Hornet's Nest by Patricia Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page A

to drive during the academy was older than this. The trunk opened from the outside. And we don’t get to use sirens . . .”
    She shoved the car in gear and drove. “I know all that. I’m not blaming you. You didn’t do it on purpose. Enough already,” she said.
    She decided to try another part of town, off Remus Road near the dog pound. Nothing would be going on there. Her assumption would have been accurate, were it not for an old drunk woman who decided to start screaming on the lawn of the Mount Moriah Primitive Baptist Church, near the Greyhound bus station and the Presto Grill. West heard the call over the scanner and had no choice but to back up the responding unit. She and Brazil were maybe four blocks away.
    “This shouldn’t be anything and we’re going to make sure we keep it that way,” West pointedly told Brazil as she sped up and took a right on Lancaster.
    The one-story church was yellow brick with gaudy colored glass windows all lit up and nobody home, the patchy lawn littered with beer bottles near the JESUS CALLS sign in front. An old woman was screaming and crying hysterically and trying to pull away from two uniformed cops. Brazil and West got out of their car, heading to the problem. When the patrolmen saw the deputy chief in all her brass, they didn’t know what to make of it and got exceedingly nervous.
    “What we got?” West asked when she got to them.
    The woman screamed and had no teeth. Brazil could not understand a note she was wailing.
    “Drunk and disorderly,” said a cop whose nameplate read Smith . “We’ve picked her up before.”
    The woman was in her sixties, at least, and Brazil could not take his eyes off her. She was drunk and writhing in the harsh glare of a streetlight near the sign of a church she probably did not attend. She was dressed in a faded green Hornets sweatshirt and dirty jeans, her belly swollen, her breasts wind socks on a flat day, arms and legs sticks with spiderwebs of long dark hair.
    Brazil’s mother used to make scenes outside the house, but not anymore. He remembered a night long ago when he drove home from the Harris-Teeter grocery to find his mother out in front of the house. She was yelling and chopping down the picket fence as a patrol car pulled up. Brazil tried to stop her and stay out of the way of the axe. The Davidson policeman knew everyone in town and didn’t lock up Brazil’s mother for disturbing the peace or being drunk in public, even though he had justification.
    West was checking the old woman’s cuffed wrists in back as blue and red lights strobed and her wailing went on, pierced by pain. West shot the officers a hot, angry look.
    “Where’s the key?” she demanded. “These are way too tight.”
    Smith had been around since primitive times and reminded West of jaded, unhappy old cops who ended up working private security for corporations. West held out her hand, and he gave her the tiny metal key. West worked it into the cuffs, springing them open. The woman instantly calmed down as cruel steel disappeared. She tenderly rubbed deep angry red impressions on her wrists, and West admonished the troops.
    “You can’t do that,” she continued to shame them. “You’re hurting her.”
    West asked the woman to hold up drooping arms so West could pat her down, and it entered West’s mind that she ought to grab a pair of gloves. But she didn’t have a box inher car because she wasn’t supposed to need things like that anymore, and, in truth, the woman had been put through enough indignity. West did not like searching people, never had, and she remembered in the old days finding unfortunate surprises like bird claw fetishes, feces, used condoms, and erections. She thought of rookie days, of fishing cold slimy Spam out of Chicken Wing’s pocket right before he socked her with his one arm. This old lady had nothing but a black comb, and a key on a shoelace around her neck.
     
    Her name was Ella Joneston, and she was very