First Lady by Michael Malone Read Free Book Online Page A

sudden Hillston’s got mad dog killers on the loose and the streets are full of garbage. Doesn’t look good. Make an arrest?”
    Cuddy glared at him. “No, we haven’t made an arrest.”
    Bubba did some loud tsk-tsking sounds. “No? Man, I bet it tears you to bits to have women scared to go out jogging, scared ole Guess Who’s gonna give them a buzz cut from the neck up.” The youngest reporters laughed.
    â€œBubba, it tore me to bits for women to go out jogging when you lived in Hillston.” The reporters laughed again. Cuddy then gave Bubba a long friendly squeeze on the shoulder at the trapezius muscle, pinching a nerve until the big man’s smile broke and he jerked loose.
    Ending his call, Andy Brookside asked us if there was still a possibility that G.I. Jane was a local girl. Bubba threw his arms out with a sardonic chortle. “Well, if she was local, she didn’t have enough friends, and if she was just passing through, southern hospitality’s sure not what it used to be.”
    The press chuckled, but without much enthusiasm; most of them aren’t native, and for them, Hospitality is just the name of a fast food chain on the interstate. At this point, Bubba’s cell phone rang. Reporters tried to listen in as he briskly answered it, but he stepped away, moving the governor off to the side with a nod that must have conveyed a clue as to who was calling, for Brookside grabbed eagerly at the phone. After Bubba blocked the reporters’ path, they turned on Cuddy and me. Shelly, the Sun reporter who was always giving me a hard time, took the opportunity to do so again. With her short wings of rich black hair, her sharp nose, and huge inquisitive eyes, she swooped down on me like a small pretty falcon, wanting to know why I was busy turning the homicide division of HPD into a local joke.
    â€œSeems to me you’re the ones doing that,” I said.
    Shelly abandoned me and tried Cuddy. “Come on, Mangum, is murder the only crime you can get away with in Hillston? What if there’s another G.I. Jane, what if there’s another dozen , before you stumble over the guy because his taillight’s burnt out and there’s a woman’s body in his trunk?”
    Cuddy told Shelly he wasn’t sure what her question was, but that if she was implying we were dealing with a serial killer like Ted Bundy, she shouldn’t be provocative. Despite the two Guess T-shirts, it was possible the Neville and the Balmoral Heights stabbings were isolated. Out of the corner of my eye, I was watching Andy Brookside, who seemed to be passionately engaged with whoever was calling him. From all the way across the room, I could feel him pouring his (considerable) seductive power into the phone. Then he laughed happily and handed the phone back to Bubba, who continued the conversation with the caller.
    Meanwhile Shelly was rubbing Cuddy the wrong way by smiling as she asked if he’d read Fulke Norris’s full-page ad in last Sunday’s Star. In it, North Carolina’s eminent “philosopher poet” had charged the Hillston police with vindictive harassment of his brilliant math professor son, a loving heartsick husband who had emphatically not murdered his wife. The elder Norris was a “state treasure”: Emeritus at the University, he wrote pretty books of spiritual poetic advice illustrated with pastel drawings and printed on handsome creamy paper. They sold in the millions (my mother had a shelf full), and Norris’s plangent voice could be heard reading them on public radio from time to time. Norris’s ad (accusing Cuddy of incompetence and bias) had probably precipitated the Star editorial calling for his resignation.
    â€œI understand Mr. Norris’s reluctance to believe in his son’s guilt,” Cuddy said. “But I think we caught the right man.”
    Shelly couldn’t leave it alone, darting forward with her thin