Cold Justice: A Judge Willa Carson Mystery (The Hunt for Justice) by Diane Capri Read Free Book Online Page A

pixie-cut. I looked again for a note from George, but found none. In three minutes, I was ready. George says I’m fast, for a girl.
    I snagged my parka, gloves, and my miniscule purse and dropped my phone into my pocket, wishing I’d remembered to stick it on the charger before my nap. When I returned to the front door to don the hideously huge boots, Kemp was waiting.
    “Do you have any theories about who shot Richards?” I asked him with my hand on the knob and before we opened the door to the blasting snow once more.
    “Prevailing theory is the guy the media has been calling the snow sniper.”
    I halted at the threshold with the door open and the howling wind rushing through, snow swirling around my body. “The what?”
    “Let’s go. I’ll tell you about him in the car.” Kemp gave me a little push on the shoulder which made me plant my feet inside the cottage.
    “I’m driving my own car,” I said.
    He laughed and pressed my shoulder forward again knocking me slightly over the threshold where I planted my feet more firmly. He pulled on his gloves. “That’ll be some trick. Even if you could navigate in this blizzard. Which I doubt.”
    I didn’t budge. “I’ve got four-wheel drive and I’ve driven in blizzards before, Kemp.”
    He sobered quickly at my steely tone and fierce stare and unrelenting stubbornness. “Yes, ma’am. I’m sure you do and you have. But not today. Because your vehicle’s already gone.”
    I whipped my head around to peer through the white stuff. Sure enough, the driven snow covered everything. Trees, shrubs, trash cans. Everything that is except the missing Jeep.
    George Carson. Where the hell did you go?
    Kemp gave me a little shoulder nudge again and this time, I stepped out into the storm. He followed me and pulled the cottage door closed. Then he moved around in front of me and led the way to his cruiser, which was now as snow-covered as everything else.
    Kemp opened the passenger door and I slipped inside. He closed me snuggly within the cold cruiser and trudged around the front and slipped in behind the wheel. Now that he’d secured me inside the car, he honored his promise to tell me more without prompting. “I’m not sure how Leo Richards was involved with the snow sniper. Maybe there was no relationship between the two at all. As far as we can tell, the sniper killed the other three victims randomly. One thing I just found out a few minutes ago, though.”
    He fired up the ignition and waited for a bit of warmth before he flipped on the wipers. They struggled to move the heavy snow aside. Maybe he didn’t have a snowbrush. “We got the quick and dirty preliminary ballistics report back on the bullet used to kill Leo Richards.”
    Those quick reports could be wrong. But they could rule out possibilities and narrow the search for the murder weapon. I reached to fasten my seat belt. I was colder than I’d been in years and when I managed to get warm again, I vowed to stay as far away from snow as humanly possible for the rest of my life. Of course, I’d vowed that before and here I was. “What did the ballistics establish?”
    “The gun that killed Leo Richards was not the gun used on any of the snow sniper’s other victims,” he said, reaching his arm out the window and catching the wiper to knock the snow off.
    “Did you tell Judge Trevor about that report?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Just before I knocked on your door. Doesn’t mean the guy owns only one gun, though, you know?” he replied, half a second before he flipped the fan up to full blast on the defroster. After that, all conversation was lost in the wind.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

    By the time we headed out of the cottage driveway, we could almost see through the tiny clear space on the bottom of the windshield.
    Kemp concentrated on his driving and I thought about what to ask first when we could turn the blasting fan down low enough to hear each other. I wanted to know about the snow sniper and why he was a