Falling Hard and Fast by Kylie Brant Read Free Book Online Page B

halted. It was a damn shame, he thought, when a man let nicotine get such a vicious grip on him that the body cried for it without the brain’s permission.
    Of course, he reasoned, he hadn’t gotten a chance for his cigar last night. That meant he owed himself one, didn’t it? The Rutherfords had already cost him some new windows, a carpet and a hell of a carpentry bill. There was no use adding to that list by denying himself the pleasure of the smoke he’d missed.
    Body and mind in agreement, he took out the cigar and lit it. The first puff was a sweet haze filtering through his lungs. The second was a luxury to be savored, and by the third he was ready to work. He spread the reports before him and proceeded to read every bit of information they had over again. He’d read through them a dozen times before. He’d read them a dozen more before the case was solved.
    It was a well-known fact in police work that the twenty-four hours preceding a homicide were as critical as the twenty-four hours following it. Information gleaned from the antemortem was valuable because what Janice Reillyhad done, where she’d gone and whom she’d seen all might have a bearing on her death.
    The postmortem twenty-four hours were important because the chances of solving the case diminished significantly the more time elapsed after the murder. As the trail grew colder, the killer got more and more of an edge. Cage had been a cop long enough to know that if a case went longer than a week without a solid lead, chances were it would never be solved at all.
    It had now been—he did a quick mental estimation—nine days, two hours, and thirty-three minutes since the body had been discovered. And it would take a stretch of the imagination to consider any of their leads “solid.”
    He pored over the information they’d put together, regardless. Fisher’s team had constructed a solid picture of the day immediately before, and the day of the victim’s death. But through the endless contacts made with Janice Reilly’s family, friends and acquaintances, no real clue had emerged. In a homicide investigation, a law-enforcement officer first looked to those people closest to the victim. Jealousy and greed were the lowest common human denominators. But the victim’s ex-husband had been halfway across the country, in a hospital delivery room with his new wife and baby daughter. They had been unable to establish a motive for the man’s involvement in his ex-wife’s murder, at any rate. By all accounts, their divorce had been amicable.
    Cage picked up a five-by-seven picture that was included in the file. That brought them to Jeremy Klatt, the victim’s ex-lover who had been, he’d asserted, home alone watching TV the night of the murder. He’d claimed he hadn’t seen the victim in over two months, but the deputies hadn’t been certain of his truthfulness. The man had also asserted that he’d been the one to initiate the breakup with Janice Reilly, a statement her closest friends disputed. Was his lie merely ego—an effort to save face? Or was it a deliberate attempt to cover up far more? Setting the photo aside, Cage rereadthe man’s statement, before turning to the stack of others the deputies had taken.
    When a sharp rapping sounded at his door, Cage looked up, faintly amazed to discover that more than two hours had gone by. A broad torso topped by a fresh-scrubbed Howdy Doody face stuck just inside the door. Deputy Roland DuPrey.
    â€œSorry to bother you, Sheriff, but we just got an express delivery of the coroner’s final report. As long as we’ve been waiting for it, figured you’d want to see it right away.”
    â€œYou figured right.” He held out his hand to take the envelope from DuPrey, and opened it quickly. Doc Barnes held the official title of coroner for the parish, but the man would be the first to admit that his experience