Drowning Barbie by Frederick Ramsay Read Free Book Online

anything more.”
    â€œOkay for now, but later you will need to talk to me. And now, don’t you go giving me the look. So, she lived in your neighborhood for a while and then left. Is that right?”
    â€œYep. Now eat.”
    â€œYessum.”
    ***
    Ike returned to the office, his mind on Flora. He believed she had information that could open the investigation so, why did she only offer gossip? Usually she would be forthcoming. Today he would swear she had something she did not want to share. What was she not telling him? He stepped through the sheriff’s office door. Something was missing. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but the office had somehow changed. He felt as if he’d somehow walked into a parallel universe configured exactly like his own but different. He stepped into the squad room and looked around. Essie stared back at him.
    â€œWhat?” she said.
    â€œSomething’s wrong.”
    â€œYou think?”
    â€œYes, definitely. I can’t figure out what it is.”
    â€œProbably ’cause you don’t smell coffee. That’s what’s missing. Good or bad, fresh or burned, this place always smelled like coffee brewing. Now we don’t brew except one cup at a time in that thing you brought. The office has lost its coffee personality.”
    â€œAh. Gone, but not forgotten.”
    Ike retreated to his desk and picked up Ethyl Smut’s file. He caught the Police Academy intern out of the corner of his eye as he exited the office. Ike called out to him.
    â€œYou managed to find a recent address for the Smuts. Good work.”
    He grinned, pulled himself up, and tried to look police professional. Ike said that when he returned he should search through Facebook and find the girl, if he could. The kid said he would. If she had a wall, he’d find it. Ike didn’t ask him what the hell a wall was. TMI.
    Charley Picket arrived with a large evidence bag filled with things he’d found in the hay barn. Actually the evidence bag was a garbage bag with an official-looking tag, but nobody needed to know that. Ike retrieved his key and padlock and dumped the contents of the bag on the floor. He began to pick through it, then thought better of it. His father’s mystery intruders could wait. He had two murders on his desk, one old, one recent, and he needed to concentrate on the job at hand. He could sort through all this stuff later. He gathered the pile on the floor together and shoved it back in the bag. He paused over a faded photograph. It could have been an early Polaroid. It wasn’t, obviously, but the degree of yellowing and the serrated edge made it seem so. He put it aside rather than returning it to the bag.
    Essie was right, there was no coffee personality. Funny how you get to expect something like that. It wasn’t as if it held any great attraction, the opposite actually, but change, even change that improves, isn’t always easily accommodated. He swiveled back to his desk and directed his attention to the meager gleanings from the crime scene in the woods.
    In addition to Charley Picket’s apparent murder weapon find, the deputies had uncovered a few odds and ends. One plastic bag held an old shell casing—nine millimeter—corroded. It wasn’t clear if it had come out of or lay on the ground, but in either case it had done so for some time. Ike wondered if it might be connected to the older case. Certainly a possibility.
    A second bag held a faded ragged one dollar bill with a phone number scrawled in pencil on it. Who used a pencil nowadays? The United States Treasury printed bills on expensive and special paper. The formula changed from time to time as counterfeiters grew increasingly more sophisticated, and there was a very readable serial number on it. There was a better-than-even chance he could date the bill by the paper’s composition and serial number. Then, if it connected to the dead guy, he’d at