After Midnight by Merline Lovelace Read Free Book Online Page B

down.
    Which he intended to do, as well. As he let himself in through the private entrance to his office, he thought about taking lunch in the jail cafeteria. He made it a point to do so at varying times so he could answer the prisoners’ inevitable complaints about the food. Today, however, he had a reprieve. The scent of fried chicken had him making a beeline for the outer office.
    Steven had inherited both his predecessor’s beat-up roll top desk and his gum-snapping, brassy-haired secretary when he let himself be talked into running for sheriff and surprised everyone, including himself, by winning. He could live without the roll top desk. He didn’t want to think about managing without Pat Sampson.
    “Is that for me?” he asked hopefully, eyeing the napkin-covered plate on her desk.
    “It is.” Her gum popped. “The prisoners are having liver and onions today, which I know ranks right down there at the bottom of your list, so I brought brought you back lunch from the café.”
    He lifted the napkin and immediately started to salivate. Fried chicken, fried okra, and red beans and rice. He’d died and gone to heaven.
    “Remind me to put you in for a raise come next budget cycle.”
    “No problem. I’ve already included it in the initial submissions.”
    Grinning, he carried the plate back to his desk, crunched into a chicken leg, and skimmed through the telephone messages stacked in a neat pile. One from the lieutenant governor’s office requesting information on a recent drug bust. One from Dub Calhoun, son of former U.S. Representative Calhoun and now a candidate for his father’s old office, inviting Steve for cocktails prior to the upcoming black-tie affair that culminated the annual 4th of July Chautauqua Summer Arts Festival. And one from Jim Hazlett, advising that his superiors had signed off on a determination of suicide in the Ron Clark case and requesting a call back if the visit to McConnell’s widow had turned up anything new.
    Steve fingered the message slip, thinking about Ron Clark. Why the heck had he spoken Jessica Blackwell’s name? Who had he been talking to? Sprint records confirmed that the call had come in from a phone booth.
    Digging out the background check he’d had his folks run on the colonel, he propped a foot on the bottom desk drawer. Springs creaked as he tilted his chair back and flipped through the pages. There wasn’t much there. Aside from that one incident as a kid, she was clean. Squeaky clean.
    Unlike her mother. A check on Helen Blackwell, nee Yount, showed one bust for driving under the influence of alcohol. Evidently the woman went straight after that. Or at least didn’t get caught again.
    So why couldn’t he shake the feeling that there was more to her daughter than met the eye? Or his growing interest in the part that did meet the eye?
    Idly, he buzzed Mrs. Sampson. “Would you see if you could get Lieutenant Colonel Blackwell on the line, please. She’s the commander of…”
    “The 96th Supply Squadron down at Eglin,” Ms. Efficiency replied. “Hang tight, boss.”
    She buzzed back a few moments later. “She’s on line two.”
    “Thanks.” He hit the button, his stomach curling with a sense of pleasurable anticipation. “Colonel Blackwell?”
    “Yes?”
    The single syllable was cool, polite and just a touch wary. Steve smiled into the phone.
    “I though you might like to know the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had ruled Ron Clark’s death a suicide.”
    “Did you find out why he said my name the night he died?”
    “Not yet.”
    The answer drew a small silence at the other end of the line. He let it spin.
    “I appreciate the call,” she said after a moment. “If there’s nothing else, I have to get ready for a meeting.”
    “As a matter of fact, there is one other matter I wanted to discuss with you.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Dinner Friday night.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “I’ve got to put in an appearance at a chamber of