Double Minds by Terri Blackstock Read Free Book Online

okay?”
    He closed the refrigerator door without getting anything out. “They’re in horrible shape. A doctor came while we were there and sedated her mother. Her father’s grief was different, though.”
    “Different how?”
    “He was angry. Really, really angry. Snapping at everyone. Shooting questions at me like he thought I’d killed her. We get that sometimes. People grieve differently.”
    Yes, Parker could only imagine how grief like that could twist and cut like barbed wire, making people strike back.
    “Hey, can I use your printer?”
    She didn’t know why he even asked. Gibson had long ago made her house his home-away-from-home. He couldn’t stand his roommate, so half the time he slept on Parker’s couch. “Sure, go ahead. What do you need it for?”
    “I want to print out these pictures. Look at them enlarged.”
    “You don’t have printers at the police station?”
    “Yeah, but I don’t want to go there to do this. Too much pressure. Besides, I need to talk to you. I need you to tell me everything you’ve ever known about Brenna, starting with the day you met her. Did she come to Colgate through Belmont’s internship program?”
    “No, she was a freshman, and that program’s for upperclassmen. She didn’t want credit hours—just experience. So she offered herself as an unpaid intern. She didn’t want anything in return. Hard to pass up free help, so I finally put her through to George.”
    The one-by-one-inch display on her printer ran through the pictures quickly, a tease of images of Brenna dead on the floor. Parker turned away.
    Gibson ignored her and fumbled with the printer until it began printing. “I’m doing them in eight-by-tens,” he said. “That way we can see the details better.”
    “I’m not sure I have enough ink for that.” But she knew she did. She’d recently changed the cartridges. It had cost her whole honorarium for the youth group concert she’d done the week before last.
    The printer began to hum. Parker looked back. As the pictures rolled out of the machine, she saw Brenna’s legs over the fallen chair. She turned away again as Brenna’s face came into view.
    More headlights moved across her curtains. Another car door slammed. “Who’s that?”
    “Probably Rayzo. He wants to talk to you, too.”
    Kyle Rayzo was Gibson’s partner. Parker had a feeling that the rough and brusque forty-year-old didn’t much like her. She didn’t know why. Maybe he just didn’t relate well to women.
    She opened the door as he started to knock. “Hi, Detective Rayzo. Nice to see you.”
    “You too,” he said, not even meeting her eyes. The big man lumbered in, a poster child for high blood pressure and diabetes and all the side diseases that came from being overweight. He’d gained all this weight after being shot in the leg a year ago. The leg had healed, but the inactivity had puffed him up like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
    Gibson pulled the pictures out of the printer. “I’m printing these out. Parker was just telling me about Brenna.”
    Rayzo went to the refrigerator as if it were his own. “Got anything to drink?”
    “Sure,” she said. “Some water and cranberry juice. A little bit of milk.”
    He grabbed the bottled water, drank it down, then headed to the tap for a refill.
    Gibson took the pictures emerging one at a time from the printer and laid them out on the coffee table. Parker forced herself to go sit down on the couch. She scanned the photos that would have looked benign if she hadn’t known that a dead girl lay just out of frame. How did one get comfortable when two detectives stood in her living room, poring over pictures of their crime scene?
    “I’ve got some pictures here of her bedroom. You should see that house. It’s like a palace or something. Parents are stinking rich.”
    Rayzo sat on the couch at the opposite end from Parker. Gibson was still adding pictures to the display on the table as they rolled out of the printer.
    “You