The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller by Noreen Ayres Read Free Book Online Page A

then said, “You know where that’s at, Turtle Rock?”
    “No problem, Stu.”
    “You could see if Sanders is free to go along.”
    I nodded, not sure if Stu didn’t trust me for the job alone or what, but not wanting to give it much thought, either.
    Joe was on the phone when I came by. When he got off I said, “I’m on my way out to a case,” I said. “Stu says you’d be good company.”
    “Where’s it at?”
    “Turtle Rock.”
    “That’s near David’s school,” he said, straightening his desk to leave. “We talked this morning. He said one of his roommates has been ripping software programs off the internet. Trademarked programs. That makes it illegal. I told him to give the jerk an ultimatum: Knock it off or move out.”
    I was pleased David confided in his dad. Joe’s forehead was still pinched. “What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Why are you frowning then?”
    “I’m not frowning. It’s how you look when you get my age. You’ll learn.”
    “If that’s a bid for pity, it’s wasted.”
    He got up and removed his jacket from the back of the chair. “I could have told him to report his roommate to campus police. I should have. I’m slipping. But you get to thinking, we got cases like this,” he said, nodding to the phone, “and cases like your Does, and who gives a shit about some software programs?”
    “Life in the big city,” I said, rising.
    “Eight million ways to die,” he said. “Who said that, anyway?”
    “The eight million? Mystery writer,” I answered.
    “Eight million. We’ve got what?”
    “Two-and-a-half.”
    “Two-and-a-half million ways to die in this county. Most of them are not going to be by someone else’s hand, and by someone we’re supposed to trust, like this Dana Point asshole.” He tapped a file on his desk. “Who’d you say wrote that, the eight million?”
    I dug for my sunglasses. “Lawrence Block. He’s got this guy named Scudder, a reformed drunk walks around New York doing favors for friends.”
    “Good writer?”
    “I like him.”
    “How much you think a guy like him makes a year?”
    “I wouldn’t know.”
    “I should quit,” Joe said, “write books.”
    “Mysteries?”
    “Nah. I don’t much like fiction.”
    “What, then?”
    “Beats me.”
    “That could be a problem.”
    He pulled out the middle drawer of his desk. “Who’s on this from Homicide, you know?”
    “Will Bright.”
    “That girl’s case…” he said, and struggled for the name.
    “Nita Estevez,” I said.
    “That’s the one.” He stared at me the moments it took him to remember that night I spent complaining in his arms about how I couldn’t get anywhere on that case, and how Will Bright wasn’t giving it any more time until new leads turned up.
    “Little Crane,” I muttered as we headed out the door.
    “Beg pardon?” Joe asked.
    “Nevermind.”

SIX

    “I f that’s a turtle, I’m a pterodactyl,” Joe said. He held our two evidence kits in each hand, raised his elbows and cried, “Squawk!”
    I snapped his picture.
    We were at the corner of Rockview and Rocky Knoll, looking at the massive stone named for a turtle. It sat on a hill in a tailored community called Turtle Rock, which sat on a hill itself five miles in circumference. Surrounding it were farmers’ fields and the expansive college campus of the University of Irvine, where Joe’s son David was a sophomore. Bright flowers, vivid grasses, and yellow scene tape reading POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS and
POLIZIA NO CRUZAR
gave the whole lump the look of a decorated cake.
    The victim lay in shadow under the neck of the rock, on his side, eyes partly open. Blood had coursed across the nose and under the eye nearest the ground. A red kerchief spanned his forehead, blackened in the center from a round between the eyes. He had on a black jacket, a gray T-shirt with a design of a cannabis plant in the center, jeans with pale wear-marks at the knees, and white socks showing above black