Fugitive Filling Read Online Free

Stephen Grant didn’t get too much pushback for taking over. Then again, if we were lucky, maybe we’d be able to use that to our advantage in our investigation.
    “Do we just stand out here in the cold and wait for him to call us in?” I asked as I rubbed my hands together. It wasn’t really that chilly out at the moment, but a cold front was supposed to come through in the next few days, a way for winter to take one final opportunity to stick its tongue out at us before it was done for good. We’d had a relatively mild winter so far, but they were predicting up to half an inch of freezing rain, which had the potential to be deadlier than a foot of snow would be. When that much weight accumulated on power lines and tree limbs, I knew that we were in for a nasty storm, and I hoped they were as wrong as they usually were about our weather. I’d take the snow, or even sleet or just plain rain, but freezing rain was something to fear in our neck of the woods.
    “We don’t have any choice but to do as he asked us to,” Jake said patiently. “You heard the man. There’s a great deal of things he and the team have to do before he’s going to be free to speak with us. They’ll need to get still photos and video of the crime scene, dust for prints, and then inspect the body before they remove it. If I had to guess, I’d say that we’ll be here at least another hour, probably longer, before he gets around to us.”
    “I should have brought coffee,” I said, rubbing my hands together, “not that I needed anything to keep me warm on the march over here. I’m sorry Teresa’s dead, but I still can’t believe that she tried to kiss you.”
    “Tried, and failed,” Jake reminded me. “I’d like to apologize in advance for what you’re going to have to put up with because of what happened between the two of us.”
    “It doesn’t matter. You’re innocent, and that’s all that matters to me,” I said. I knew in my heart that my husband hadn’t reciprocated Teresa’s affection. Max may have cheated on me while we’d been married, but Jake would leave me long before he’d ever dream of doing anything with another woman, and oddly enough, I took a great deal of comfort in that fact.
    One of the deputies came out and joined us twenty minutes later. “The chief said that you should both wait for him at his office, Chief.” It was confusing sentence structure, but we knew what the officer had meant. “There’s no use you two standing out here in the cold.” He glanced around and didn’t see either of our vehicles. “Do you need a ride?”
    “It’s five hundred feet away, Rick,” Jake said with the hint of a smile. “I think we can both manage it on foot.”
    “Okay, just checking,” the officer replied, and then he saluted Jake with two fingers before he retrieved a kit from the trunk of his squad car.
    “Thanks for letting us know,” my husband said.
    “You bet, Chief.”
    “I’m not the chief anymore, Rick. You can just call me Jake.”
    “Sure thing, Chief,” Rick replied with a grin. If he was disturbed about the thought that there was a dead body twenty feet away from us, he didn’t show it. Then again, Jake wasn’t all that shaky either. I, on the other hand, was a bit of a wreck. No matter how many times I managed to stumble across a corpse, it was still very upsetting to me, and I hoped that I never got used to it happening to me.
    “You heard the man,” Jake said after the officer was gone. “Let’s go get out of the cold.”
    “Does it bother you that he kept calling you Chief?” I asked Jake as we walked over to the nearby police station.
    “No, I understand the habit. I’ve done it myself more than once to former bosses of mine. It kind of goes with the territory.”
    “You miss it, don’t you?” I asked him.
    “Parts of it,” my husband admitted, “but mostly I’m glad to just sit at home and stoke the fire with you by my side.”
    “Only I’m not there with you a