The Kindness of Strangers (Skip Langdon Mystery #6) (The Skip Langdon Series) by Julie Smith Read Free Book Online

she couldn’t see the point. She knew where he worked, and she could catch him there. For the moment, she contented herself with a note in his mailbox: “Jamal—Nikki Pigeon may have mentioned me. She told me what happened to her in the Following, and I hear you had a bad time, too. Maybe we can help each other.” She signed it, thought twice about leaving her phone number, but in the end couldn’t see any harm in it—it wasn’t her address, after all, and right now she wasn’t a cop.
    She went to the coroner’s office and found her favorite deputy, Wayne Kerlerec. He was a short man with hair in a brush cut, stocky but soft, a man who obviously believed in lots of fried seafood and no exercise. He was married with two children, and remained relentlessly cheerful despite the gory nature of his work.
    When she arrived, he was mopping up blood after an autopsy. “Hey, Miss Skip. You missed the excitement. Six homicides in twenty-four hours.”
    “Drugs?”
    “Oh, yeah. Drive-bys, a couple of ‘em. Gangs, prob’ly. Young kids. Mmmmm. Mmmm.” His lips set only briefly, before he smiled again. “What can I do you for? I thought you were on leave?”
    “I am, but you know—there’s always something.”
    “A little moonlighting?”
    “Something personal.”
    “Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “Young, black Jane Doe—late last June sometime, or early July. Before the fourth.”
    He finished his mopping up. “Let me get to my list. How old did you say she was?”
    “Not sure, exactly. Between twenty-five and thirty- five.”
    “Here’s one. I got one for you. June twenty-eighth exactly—that be about right?”
    Skip nodded.
    “Somebody found her lying on the sidewalk with a cracked skull—like she tripped and fell. Okay, it was off Jackson Avenue, near the St. Thomas Project. No purse on her, but you know what that place is like. Wouldn’t put it past half the bozos live there to take it off a corpse. The other half would mug her for it.”
    Skip got a sudden tight feeling in her stomach—if Jacomine had done her, he’d done her right. Without witnesses, there’d be no point in reopening the investigation. “Can I see the video?”
    “Sure.”
    When the office first instituted the videos, it struck Skip as a little odd, since a picture of a corpse is a still by definition, but she had to admit it made all the difference—photos wouldn’t do it, and this saved the family the actual sight of their smashed-up loved one.
    The tape showed what the office called a face and bust shot—more or less head and shoulders.
    “That’s her.”
    “Who?”
    “Her name’s Nikki Pigeon. She had one sister, Tanya, on Baronne Street, but lots of luck with Tanya. She’s probably too strung out to make it over here.”
    The investigation was undoubtedly closed, and she could think of absolutely no argument to take to Cappello. It was just another piece of the dark, tortured picture she was forming of Errol Jacomine. Without much hope, she phoned Tanya herself.
    No one answered.
    That was probably the way it was going to be—Tanya was probably going to make herself pretty scarce to official personnel.
    I’ll have to go see her, Skip thought, and found the idea depressed her.
    * * *
    “Potter. Potter, got a minute?”
    Potter loved that about Daddy. His politeness, the way he always asked, as if he weren’t paying Potter for his time, as if he didn’t know Potter Menard would lay down his life for Errol Jacomine.
    He couldn’t call him Daddy in public anymore, though. They had decided to forego that during the campaign—actually, during Daddy’s entire public life, which was projected to be long and distinguished. It sounded too “fundamentalist cornball,” Daddy himself had said, and chuckled. Another thing Potter liked about him: He could laugh at himself.
    He’d never thought he’d feel about a white man the way he felt about Daddy—almost as if Jacomine were his real father. God knows he