Monument to Murder by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online

gave Brixton the information he needed to complete his report. She was taken with his strong, youthful face and snappy uniform, he with her dazzling smile, shapely figure, and fashionably styled blond hair. He didn’t know whether asking for a date while on duty was against MPD rules but did it anyway.
    They were married six months later, to the chagrin of her mother, who considered police service a necessary albeit lower-class way to make a living.
    Marylee became pregnant the first month of their marriage and Jill was born nine months later. The second pregnancy occurred as soon as Marylee’s physician told her it was okay to have sex again. Janet arrived nine months after that.
    Things went downhill from there. Brixton had become disenchanted with his job, which was a mild reaction compared to Marylee’s revised view of being married to a cop. With her mother, arms crossed, supervising the move, Marylee, Jill, and Janet vacated the apartment in The District and headed to the family home in Maryland. Brixton didn’t contest the divorce or the amount of child support and alimony. Marylee’s mother had been left a lot of money when her husband died, and Brixton got off easy. Within months he’d resigned from Washington’s MPD, been hired by the Savannah Police Department, and moved to that quintessential southern city where there were plenty of other Marylees that he assiduously avoided. Flo Combes was originally from Staten Island. Enough said.
    Brixton’s daughters considered him a bit of a flake, which was okay with him. He called weekly, sent the checks on time until they reached eighteen, and managed a visit every couple of months. He missed watching them grow up but didn’t wallow in that disappointment. The older girl, Jill, went on to receive a degree in accounting from Maryland University and landed a good job with a firm in Bethesda, where she met her husband. Brixton had attended the wedding a year ago and proudly walked her down the aisle. Janet proved to be less conventional. She dropped out of college and became involved with the music industry in capacities that Brixton never fully understood. Most recently she claimed to be promoting rock concerts in the D.C. area featuring bands Brixton had never heard of, nor wanted to. He knew she was into the rock world’s drug scene and had warned her on many occasions of the ramifications of that life. She always listened but he was certain that his words fell on deaf ears. That he was now a private investigator, a private eye, amused Jill and Janet, whose knowledge of what private eyes did came from TV. All in all, and with the exception of worrying about Janet’s lifestyle, his life was pretty good, except for those times when he was sure it wasn’t.

    •  •  •

    He left Savannah at seven. The 250-mile drive to Atlanta usually took him about four hours, but the rain and two accidents on I-75 slowed him down. On the long list of things he didn’t enjoy, long drives were at or near the top. His orthopedic problems were made worse when behind the wheel for longer than a half hour, and the number of yahoos sharing the road seemed to increase each day, gobbling messy sandwiches while driving, blathering on cell phones, and more recently dunderheads composing text messages on the highway while doing seventy-five.
    The only positive thing he found about driving long distances was the time it gave him to think. Shutting off his cell phone while behind the wheel was as second nature to him as silencing it in theaters. There was no call important enough that couldn’t wait until he’d arrived at his destination and gotten out of the car.
    He’d researched Wanda Johnson on the Internet the night before. Now in her early forties, she’d been turning tricks for years—Vegas, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and finally her hometown, Savannah. Her rap sheet took up enough pages to fill a novella; the Savannah PD’s vice squad knew her well enough to call her by