All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming Read Free Book Online

bicycle. Russ prayed that Lyle hadn’t taken it into his head to cheer him up. He could just imagine what his deputy—a long-divorced, self-proclaimed ladies’ man—would consider a picker-upper. Probably a pair of strippers dressed as beat cops. One word leaked about something like that and Russ would be handing his head to the Millers Kill aldermen on a silver platter.
    “We’re here,” Mark said helpfully, bumping over the strip separating the police department’s parking lot from the road.
    “Thanks,” Russ said. “I might not have recognized it with all the pretty snow.”
    Mark flushed red and jammed his cap on his head. They both got out. Russ scanned the parking lot as he tromped toward the front steps. He recognized Lyle’s Pontiac Cruiser and Eric McCrea’s Subaru station wagon. Noble’s nondescript Buick and Harlene’s Explorer. Nobody who shouldn’t be on duty right now, thank God. That ruled out the stripper party. Unless Lyle was planning on wrestling him over to the Golden Banana in Saratoga?
    He mounted the unswept granite steps carefully, Mark at his back, and stomped down the hallway toward his office, shedding snow as he went. The Millers Kill police station was state-of-the-art law enforcement construction—in 1880. Lots of granite, marble, and frosted glass. Very few spaces convenient for large electronic dispatch and routing boards. A great big holding tank in the basement, from the days when judges rode the circuit in buggies. A warren of small offices above stairs.
    Harlene’s communications center had been knocked together from two small rooms and straddled the space between the officers’ bullpen (formerly three offices and a storage closet) and Russ’s office (original, but with much uglier furniture than his predecessors had a century ago).
    “I hope someone has an explanation for me,” Russ said, entering the dispatch room. Harlene looked at him, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy. She silently pointed toward his own door like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—if the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had had a tightly curled iron-gray perm and a purple MKHS Minutemen sweatshirt on its rotund form.
    Sighing, he went in. Lyle was standing there waiting for him. Big surprise.
    “Okay, what is it?” Russ crossed to his battered metal desk and plunked himself into his chair. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at his deputy.
    Lyle shut the door. Tested the handle. He bit the inside of his cheek. “There’s been—” He stopped. “I have to—” He seemed genuinely disturbed.
    Russ leaned forward, bracing his elbows on various pieces of half-completed paperwork. “Just tell me, Lyle.”
    MacAuley sat down. Russ always thought of Lyle as a contemporary, but in the unkind fluorescent light, Russ realized his friend and sounding board was closer to sixty than fifty. His bushy eyebrows had as much white as gray in them, and the folds beneath his eyes, which normally gave him a deceptively lazy look, were sunken and settled, as if the skin had been pulled away from his bones and left to lie.
    “Lyle?”
    Lyle ran a hand over his face. “There’s no easy way to say this, Russ. Your wife has been killed. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
    In Russ’s head, the usual clatter of thoughts and concerns fell absolutely silent. Everything within eyesight took on an otherworldly clarity: the damp sheen of Lyle’s face, the thin coating of dust on the straggly philodendron in the corner, the faded, felted spines of the
Police Gazette
s stacked on his extra chair.
    “Linda?” he said.
    MacAuley nodded.
    Russ snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”
    “Russ, I know it’s hard to—”
    “Linda’s a good driver. A cautious driver. As much snow as there is on the road—that wouldn’t throw her. And her car. A late-model Volvo wagon? I can’t even imagine how many of them must be registered in the three counties. You guys have tagged the wrong car.”
    Lyle was shaking his head no,