The Broken Places Read Online Free Page A

in women,” Bones said, swallowing, looking to the big woman measuring out coffee into the machine. “But great taste in an automobile.”
    •   •   •
    Quinn got five hours’ sleep, waking up at 1200, and spent the next couple hours on his tractor, delivering hay to his cows, with Hondo riding shotgun. After his chores were done, he showered and shaved, dressing in a crisp khaki shirt with patches for Tibbehah County Sheriff, a pair of laundered blue jeans with a sharp crease, and a pair of cowboy boots. By the time he finished his second cup of coffee and first La Gloria Cubana of the day, he had pulled his truck into the sheriff’s office lot. He walked through the front door, saying hello to Mary Alice, who was the office administrator and answered the phone, did the filing, and also ran dispatch for the seven-man and one-woman office.
    Quinn had the usual conversation with her, talking about it being too wet to till the garden yet and what Mary Alice planned to plant this year: some kind of German heirloom tomatoes. He finally made his way back to his office, where he hung up his coat and ball cap. The same Beretta 9mm he’d worn in numerous tours of Iraq and Afghanistan with the 3rd Batt of the 75th Regiment perched on his leather belt.
    After a few new reports, he made his way back to the reception area and refilled his coffee, walking back to his office to find his chief deputy Lillie Virgil sitting in his lone visitor’s chair, tilted back, boots on his desk, and taking a puff of his cigar.
    “How the hell do you smoke these things every day?” Lillie said, letting out a long stream of smoke and passing it back to Quinn. “Tastes like a dog turd to me.”
    “You ever smoke a dog turd, Lillie?” Quinn said.
    “How’d your meeting with Ophelia Bundren go this morning?”
    Quinn sat down behind his desk and propped up his boots as well on the desk that had been his late Uncle Hamp’s when Hamp had been sheriff for nearly thirty years. The desk was beaten to hell and badly in need of repair, but Quinn liked the common history of it.
    “Who told you?” Quinn said.
    “I saw your truck and I saw her car.”
    “Meeting went the same as it always does.”
    “I feel for her,” Lillie said. “I really do, but she’s driving herself batshit insane with this. She needs to see a shrink or it’s going to drive her to a room in Whitfield.”
    “I don’t know if I’d be much different,” Quinn said.
    “How long had you been gone when Adelaide was killed?”
    “I was just at Fort Benning for Ranger school,” Quinn said. “My mom sent me the newspaper clips. I liked Adelaide.”
    “I would have never imagined them as twins,” Lillie said. “Adelaide had fair skin and blond hair; Ophelia still looks like that girl from The Addams Family to me.”
    “Wednesday,” Quinn said. “Yeah, I’ve heard that a few times.”
    “That’s her,” Lillie said. “When I first saw you two together, I was thinking that maybe you were getting a piece. But I never could see Wednesday Addams out at the Colson farm, picking tomatoes and eating deer meat you shot. Relieved to know it was all professional.”
    “I happen to find her very attractive.”
    Lillie leaned forward and picked up Quinn’s cigar from the ashtray, took another puff, and set it back. “Yep,” she said. “You would.”
    “I read back through the original files,” Quinn said. “And it looks like there wasn’t enough of Adelaide to make more than manslaughter. How’d they prosecute for murder?”
    “The Bundrens said Dixon had been beating the shit out of her for more than a year,” Lillie said. “Adelaide and Dixon had shared an old house over in Dogtown. The family said he ran her over in a rage and then sat on the bed of his truck while what was left of her got run over by passing cars. Family said they had witnesses who said Dixon sat there drinking Busch from the case and smiling while their daughter got hit again and