Top Ten by Ryne Douglas Pearson Read Free Book Online Page A

Jaworski had sent her to talk to this woman, to pick up this one last interview of staff at the post office where Doris ‘DoDo’ May had been cut up. But what could this woman possibly offer? She’d been out of town when the crime occurred. Out of town in the week leading up to it. What possible dots could be gleaned from her.
    “Do you think she suffered?” Judy Bryce asked. Her wet eyes pleaded for a wanted truth.
    “I don’t think so,” Ariel told her, giving her what she wanted. By any other name it was a lie. “Before you left on vacation, did Doris mention anything about anyone to you? Someone new in her life? A boyfriend? An admirer?”
    Judy Bryce shook her head. “She had a steady guy. Mike DeRoy.”
    Who had been checked and cleared already, Ariel new from the case notes Jaworski had given her. She’d read them while stopped for lunch en route to Pembry. There’d been no pictures included. She’d been able to finish half a sandwich before the cold words sparked new memories.
    “He drives trucks across country,” Judy told Ariel. “God, has anyone told him?”
    “He’s been talked to,” Ariel assured her. Agents in Montana intercepted his rig and questioned him for two hours. They ended up taking him to a hospital. “So Doris had no one new in her life. Not even a new friend?”
    “Everybody knows everybody around her,” Judy said. “There’s no one new to know.”
    Ariel nodded and clicked her pen shut. Tucked her notebook inside her blazer. Judy Bryce was a wash.
    “I appreciate you talking to me, Mrs. Bryce. I’ll walk you back in.”
    Judy Bryce took a last draw on her cigarette and tossed it to the ground. She crushed it out with a twist of her foot on the gravel and used her key to open the back door. A new lock had been installed over the weekend. One that locked automatically whenever the door closed.
    Ariel followed Judy back through the post office. Through the back room and its mail sacks. Down the hall past the rooms where horrors had been done to Doris ‘DoDo’ May. Both were closed off. The floor was shiny. It had been stripped and cleaned and waxed overnight. The place was spotless. Clean. But it would always be stained.
    Judy walked Ariel behind the counter where another postal worker stood at the service window chatting softly with a woman buying stamps and mailing a package. The woman was slowly shaking her head.
    “Thanks again,” Ariel told Judy Bryce once they were in the main lobby. “I know it’s hard to talk about.”
    “I know I wasn’t much help,” Judy said. Her arms were crossed tight across her chest as if there were a chill in the room. The heater was running at full bore.
    “Everything helps,” Ariel reassured her. It wasn’t a lie, per se.
    Judy Bryce looked around the lobby. The floor gleamed. One spot on the wall near the bulletin board had been scrubbed whiter than that which surrounded it. Word was the whole place was going to be painted. Rumor was it was going to be razed.
    Ariel, too, took a look around the sanitized space. Muted afternoon light filled it through the doors that had been part of Michaelangelo’s canvas. Only part. The walls, too, where he’d scrawled his message, they were integral to the shock value he sought to...
    Camera.
    Her survey of the room stopped cold on the surveillance camera pointing almost directly at her from behind the counter. She turned and looked behind. High above the door another one was mounted. A cable from it snaked through a hole in the ceiling.
    Jaworski hadn’t said anything about cameras. The case notes he’d given her hadn’t mentioned any. But certainly they had been noticed.
    “Mrs. Bryce, the cameras there and there...”
    “Bob said your people took the tapes and the recording decks.” Judy Bryce motioned to her coworker commiserating with the customer. Her face went sullen. “I don’t know if I want them to have seen anything.”
    Ariel could understand without agreeing. “Again,