Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery Read Online Free

Arri 300, will ya, Victor? Or are you going to stand around all day?”
    Victor looked at me, and I shrugged. He wanted me to come to his defense. Victor was in his midtwenties, with a ninety-eight-pound-weakling body, a part-time career as a drummer, and a whole host of neuroses. He was deeply sensitive to slights, both real and imagined, despite the heavy metal clothes, tattoos, and piercings. But he was a good sound man and a decent guy, and he didn’t deserve to have Andres take his bad mood out on him. Under other circumstances I would happily have told Andres to lighten up. But I needed my cameraman to get the lights up and ready for taping in thirty-five minutes. If it meant I had to live with a sulking Victor all day, then so be it.
    We had a killer waiting.

Five
    T he information I’d been sent on Joseph “Brick” Tyler was pretty limited. He was forty-one, African American, had grown up on Chicago’s West Side, and had been in and out of the prison system since he was fifteen. He was now in for life for the murder of three people in 1990, and while he had been known for prison violence in the first ten years of his sentence, lately things had been quiet and his record was clean.
    When Andres was ready with the lights, after a tense and silent thirty minutes of prep, I asked Joanie to bring Brick to the room. He arrived a few minutes later, his hands cuffed in front of him. With a nickname like Brick, I was expecting a large man, something in the three-hundred-pound range. And while he was tall and muscular, he was surprisingly slim. His head was shaved and he had tattoos peeking out from the rolled-up sleeves of his blue denim shirt. He didn’t look threatening, exactly, but he didn’t look like a man to cross.
    “I’m Kate Conway,” I said, sounding warm and casual in hopes he’d be the same.
    Brick slowly lowered his eyes, taking a long look at me from head to toe and then back again, resting his gaze on my breasts. I was dressed like the world’s most conservative librarian: tan dress slacks, green cashmere turtleneck with a matching cardigan, and my hair in a ponytail. But the outfit wasn’t deterring his interest.
    “If you want to take a seat,” I said, “Victor, our sound man, will put a mic on you and we’ll make a few adjustments to the lights.”
    Brick glanced behind him at the chair. He looked to the guard, who nodded. Brick, apparently satisfied with the situation, sat down and stared at each of us as Victor put a mic on him and Andres turned off the room’s fluorescents, leaving us in darkness, and turned on the lights we’d set up for the interview. Brick blinked a little at the sudden brightness aimed at him, but he sat quietly. When we were ready forthe interview, he held out his wrists for the guard to uncuff. As soon as he was free of the restraints, he reached out a hand toward me, and we shook. I could feel his strength and was, probably as intended, intimidated by it. People always assume a killer looks different somehow, and that being in the same room must be a frightening experience for me, but the killers I’ve met are normal, or seem to be. That’s the only part that scares me.
    “I’m Joseph,” he said. “You should probably call me Brick, since I don’t really answer to Joseph no more.”
    “Even with your family?”
    “I don’t talk to family. Not ones outside. I got a cousin here. But he calls me Brick.”
    “Okay, Brick it is. And I’m Kate.”
    He ran his eyes up and down one more time. “Okay. Kate. You got a bad temper?
    “Excuse me?”
    He pointed to my hair. “Don’t redheads have tempers?”
    I smiled. “I do, when I don’t get my way. But you’ve probably seen worse.”
    Brick looked over to Victor, who attempted to make himself look bigger. And failed. “You need a real man to handle that temper of yours.”
    “I manage, thank you.”
    “You married, Kate?”
    I looked over at Andres, who signaled that he was rolling tape. I didn’t