Law and Disorder by Mary Jane Maffini Read Free Book Online

see Ray over the phone and he couldn’t see me. This was a good thing because it meant I could lie around in old T-shirts and baggy shorts and keep my hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail. I didn’t have to have a pedicure every month, as my sisters advised. It was the one good thing about having a significant other one thousand, six hundred and forty-one kilometres away. He could imagine me any way he wanted and vice versa.
    Sometimes we were right about each other. At that exact moment, I knew he was scrunching up his face.
    “And this ‘Bunny’ doesn’t have them.”
    “His wife is crazy clean. They’re gone.”
    “You sure they’re gone? You should get the local boys to go over and search his house.”
    “Are you kidding? I can’t do that to Bunny. Okay, he’s been a burglar most of his adult life and probably when he was a child too, now that I think of it. But he can’t have the cops traipsing all over his house. What if they found something incriminating?”
    After a significant pause, Ray finally spoke again. “You know something? I have to put the cat out now. How about I bang my head on the sidewalk a few times while I’m outside?”
    “See that’s the problem, Ray. You’re a cop. It colours the way you look at the world. I’m a lawyer. Bunny was my legal aid client for years. I’m attached to him. I can’t traumatize him. Also, you don’t have a cat.”
    A strange noise drifted over the line.
    “Are you laughing? Ray? Cut that out. Oh, gotta go. It looks like Leonard Mombourquette’s calling on the other line. I’ve been leaving messages for him all night. It’ll be about the dead lawyer.”
    “Call me back right away. We have to work out the details about the girls.”
    “The girls?”
    “Brittany and Ashley. Don’t turn everything into a game, Camilla.”
    Details about the girls? The very mention of Ray’s teenage daughters was enough to make me edgy. Possibly because they both hate me.
    “Sure thing.” I didn’t want Mombourquette to hang up.
    “Don’t forget.”
    “Yup.”
    I picked up Mombourquette’s call. “What’s happening, Leonard?” I’d been trying to reach him at home and on his cell and later at my friend Elaine Ekstein’s place because he still hadn’t called me back.
    “If I tell you, will you stop calling?” he said. I thought I could hear Elaine squawking in the background.
    I said, “Any luck?”
    “It looks like your man Rollie was shot with a small calibre weapon. No ballistics results yet. This is not public knowledge, so if you tell anyone else, I’m coming after you.”
    “A small calibre weapon. Of course, that doesn’t mean much. I don’t actually know anybody with a gun.”
    “Oh, come on. You were a legal aid lawyer long enough. Everyone you dealt with had a gun. Hey, now your boyfriend even has one.”
    “Don’t creep me out. I have trouble with the cop thing. So was there anything else?”
    “It’s not enough that the guy was shot and tossed off a boat? You wanted him garroted too?”
    “Was he garroted?”
    “No. We actually don’t get a lot of garroting around here. But two out of three ain’t bad.”
    “Aren’t you playful tonight, Leonard? Was he bound?”
    “What, you think there’s a sexual component to this?”
    “Ew. With Rollie Thorsten? That just makes my skin crawl. So if he was found in the middle of the Rideau, he must have been taken there on a boat. I was just wondering who he might get close to who might have a boat and might also have a gun. My point is just that it would be easy to narrow that down. Guys with guns and boats.”
    “Try to be a bit more politically correct, Camilla. Maybe women with guns and boats. Now, you want to tell me how come you asked about the fact that he was shot?”
    “Do I have to?”
    “Let’s see. I’m Major Crimes, there’s a killing with information known only to the killer, the police and the staff at the morgue. Hmm. So, in short, yes, you have to tell