Dearly Departed Read Online Free

know that I know it,” she told me. “I know a lot of other things, too. So, you want to catch bad guys with me or what?”
    We caught a lot of them together.
    “D o you know the Dakota County sheriff?” I now asked.
    “Yes. Ed Teeters. Nice man.”
    “Nice enough to let a PI snoop around one of his investigations?”
    Anne gave me one of those here-we-go-again eye rolls and asked, “What are you into now?”
    “Alison Donnerbauer Emerton,” I told her. “She disappeared seven months ago. I was just hired to learn what happened to her.”
    “Good luck,” she said. “I worked the case …”
    I don’t know why I was surprised. Solving unsolvable murders is, after all, Annie’s specialty.
    “Teeters asked me if I could give him a fresh perspective. I couldn’t,” she admitted.
    She opened a lower desk drawer and took out a huge family photo album—her murder book, a grisly, gory, gruesome account of every homicide investigation she had ever worked, the investigations presented in chronological order with the most recent in front. Each account contained before-and-after photographs of the victim, a detailed description of the killing, a synopsis of the investigation, and final disposition of the case. Homicides that were solved had a blue tab; those that remained unsolved had a red tab. There were only a few red tabs, and most of these were near the front. Anne turned to the tab labeled #197. Case #197 differed from the others in that it was skimpier and didn’t feature a photograph taken after the victim’s body was discovered. The “before” photograph was a reprint of the one Hunter Truman had given to me that morning.
    “Theories?” I asked.
    Anne shrugged. “Assailant knocks, Alison answers; assailant pushes a gun in her face, forces her into a car, drives off. I put a stopwatch on it. From the mouth of the cul-de-sac to the driveway to the front door, back to the car and out; add thirty seconds waiting for Alison to answer the door: one hundred and sixty-seven seconds total. And that’s conservative.”
    “Who?”
    Anne consulted her notes. “Raymond Fleck.”
    “Based on what? The tape?”
    “No, his MO. He was convicted of rape eight years ago; what he did was knock on the woman’s door in broad daylight. When she answered, he pointed a gun at her, shoved her in, raped her, left.”
    “Does one conviction constitute an MO?”
    “He was convicted for one, but the arresting officers figured him for a half dozen others they couldn’t get positive IDs on. Victims wouldn’t come forward.”
    “Why take Alison with him?”
    “The one time he was convicted, he stayed in the house for five hours. Made himself lunch between attacks. This time he didn’t have five hours to enjoy himself; the husband was on his way home.”
    “If he did it for revenge, why not simply kill her and leave?”
    “Where’s the sport in that?”
    She had a point. Still, did she have anything that made it more than a theory?
    “He’s free, isn’t he?”
    “I asked a stupid question.” I admitted.
    Anne studied Alison’s photograph for a moment and then closed the album with a resounding thud. “Teeters brought me in because he was looking for an angle his people might have missed. I could convince him to let you in for the same reason.”
    “Would you?”
    Anne pushed herself away from the desk. Her swivel chair was on wheels, and she rolled it slowly to a bank of beige-colored metal filing cabinets. From the third drawer of the middle cabinet Anne retrieved a file maybe three inches thick, the pages held together with a metal fastener. The label on the file cover listed Alison’s name and the date of her disappearance. Anne dropped the file in front of me and started rummaging through the bottom right-hand drawer of her desk. She came up with a brown grocery bag and slipped the file into it, but not before I peeked under the cover and read the first page: Case #97-050819 Dakota County Sheriff’s