Dearly Departed Read Online Free Page B

clinched it was the radio. One of the buttons was still set for the station the guy was playing when he raped the mother—a station you can’t pick up in St. Cloud. The new owner allowed us to impound the car, and I had forensics do a search. They found bloodstains and strands of hair in the back seat. The samples were identical to the victim’s.”
    “Nice,” I told McGaney, and I meant it; he’d done a helluva job. “Very nice.”
    “Where is the daughter now?” Anne asked.
    “At home, waiting for me to call her about a lineup.”
    “The county attorney?”
    “Licking his chops.”
    “And the sorry sonuvabitch named in the warrant?”
    McGaney smiled. “At his place of business.”
    Anne grinned, too—grinned like she’d just learned her own daughter had been named class valedictorian. She took a small school bell from her desk drawer and rang it vigorously. “Ticket to ride, boys! We have a ticket to ride!” she shouted across the room. The detectives, smiling just as incandescently, literally hopped up from behind their partitions and started holstering guns, fastening bulletproof Kevlar vests, and donning dark-blue windbreakers with the word POLICE spelled out in huge white letters on the back. Conversations grew louder, jokes flew; it was like a party had suddenly broken out. This was why most of the detectives had come to this line of work—to get the bad guys— and they were loving it.
    Anne told one of the detectives to arrange for uniform backup.
    “Backup? We don’t need no stinking backup,” another replied in an accent that was supposed to be Hispanic, paraphrasing a line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
    They headed for the door en masse, Anne leading the way.
    I hadn’t felt so excluded since my friends won the softball league championship the season after I retired from the team.
    C ynthia Grey always greeted me the same way, like an old friend she hadn’t seen since the last high-school reunion. This time she gave me a warm hug and happy smile in her office suite, located in a former cloister not far from the St. Paul PD. Her office manager didn’t approve—not of the hug and certainly not of me. Once again I had arrived without an appointment, distracting Cynthia from the task at hand, which was the practice of law.
    Cynthia was known in the Twin Cities for her stalwart defense of DWI suspects, and her quotes were often sought by the local media. Like MADD, she wanted them off the street. But unlike those militant enemies of drunk drivers everywhere, she wanted the lawbreakers in treatment, not in jail. However, it was a stunning victory in a single civil suit that had recently thrust her into the public eye.
    She had filed a complaint against a women’s clothing manufacturer on behalf of a dozen female employees, alleging that the company’s TV and print ads—which always depicted women in a sexual context—fostered an environment inside the company that condoned, if not encouraged, sexual harassment. Stories about the suit appeared in several local and national publications, usually accompanied by a photograph of the women and their lawyer. You could always tell which woman was Cynthia. She was the beautiful one in back who wasn’t smiling.
    Anyway, the clothing manufacturer settled. No one knows for how much because the settlement was sealed. But it was big time. You could tell by the quality of the cars the plaintiffs went out and bought immediately afterward. Cynthia bought a car, too. And gave it to me. True, it was only a 1991 Dodge Colt—it was all I would accept—but, still, when was the last time your girlfriend bought you a car?
    Which brings me back to Miss Efficiency, aka Desirée Smith, the office manager. The phone had been ringing nonstop since the settlement, and without her, Cynthia wouldn’t have time for all that media schmoozing. Without her, Cynthia probably would be late for most of her court appearances and client meetings, few of her motions