The Big Exit by David Carnoy Read Free Book Online

dating guys with unique and intriguing qualities, particularly good looks, just not large bank accounts. Perhaps the problem
     was they always seemed to have dual professions separated by a slash. There was the restaurant manager/nutritionist, a mediator/ski
     instructor, an architect/political blogger, the landscaper who bred huskies and had Iditarod aspirations. She’d tried to break
     herself of her habit, rotating in a few techie types, they of lofty titles and nonsensical company names, tier-two Boy Wonders.
     Invariably she found them dull or unattractive—or both. Meanwhile, the “slashes” kept finding her.
    The exception was Ted Cogan, the surgeon. Wealthy, no. Not for around here anyway. But well off, yes, which was just fine
     with her. The only problem was she’d failed to seal the deal and marry him not once, but twice, and though she doesn’t like
     to admit it, that second defeat triggered the little tailspin that led to her professional grounding.
    Fuck him
, she thinks, glancing up at an arguably exquisite light fixture that’s illuminating the short hallway they’re passing through.
Fuck Ted Cogan
. And just then a door suddenly opens in front of her, startling and separating her from her escort. It’s a woman coming out
     of a small bathroom. The two stop just short of colliding.
    “My God, you scared me,” the woman says, clasping her hand to her chest. Pencil thin, around forty-five, with short sandy-colored
     hair, she isn’t exactly dressed up, but she is well dressed, with khaki slacks and a couple of buttons open on her crisp white
     blouse to show off a string of white pearls.
    “Sorry,” Carolyn says. “And you are?”
    “Pam Yeagher. I live here. We’re the neighbors. This is just ghastly. Absolutely horrible. You must be Carolyn Dupuy. Beth’s
     in the den. She’s waiting for you.”
    Out of view, Carolyn hears the young officer talking to a man with a very familiar-sounding voice, though she only realizes
     it belongs to Jeff Billings, one of the detectives, when she follows Pam Yeagher into the kitchen and sees him standing there.
    “Well, well, if it isn’t Ms. Dupuy,” he says. “Last I heard, you’d been put on hiatus, Counselor.”
    “New season, new show,” she replies, reflexively winding up to return his jab with a bigger shot of her own. “You guys figure
     out a way to fuck up the crime scene yet? That why they have you stashed over here?”
    Billings face blanches; she’s hit a nerve. “Ask Hank,” he says. “He’s in charge.”
    Last year, she’d caught Billings in a small fib on the stand in a breaking-and-entering case and made him look bad (he’d testified
     that a piece of evidence was in “plain sight” when in fact it wasn’t). She loves cops but most of them are liars. And they’re
     arrogant. They think they know who’s guilty and who isn’t, and if they occasionally have to bend their story a bit to make
     things come out right in the end, well, that’s the way it is. As a prosecutor, she was empathetic. She’d overlooked the fudges,
     even tacitly approved of them so long as she didn’t think they’d come back to bite her in the ass. But now it’s different.
     Now it’s her job to make them bite back. And leave marks.
    “Your perimeter isn’t wide enough,” she says to antagonize him further. “You’ve got all kinds of people over there destroying
     possible evidence.”
    He forces a smile and sticks his thumbs in the belt loops on either side of his hips.
    “Sure they are,” he says, smiling, not taking the bait.
    Neither the young officer nor the Yeagher woman, who’s standing just to her left, knows what to make of the exchange.
    “I’m just going to get a glass of water for Beth,” Pam says. “My husband’s in there with her. He’s a doctor. I’ll take you
     in.”
    A doctor?
thinks Carolyn.
Are you kidding me? A fucking doctor’s house? That’s just goddamn perfect
.
    “I’ll give you ten minutes,”