.
    I unmuted my phone.
    “Gotta go,” I said to Rob. Then I hung up and dialed Horace.
    “I know,” Horace said instead of hello. “I’m about two minutes away.”
    With that he hung up.
    “Two minutes,” I repeated to the chief.
    “Debbie Anne?” The chief was talking on his own cell phone. “See if Dr. Smoot is in town, and findable, and can get his sorry self down here with reasonable speed.” He looked up at me. “This is going to be complicated,” he said. “If you can find your father—”
    I nodded and hit a speed-dial button. By the time I had left a message for Dad and sicced Mother on the job of finding him ASAP, the chief had finished issuing instructions to his troops. He looked grim as he tucked his phone back into his pocket.
    “So, talk,” he said. “Anybody.”
    “You want the good news first?” Randall asked.
    The chief growled slightly. Randall took that for a yes.
    “Phinny didn’t do it.”
    “Randall, I know he’s a friend of yours, but—”
    “He may be alibied,” Randall said. “Rob Langslow has been in there most of the day. They’ve been playing one of Rob’s war games for the last several hours. With any luck they were in sight of each other when she was killed.”
    “We can only hope,” the chief said.
    “Of course, even if they were, it’s an alibi that would cause the devil’s own kind of trouble if we had to use it,” Randall said.
    “Yes,” I said. “I shudder to think what would happen if you had to put Rob on the stand to alibi Mr. Throckmorton. As a kid, Rob was always getting punished for stuff he didn’t do because he got so rattled when anyone in authority interrogated him. A sharp DA could easily convince a jury Rob was confused or lying. Heck, they could probably even convince Rob.”
    “Let’s hope Mr. Throckmorton doesn’t need his alibi, then,” Randall said. “Actually, I meant that using the alibi would give away the secret of the tunnel. Could cost the chief and me our jobs, and the town its lawsuit, and a lot of townspeople could be looking at a whole bunch of criminal charges. I’m no lawyer, but I bet there’s some kind of aiding and abetting charge they could file against every one of us if they found a sympathetic DA. Like if they got Hamish Pruitt