A Cup Full of Midnight Read Online Free Page A

if he’d just walked through a cobweb. “My best guess?” he said. “Probably. The O’Brien girl didn’t kill Parker and pose him on that pentagram all by herself. She had to have help. And witnesses place Josh and the girl together near the victim’s house an hour before the murder.”
    I tried to keep my expression neutral, but he knew me too well.
    He said, “Josh didn’t tell you about that?”
    “He told me he ditched school.”
    “That’s all?”
    “He didn’t do this, Frank. You’ve known him since he was, what, seven? You know he isn’t capable of this.”
    He gave a slow nod, as if his head were too heavy for his neck. I wiped my palms, suddenly clammy, along the outside seam of my jeans. I wondered if he was remembering, like I was, the scrape-kneed, sunburnt, laughing boy Josh had been. If he was imagining, like I was, what prison might do to that same boy charged with a vicious crime and old enough to be tried as an adult.
    Then, “Wait here,” Frank said.
    A few minutes later, he came back and handed me a thick manila folder. “Do something with that and come on,” he said. “I gotta get out of here.”
    I stuffed the folder under my coat and zipped it inside. The coat was an Australian duster with a fleece lining. I liked the bomber jacket better, but I couldn’t get the bloodstains out. “What about Malone?” I asked.
    “Fuck her,” he said. He leaned across the desk and picked up the Styrofoam cup, downed the last of his coffee and crumpled the cup into a shapeless wad. “For this, I need a beer.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    W e pushed out onto the freshly salted sidewalk and into a skin-chapping cold that briefly glued my nostrils shut. The sky was a bitter gray, and needles of sleet stung our bare faces. I looked at Frank and said, “Where to?”
    “Let’s go to Tootsie’s. You drive.”
    Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge was a famous dive on Lower Broadway in the heart of downtown. We parked the Silverado in a public lot four blocks away. In good weather, it was a pleasant stroll. Today, the wind knifed through my coat and brought tears to my eyes. Halfway across the street, my ears were already numb.
    “You’re gonna give me pneumonia,” I groused. “Worse, you’re gonna get pneumonia, and then Patrice is gonna kill me.”
    His wife’s name evoked a grudging smile. “Damn straight. Can’t you hear it? ‘What were you thinking, dragging an old man out in the cold like that?’ ”
    “Not so old,” I said, trying to count it up. What was he? Sixty, sixty-one? Didn’t they say fifty was the new thirty? That would make sixty the new forty. Which would make me, what? The new sixteen?
    After awhile, he said, “I always thought I’d die in the traces.”
    “Things get too rough, you could come and work with me,” I said.
    “I’ve seen your office. That damn desk. It should have its own country. There’s not enough space for me and it in the same room.”
    “I love that desk,” I said. “It’s got character.”
    “So did Margaret Thatcher. But I wouldn’t want to share my office with her.”
    We pushed open the front door of Tootsie’s, and a gust of warm air rolled over us. It smelled of beer and grease and a hint of old cigarette smoke. The musicians at the front, a Dixie diva and a concrete cowboy, were singing a decent version of Garth Brooks’s “I’ve Got Friends in Low Places” to a half-empty room. They nodded in acknowledgement as we stuffed a pair of fives into the tip jar and made our way to a table for four at the back. We shook the sleet out of our jackets and tossed them into the extra seats. Then we both moved our chairs so we could see the exit.
    I plucked a handful of napkins from the dispenser and dried my hands and face as well as I could, then waited until the waitress had taken our orders—a Bud and an order of fries for Frank, onion rings and AmberBock for me—before taking out the file and opening it on the table between us. A full-color photo of