LITMIR.BIZ

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Scarlet had the single front door to her little BMW Isetta open and we hopped inside. I slammed the door harder than I meant to and immediately apologized. “Sorry.”

      “Don’t be.” She grabbed my seat belt and buckled me in before putting on her own and starting the car. I don’t know if it was the buzz of her little engine or the word police reverberating through my head that woke me out of my temporary shock, but I had to know if the sheriff was on the scene. “Is Mateo there?”

      “That’s what Daisy said.”

      I nodded but was immediately distracted with thoughts of the conversation I’d had with Isla earlier in the day. Isla was close to my daddy, but Isla had accused the woman I’d seen leaving my father’s house that morning of having an affair with her husband, the Judge. The woman my daddy was interested in, was also apparently the other woman in Isla and the Judge’s marriage. And Daddy and I had a mutual hatred for Judge Sperry—the old man who’d been the town sheriff when I was a kid. The same sheriff who was present every single time I made a mistake in my youth. He’d put handcuffs on me once, taken me to jail, and put the fear of God in me as he spouted numerous verses from the Bible. My daddy never took kindly to the Judge preaching to his daughter.

      No one could anger my daddy the way Judge Sperry did.

      I sent a prayer up into the universe, hoping God was more forgiving than vengeful. Please don’t let the Judge be dead at the hand of my father.

      Scarlett drove the ten blocks to the Judge’s house, taking the corners faster than I thought her car could handle. It seemed every turn was made with divine intervention. As we approached Tenth Street, the strobe of emergency lights bounced off the houses throughout the neighborhood. People lined both sides of the street. Huddled against the increasing strength of the spring breeze, they peered toward the crime scene and talked to their neighbors.

      Access to Tenth Street was blocked off two houses away from the Judge’s by a patrol car parked at an angle. I could see another patrol car at the opposite end of the block, barricading the entrance to the street at the intersection. A white van marked CSU was parked across from the Judge’s house in the midst of the area the police had marked off as their crime scene. The back doors were flung open and two crime scene techs were digging in bags in the back of the vehicle. Three uniformed officers stood guard at different sections of bright yellow tape that seemed to encompass a large amount of the normally quiet neighborhood.

      An unmarked black Dodge Charger police cruiser was parked on our side of the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape. I scanned the scene looking for a familiar face, but it wasn’t the sheriff’s face that turned my already flopping stomach. It was the long lump covered with a yellow blanket that I spotted on the manicured front lawn in front of the Judge’s house, and I prayed it wasn’t anyone I knew.

      As if my prayers were answered by a warped universe, I saw him. Dressed only in a dark colored robe with his gray hair unkempt, Judge Sperry was kneeling on the grass in front of his house, his face a mask of grief. I shouldn’t have felt an overwhelming sense of relief when I saw the old man, but I did, because it meant my worst fear hadn’t come true. Daddy hadn’t taken out years of pent-up anger and killed the man. No, my daddy stood a few feet away talking with the current sheriff and owner of the Dodge Charger, Mateo Espinosa.

      Who was lying dead in the grass?

      Scarlet double-parked her car and turned off the ignition, effectively forcing me out of my frozen state.

      “You can’t park here,” I told her.

      Scarlet rolled her eyes and opened the door. “That cop guarding the crime scene tape closest to us is Sally Ferguson. She’s got an appointment in the salon tomorrow morning. I don’t think she’d like her blond locks turned green.”

      My head snapped back toward Scarlet as she pushed me out of her car. “You wouldn’t.”

      Scarlet pulled herself out of her vintage car and closed the door. Dressed in a long-sleeved blue floral print pencil dress, she looked as amazing at nine o’clock p.m. as she had when she opened up her Beaus and Beauties hair salon at seven o’clock that morning. She was still wearing her five-inch heels that made my feet hurt just looking at them. I was also envious of her perfect ginger-colored hair that didn’t block her view on a windy day like the mass of curls I brushed off my face for the third time since we’d exited the vehicle. My attempts to keep my curls from obstructing my view were fruitless.

      “Of course, I wouldn’t, but she doesn’t need to know that. Besides, no one is leaving this street anytime soon.”

      I wanted to go to my dad, but he was busy with Mateo and hadn’t seen us arrive. We approached Daisy and her husband Jessie by walking through a couple front yards. We reached their position in the middle of their driveway in a matter of minutes. The older couple was holding hands like teenagers until Daisy saw us approach.

      “Young lady, I’ve been trying to call you for the past thirty minutes,” Daisy scolded.

      “I’m sorry. I left my phone in my apartment.”

      Jessie came up and put his arm around my shoulder. “Don’t give the girl a hard time, Daisy. Can’t you see she’s worried half to death?” Jessie winced as soon as the word left his mouth, and Daisy pushed him away to wrap me in a tight embrace.

      “That’s my husband,” she whispered in my ear, and a lock of her gray hair blew across my face, hiding my view of my father on the other side of the holly hedge that divided the Mahans’ yard from the Judge’s. A tall metal arbor stood in the middle of the long row of bushes allowing access between the yards. A yellow piece of crime scene tape, however, blocked our entrance. “Everything is going to be okay, Princess. Mateo will take care of your daddy.”

      The last thing I wanted was comfort. I needed answers . . . yesterday. I gently pushed her away.

      “Do you know who died?” I asked. Deep in my gut I was hoping some stranger had just keeled over from a heart attack or an aneurysm or had tripped and broken his neck—anything was possible.

      “No, dear. By the time we came out to see what the ruckus was all about, the officer had already covered the body.”

      Scarlet asked the question I was dying to hear the answer to. “Was Bobby Ray already here?”

      “He was when we came outside,” said Jessie.

      “Nobody else?” I prayed there was someone else. Someone Daddy had cajoled into giving him the smoking gun. Someone he disarmed in hand-to-hand fisticuffs. Someone he’d taken out with his pocket knife a moment too late to save the person under the blanket . . . but then there’d be two bodies.

      “The Judge was with him and they were arguing,” Jessie explained.

      I winced. That was the last thing I wanted to hear.

      Daisy shook her head. “That’s my husband, always stirring up the women.”

      If I could find some humor in this whole mess, I’d think Daisy’s comment was funny . . . but I wasn’t laughing. I was worried my daddy was in over his head. If he and the Judge had been working together to save whoever was under the blanket, it would look better for my daddy—the Judge too.

      I grasped onto that. The two of them would never work together to kill someone, that much was certain. If my dad ended up being a suspect, that made the Judge just as big a suspect. Unless there was another witness. I gazed down the street lined with neighbors.

      “We should go talk to people,” I suggested to Scarlet.

      She pointed at the two men in wrinkled suits standing directly across the street from the crime scene. They were taking notes on identical steno pads as they spoke to the residents, one at each end of the front porch. “I think the detectives are doing that now.”

      “That’s them. This is us.”

      Jessie tried to stop my mission before it began. “Princess, I don’t think your daddy—”

      “Would

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