Still Waters by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online

marble stairs and a cool white hall glaring with bare fluorescent overhead lighting. Elizabeth followed him along the corridor and to the right, the heels of her cowboy boots thumping dully against the smooth, hard floor. She wondered what would come next and how long it would take. Trace was supposed to be home by eleven. The large round clock mounted above the dispatcher's station already showed eleven-ten.
    “Lorraine,” Ellstrom said in a tone of voice that rang with phony authority, “this is Miss Stuart. She's the one found Jarrold. Dane wants her to wait in his office. I have to get back out there and help secure the crime scene.” He hitched up his pants and puffed out his chest. Macho and tough, the man in command.
    Behind her big U-shaped fake birch desk, Lorraine Worth gave him the cold, hard look of a woman who wasn't fooled by much and certainly wasn't fooled by him. The dispatcher-cum-secretary sat at her post with schoolmarm posture and pinched lips, dressed in something June Cleaver would have worn around the house with a string of pearls at her throat. Her hair rose up an impressive height in a cast-iron bouffant the color of gunmetal. Her eyebrows were penciled on, thick, dark lines drawn in a style intended to make her look stern and to minimize the motherly quality of her eyes. She stared at Ellstrom from behind rhinestone-studded glasses that pinched up on the outside corners like cat's eyes, and somehow managed to look down her straight, long nose at him, even though he towered over her desk.
    “The crime lab is about to arrive,” she announced imperiously. “You'd better get out there, or there won't be anything left for you to do except sweep up the coffee cups.”
    Ellstrom narrowed his eyes to slits and scowled at her without noticeable effect, then turned on his heel and stalked away as Lorraine snatched up the receiver of the ringing telephone to her right.
    “Tyler County sheriff's office . . . No, the sheriff has no statement at this time . . . No arrests have been made that I'm aware of,” she said, turning an eagle eye on Elizabeth, taking in her appearance in one scathing glance, disapproval tightening her mouth into nothingness. “I wouldn't know anything about the woman and I don't spread gossip, at any rate. Now, I must ask you to hang up. This line has to be left open for emergencies.”
    She ended the call herself, cradling the receiver with a resounding thump.
    “I don't mind telling you, I dislike this business intensely,” she said sternly, her gaze still boring through Elizabeth as if she was more than ready to lay the blame at her feet. “There hasn't been a murder in Tyler County in thirty-three years. Not since Olie Grimsrud did in Wendel Svenson, the milk hauler, for having hanky-panky with Leda Grimsrud behind the bulk tank in their milk house. I don't like it a bit.”
    “I'm not so crazy about it myself,” Elizabeth said as the phone at Lorraine's elbow rang again. She didn't like the woman's implication that it was somehow her fault the amazing streak of law and order had ended, but she had caught the glimmer of fear beneath the anger in Lorraine Worth's eyes, and she sighed. Still Creek had been a safe haven for its residents for a long time. Now the ugly reality of a brutal world had intruded. The woman had a right to her anger.
    Elizabeth's own nerves were frazzled right down to the nub. She wasn't in the habit of finding dead bodies practically within sight of her own house. The reminder of just how near home she had been made her shiver. She thought of Trace wandering along the road, maybe trying to hitch a ride from wherever he'd gone for the evening, and the nerves in her stomach congealed into a gelid lump.
    “Listen, is there a pay phone around here I could use? I need to call my son.”
    The dispatcher gave her a long look that Elizabeth guessed was intended to communicate the woman's feelings about divorced mothers or women who stumbled across dead