Murder in the City: Blue Lights Read Online Free

caused him to kill Simone. “Nice try, Detective Brice. Nice try.”
    He slunk away, trying to pretend comment about the other guys hadn’t gotten to him.
    But it had.
    He’d slip up at some point and when he did, Brice would drag his sorry ass into the bowels of the prison system to rot forever.
    * * *
    “Julie, get up. Time for school.” Lainey pushed open the door to her little sister’s room.
    Julie struggled to a half sitting position, her blonde hair tousled, her blue eyes still looking half asleep. “Why didn’t you take me with you, last night?”
    “Yeah,” Lainey snorted. “And explain to your teachers that Julie is sleeping in class again because she was out on another crime scene.” Julie went to a year round school, thank goodness. It worked out well for Lainey’s job.
    “I’m going to be a cop. I need to learn,” Julie said in a way that made Lainey believe that in another ten years Julie would be walking a beat.
    After college that was.
    “Why not be a lawyer?” Lainey looked at Julie with a cocked eyebrow. Julie had started becoming so insistent about her choice of career paths.
    “You’re the lawyer. I’ll catch them and then you’ll put them away.” She gleefully imitated slamming a prison door shut.
    Julie was probably as scarred by the bitterness Lainey had felt in the past about the loss of their parents as she was by the actual loss itself.
    “Whatever. Just get up and get ready for school. Pronto.”
    Lainey walked back to her room with a cup of coffee in hand. Caffeine would be about the only thing getting her through the day.
    Julie popped into her room a minute later, in her little starter bra, struggling to get her shirt over her head. Any day now, she’d need that bra. But as of yet, it was just an accessory, about as necessary as a necklace.
    But, Lainey needed to accept Julie was getting ready to leave the little girl phase behind. No more dolls or teddy bears. Just boys, boys, boys, she feared.
    It would be all on Lainey to make sure she grew up right. Julie was destined to be a beauty, already looking so much like their pretty mother. Julie’s crystal blue eyes that always sparkled with fun, and her heart-shaped face with smooth skin surrounded by blonde hair would attract teenaged boys in herds.
    Lainey would have to work to keep them under control.
    “So, what are your plans today?” Julie said in a good imitation of an adult.
    “Well,” Lainey said in a mincing tone. “I’m going to try to put a bad criminal away for a long time. Then, I’ll probably deal with a lot of petty criminals and hope they don’t grow up to be felons.”
    Julie laughed and fell down on Lainey’s already made bed. “Dude, you’ve got too much sympathy for the bad guys.”
    Lainey looked at her sharply. “Have you been listening to those cops again?” Julie really had been on more than her fair share of crime scenes. And, often, while Lainey went inside the yellow tape, she left Julie in the car and told the nearest uniformed cop to keep an eye on her and that she’d take it personal if anything happened to her.
    So, inevitably the cop would hang by the car, making conversation with the precocious preteen.
    In another few years, she’d need to advise the younger cops of Julie’s actual age. Because something told her Julie would probably get their Mom’s curvy figure.
    “Can I put a turquoise streak in my hair?” Julie walked up behind Lainey, looking over her shoulder into the mirror as Lainey put on makeup to hide the dark circles.
    Lainey flashed her eyes at Julie and shook her head. “Maybe when you go off to college and I don’t know your hairdresser.”
    They’d only just recently started having enough extra money to go to a nice hair salon. Before that, it had been beauty school freebies from a friend of Lainey’s.
    “Kendall’s mom let her get a pink streak.”
    “Yeah, well Kendall’s dad also left her mom for another woman. Kendall’s mom is trying to make