Over Tumbled Graves by Jess Walter Read Free Book Online

Christmas?”
    “Yeah.”
    “How old is that guy?”
    “I don’t know. Twenty-two. Nine. Somewhere in there.”
    “Good for her. If I was a woman, that’s what I’d do.”
    Dupree looked away from the body to Pollard.
    “No,” he said, “I just mean, if I was attracted to guys, that’s what I’d do…Men do it all the time, you know, go out with someone a lot younger. You know what I mean.”
    “You’re attracted to younger guys?”
    “No, I mean…” He shifted his weight and looked to change the subject. “That’s a tough call she had to make. Poor kid.”
    “She’ll be all right. She had good training.”
    “Oh, that’s right. She worked for you. As if that wasn’t enough bad luck for one lifetime.”
    Dupree nudged the dead man’s foot with his own. “Neighbors know anything?”
    “Yeah. The guy’s nephew stops by earlier today for a visit. Some screaming. About nine P.M ., neighbor sees the nephew leave in the victim’s car.”
    “Get a plate on the car?”
    “Yep. Plate, make, model. I got it all. The reason I called you was that one of the neighbors said the nephew was wearing khaki pants.”
    “No shit?” Dupree looked more closely at the dead body on the rug.
    “Don’t know if it’s Caroline’s guy from the park, but the description’s close.”
    “What about the rest of Uncle Stiffy’s family? Any of ’em know the nephew?”
    “We’re lookin’. Wife’s got Alzheimer’s, lives in a home. I guess he’s got a sister in the Bay Area we’re trying to track down.”
    Dupree picked up a photo album and began leafing through it. “I forgot to ask, who won the pool?”
    Pollard motioned to the huge pipe wrench lying in a corner, marked with one of the small evidence flags. A technician crouched to dust it.
    Dupree shook his head. “You’re kidding. A pipe wrench? Goddamn Spivey.”
    Every December at their Christmas party, the Major Crimes detectives picked a weapon—everything from a baseball bat to a .38 to an Uzi to different kinds of knives—and whenever there was a murder the next year, each of the eight detectives tossed in twenty bucks. The guy with the right weapon won the pot. Some guys bought two or three weapons and so the pot was usually more than two hundred dollars.
    They went by seniority, the newest detective choosing last each time, and since all the likely weapons were chosen by the time Spivey came aboard, he stared at the list and then said, in perfect Efrem Zimbalist Jr. inflection, “miscellaneous blunt objects.” Now, here it was only the end of April, and already they had a murder committed with a shovel and now this—a pipe wrench. Unbelievable. Nine murders this year and already Spivey wins two.
    “So, what do we do? Arrest Spivey?”
    “No shit,” Pollard said.
    The assistant chief, James Tucker, came in then. With the chief a year away from retirement, at the most two, Tucker showed up at every crime scene where there might be reporters. It was taken for granted that he was in line for the job, even though many of the older cops didn’t like him because he had come from San Diego instead of the insular world of Spokane cops.
    “What’ve we got?” Tucker asked.
    “Miscellaneous blunt,” Pollard said.
    “Goddamn Spivey,” Tucker said.
    Dupree turned his back and looked through the photo album for a picture of the nephew, knowing it was a long shot. But that was the thing about streaks and runs. If the guy who pushed Caroline’s drug dealer off the bridge also beat this old man to death, then thestring was already playing out, each movement taking the thing out a little further, the coincidences piling up, just waiting to be revealed.
    So he wasn’t surprised when he saw, in one picture, the dead guy leaning against a pier in San Francisco with a stump of a woman, her husband, an attractive young girl with black hair, and a guy who looked about thirty-five, a guy with a cocky smirk and the kind of simple, colorless tattoo on his