Pouncing on Murder by Laurie Cass Read Free Book Online Page B

almost reached the underside of my chin, gave my name, and asked if I could see Detective Inwood.
    “Hang on,” said a deputy. With no speed whatsoever, he reached for the phone, pushed a few buttons, and turned away to talk. He murmured a few words, glanced back at me—I smiled brightly—flipped back around, laughed, then hung up the phone. “Hal says to send you back to the interview room.”
    “Thank you,” I said politely, trying not to wonder what had caused the laughter.
    The deputy buzzed open the locked door that led to the interior offices. “It’s down the hall, third office on the right.”
    “Thanks,” I said, though I didn’t need the directions. If this had been baseball, someone would have been keeping track of the number of times any given honest law-abiding private citizen had sat in the small windowless room. Last fall I’d lost count after using up all myfingers and had decided it was a silly number to try to remember anyway.
    I sat primly in the chair that I’d long ago come to think of as mine, and kept my attention away from the stains on the ceiling tiles, especially the ones near the door. If I stared at them too long, they’d turn into fire-breathing dragons and fly into my dreams. As it was, I had enough problems with animals in dreams, thanks to Eddie’s tendency to sleep on my head when the outside temperature dropped below sixty degrees. Why the outside temperature should cause a change in his inside behavior, I didn’t know. All I knew was that it was true.
    “Ms. Hamilton.” The tall, rangy, and gray-haired Detective Inwood entered the room and stood next to the scratched laminate table. “Do I need to sit down for this?”
    He showed a number of signs of a man with too much to do and not enough time to do it in. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Tapped his leg with his fingers. Glanced out to the hallway. If I tried to talk while he was standing, I’d never get his full attention.
    I slid down and reached out with my toes to push out the chair opposite from me. “How nice to see you, Detective Inwood. Did you have a nice winter? And how were your holidays?”
    “Ms. Hamilton,” he said, his patient tone slipping, “please don’t tell me you’re here for a social call. Devereaux retired last month and Wolverson isn’t a detective yet, so I’m dealing with a double caseload. I have half a dozen cases going and—”
    “It’s about Henry Gill.”
    Inwood’s tense impatience fell into lines of fatigue. He went to the chair and sat heavily. “Henry. I still can’t believe the old bugger’s gone.”
    Too late, I realized what I should have considered earlier, that the detective and Henry were near contemporaries, that Tonedagana County didn’t have all that many people in it, and that the odds were good that any two men from the same generation knew each other. Hundred percent odds, really, if Inwood’s reaction was a guide. It had been poor judgment not to think about the possibility, and I was sorry I’d been flip in the way I’d changed the subject.
    After a moment, I said, “I was talking to Adam Deering earlier today.”
    The detective nodded. “The guy who found Henry.”
    “He was saying that he saw someone running away from Henry, after that tree fell.”
    “Thought that he saw a male figure,” the detective corrected.
    I bristled at the dissing of my new friend’s reputation. “Well, he was having a heart attack.”
    “Exactly,” Detective Inwood said. “Eyewitnesses are unreliable in the best of cases, and this certainly wasn’t best.”
    “But—”
    Inwood held up his hand against my protest. “Point number one. Mr. Deering was having a heart attack. Point number two. He was in an area with which he was not familiar. Point number three. The weather was windy with gusts up to thirty miles an hour, two inches of rain had fallen inside the previous twelve-hour period, andthe heavy cloud cover made the light quality very poor. None of