Cop Town by Karin Slaughter Read Free Book Online Page A

justice was probably the last thing on Terry’s mind. He wouldn’t be thinking about what had happened this morning. He would be thinking about the cop killer who had gotten away with murder.
    Last January, Detective Duke Abbott had been shot in the chest while sitting in his parked car behind the City Motel off Moreland Avenue. His partner was inside the motel doing what you’d expect a cop tobe doing inside a motel at two o’clock in the morning when he was supposed to be working a shift. Duke was a white cop. Witnesses had seen a black man leaving the scene. By the time the morning paper hit the stands, the city was wound up like an alarm clock strapped to a thousand sticks of dynamite.
    Within three days of the murder, they had a suspect’s name. Edward Spivey was a mid-level drug dealer and pimp who operated in the vicinity of the motel. A couple of witnesses had identified Spivey as the man leaving the scene of the crime. One claimed he saw Spivey ditch a gun in a sewer grate. The other said Spivey had blood on his shirt.
    Terry led the team that had found both the gun and the bloody shirt. For nearly a week, they turned the city upside down looking for Spivey. The suspect proved to be more cunning than any of them anticipated. Instead of running, Spivey turned himself in. He invited a local news crew to meet him on the steps of the station house. He shouted out his innocence. He said the evidence was planted, the witnesses bribed. He hired a fancy lawyer from up north. He talked to any reporter who showed up at the jailhouse. He practically dared the city to send him to the electric chair.
    Normally, the city would have gladly obliged, but between Duke Abbott’s murder and Edward Spivey’s trial, Atlanta had gone through a radical change. The newly elected black mayor had delivered on his promise to bring diversity to local government. Which was good or bad, depending on how you looked at it. Before the transition, a black man accused of shooting a white cop would’ve gone straight to death row. But then the ballots were counted, and an all-black jury let Edward Spivey walk out of the courthouse a free man. The resulting rift between the police and the district attorney’s office made the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk.
    If Maggie had to guess, she would’ve said that the only thing on Terry’s mind right now was making sure that Don Wesley’s killer never saw the inside of a courtroom.
    The car jerked as Terry took a left into the parking lot down frompolice headquarters. The Buick sailed into its regular space. Maggie moved in tandem with her uncle: He put the gear into park. She pulled the door handle and got out of the car. There was a brief moment of relief, then Maggie found herself facing a wall of duplicate Terrys.
    Same cropped haircuts. Same bushy mustaches. Same kind of anger flashing in their beady little eyes. Terry’s friends all had names like Bud and Mack and Red and talked about the good old days like preachers talked about heaven. They all had multiple ex-wives, angry mistresses, and grown children who wouldn’t talk to them. Worse, they were all the same kind of cop as Terry. They always knew better than everybody else. They never listened to anyone from the outside. They carried throwaway guns in their ankle holsters. They kept their Klan robes hanging in the back of their closets.
    Maggie couldn’t remember a time in her life when Terry’s friends were not around—not because of Terry, but because of Jimmy. They attended all of his football games. They dropped by practice to offer the coach unsolicited pointers. They slipped Jimmy cash to go on dates. They bought him beer before he was old enough to drink. When Jimmy’s knee blew out, they had given him a police escort to the hospital.
    Maggie had thought that their hero worship would end with Jimmy’s football career, but in some ways, they seemed happier to have Jimmy on the job than they were to see him on the