Swift Justice Read Online Free Page B

the car seat and maneuvered it behind my desk. “Thanks,” I told Gigi, who had returned to her desk and was staring at her computer screen, nails clicking across the keyboard.
    She wrote something on a lavender sticky note and handed it to me. “Delicia Furman’s phone number and address,” she said. “From her Web page. She’s outside Larkspur.”
    “Thanks,” I said again, studying the note. At least Gigi knew her way around a computer and the Internet. She even had a little initiative. “Do you want to come with me to talk to her?” The words popped out before I could stop them.
    “And learn PI interrogation techniques?” Her eyes lit up.
    “Think of it as an interview, or better yet, a conversation,” I suggested, already regretting the invitation.
    “Gotcha.” She made a note on a steno pad, then tucked it into her mailbag of a purse. “Now?”
    I sighed. “Might as well.”
    Gigi automatically headed for the Hummer after I collected the blanket, set the answering machine, and locked the office door.
    “No way,” I said. “We can’t go visit an artist, a womanwho raises goats, for heaven’s sake, in a vehicle that looks like a Sherman tank and burns more gas than small third-world nations. She’d run us off with a shotgun.”
    “I never thought of that,” Gigi said, dropping her keys back in her purse—how did she ever find them in there?—and following me to the Subaru. “It was Les’s, you know. The Hummer. He sure loved that thing when he first got it—waxed it every weekend, wouldn’t let the kids eat or drink in it. I guess he couldn’t figure out a way to get it to Costa Rica, so he left it. Maybe he just didn’t want it anymore.”
    I ignored the wistful note in her voice, wondering if she saw the parallels between Les’s relationship with the Hummer and with her. The bastard. My anger toward Les Goldman surprised me, and I tamped it down. If I was angry, it was only because his disappearing act had foisted Gigi on me, landing me with a partner I did not need or want.
    My annoyance kept me silent throughout the twenty-five minute drive to Larkspur, a small community northwest of Colorado Springs best known for the huge Renaissance festival it hosts every summer. We drove past the festival grounds, where permanent walls, shop fronts, and castles loomed among the lodgepole pines like ghosts of medieval England. Delicia Furman’s farm was ten minutes farther on, wedged into a small valley guarded by hills on three sides. The morning sun lit up a small house, a barn, several outbuildings, and fenced enclosures full of goats. A sign at the roadside announced FURMAN’S in elegant gray script on white. We bumped down a rutted driveway, and I parked the car by the first paddock. As I opened the door, the scent of dung, warm animal, fresh hay, and clean water drifted in. The smell pulled me back tothe farm outside Spokane where I’d spent several years off and on with Grandy and Gramps, my mom’s parents, while my parents missionaried in all sorts of godforsaken crannies in South America and Africa. Grandy and Gramps had raised a small herd of Barzona cattle, big red animals with the smarts of a teaspoon, but the farm smell was the same. I breathed it in.
    Gigi murmured, “Aren’t they just the cutest?”
    “Cute” wasn’t the word I’d’ve chosen. The goats were as tall as my thigh in an array of colors—tan, white, brown, gray, black—but they had long horns that swooped back from their brows and twisted to nasty-looking points. The shaggy black goat in the pen closest to me eyed me suspiciously as he chewed his cud. “You’re a handsome fellow,” I told him. Unmoved by my flattery, he scratched the side of his head against a fence post.
    Just as I was wondering where to start the search for Ms. Furman, a woman strode out of the barn fifty yards away, trundling a wheelbarrow full of what I suspected was goat poop. Thick gray hair streamed almost to her waist from