Dearly Departed Read Online Free Page A

Department Alison Donnerbauer Emerton TABLE OF CONTENTS FELONY MURDER. The word COPY had been stamped in red several times across the page.
    Anne folded the bag and tossed it for me to catch, explaining that since technically it wasn’t a St. Paul or Ramsey County case, technically she wasn’t violating department regulations by lending me her file. Technically.
    “But I want it back. Without any rocket ships or baseball diamonds doodled in the margins,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to grease the skids for you with Teeters.”
    “You’re being awfully cooperative, Annie,” I told her.
    She leaned across the desk and spoke slowly between clenched teeth. “I do not like it when women are killed simply because they are women. It is UN-AC-CEPT-ABLE.”
    Now you know why Anne Scalasi is the best in the business. It’s not the training; it’s not the experience. It’s the outrage. She never lost it. The rest of us had. We were afraid of it, afraid of how it twisted our perceptions of the real world, afraid of the pain it made us feel. So we hid from it—hid behind bad jokes and out-and-out goofiness, hid behind booze and drugs and sex and macho behavior that bordered on the self-destructive until the outrage went away, leaving us numb. Not Anne. Anne did not hide from her outrage. She drew it like a gun.
    “I’ll tell you another thing,” she said but never did. That’s because she was interrupted by a detective, a black man whose reputation was also unfairly marred by an affirmative-action label.
    “Yo, mama!” Martin McGaney called as he danced toward us, waving a folded piece of paper like a baton before him.
    “Yo, mama?” I repeated quietly.
    “This better be good, Martin,” Anne warned as the detective approached. The warning was unnecessary. You could tell by the smile on his face.
    “Lookee what I have,” he said, drawing out the words, handing Anne the paper. It was an arrest warrant.
    “You finally found the guy who stole my ten-speed when I was in high school,” I ventured.
    “Taylor, you’ll appreciate this. You used to be a good investigator.”
    “Used to be?”
    “When you were young.”
    “Ahh.”
    “The bastard who raped and murdered that woman in front of her twelve-year-old daughter a couple weeks back? I got ’im!” He pumped his fist as he said it.
    The case had made daily headlines since the crime occurred. A woman and her daughter had been driving home from a movie late at night when their car broke down. A “good Samaritan” stopped to offer assistance. Some assistance. He forced the woman and the girl into his car at gunpoint, drove to a secluded spot, and raped the mother, threatening to shoot the daughter if the woman resisted. When he was finished, he told the daughter she was next. The mother went to protect her child, and he shot her dead. In a panic, he shoved both mother and daughter out of the car and drove off. The daughter described the well-dressed assailant in detail but not the car, telling the police only that it was dark and “sporty looking.”
    “I took the daughter with me,” McGaney said. “She wanted desperately to help us find her mother’s killer. We cruised the car dealerships on the 1-494 strip, looking for a model she might recognize. We found it. A Ford Taurus GL.”
    “A Taurus is sporty looking?!”
    “She’s a little girl, what does she know from cars? Anyway, I obtained a list of every black or dark-blue Taurus in Minnesota from DMV, concentrating only on those vehicles owned by men who fit the age and general description the girl gave us. I found nineteen within five miles of where the woman’s car had stalled. I questioned each one, telling them I was investigating a hit-and-run and wanted to see their vehicles. One guy told me he’d sold his. Yeah, he sold it all right. The day after the murder he practically gave it away to a guy in St. Cloud. I drove the girl up to St. Cloud. She said it looked like the same car, but what