LITMIR.BIZ

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ways, and it had a growing drug problem and overworked police department to prove it. Now it also had the murder of Grand Springs’s mayor, Olivia Stuart, making the pressure even more intense.

      Jack planted his feet on the floor and summoned a last deep breath. He was tired—he often worked until ten at night, then brought work home with him—but it didn’t show. He’d already smoothed his face into the bland, capable expression cops wore for outsiders. He’d learned a lot about how to handle politicians over the years.

      Stone, who prided himself on irreverence, leaned back and propped up his feet on his desk in a deliberately casual pose.

      “Don’t antagonize him,” Jack ordered under his breath as Hal entered the main room. “It just encourages him to talk more.”

      “But baiting him is the only sport I get around here.”

      “It’s not a sport—to be a sport, it would have to be a challenge.”

      Stone was still chuckling softly when Hal planted himself in front of their desks. The acting mayor’s soft features were already screwed into a scowl. His blond hair, normally carefully smoothed back, looked mussed, and his tailored suit was uncharacteristically disarrayed. Someone, Jack thought, must be making the acting mayor actually work. Judging by the look on his face, he wasn’t happy about it, either.

      “Howdy, Hal,” Stone sang out. “Nice of you to drop on by. Did you bring us poor slaving public servants any lunch?”

      Hal’s frown grew, the look in his eyes uncertain. He crossed his arms over his chest and adopted a firm expression.

      “No. Look, I’m a very busy man, so let’s make this quick—”

      “Of course,” Stone said politely. Jack hid his wince behind a small cough. When Hal said “let’s make this quick” it meant it was going to be long.

      “I’ve given you three months!” Hal announced. “In the beginning, everything was upside down from the power outage, I understood that. Then there were the immediate needs of restoring order and policing the streets after the ensuing accidents and incidents. But it’s late September now. The other situations are in the past, and I want to know—why isn’t my mother’s case being given top priority?”

      “It is,” Jack said. He didn’t need a lecture on his job. He already knew that the chances of solving a three-and-a-half-month-old murder case were slim. It ate away at him every night as he pored over old case notes, wondering why they couldn’t connect the dots.

      “Then, you have new leads to report?”

      “No,” Stone said. “But we’ve processed forty-six people for vandalism and theft, fifteen men for drunken and disorderly conduct, and six people for brawling. Plus, we’ve worked on finding your vanished bride as well as the mother who abandoned her baby at the hospital, and then your sister, Eve, and her daughter, Molly, when they were kidnapped. We’ve also worked on discovering the true identity of Martin Smith, evacuating people from unstable areas and delivering supplies to people cut off by the mud slides. Oh, and I foiled a bank robbery. A pretty slow summer here in Grand Springs, wouldn’t you say, Stryker?”

      “We’re giving the investigation everything we can,” Jack translated for Hal. He gave Stone a meaningful look that his partner ignored.

      “Didn’t Randi give you a name? What more do you require?” Randi Howell was Hal’s former fiancée. She’d fled on their wedding day due to her own misgivings…and two thugs who had caught her eavesdropping on their conversation.

      “Randi reported that she overhead one of the men say, ‘Jo will take care of the broad—it’s her specialty.’ The statement’s too vague,” Jack said matter-of-factly. “We can’t be sure they were talking about Olivia. We can’t even be sure ‘take care of the broad’ means murder. And we have no idea who ‘Jo’ is.”

      “As far as we know, Jo could be an acupuncture specialist,” Stone volunteered. “We can’t arrest everyone named Jo based on a statement like that.”

      Hal’s face reddened. He turned on Stone. “And your friend the psychic woman, doesn’t she know anything else? Or is she talking to Elvis instead these days?”

      Jack placed his hand on Stone’s arm to keep him sitting. As Hal well knew, Jessica Hanson was a little more than Stone’s friend. She was now his wife. And she wasn’t exactly a psychic. The visions she’d experienced after hitting her head during the blackout in June had stopped, and no one was certain why they had happened or what they had meant.

      For a bit, however, Jessica had been plagued by the image of a tall, blond woman stabbing a hypodermic needle into Olivia’s leg. These “visions” were always followed by the scent of gardenias.

      Hal had been informed of all this. He had also been told that someone had sent a bowl of gardenias as a funeral bouquet to Olivia Stuart’s house. The flowers hadn’t included a card and Eve Stuart, Hal’s sister, could only vaguely recall an elegantly dressed blonde standing in the doorway with the bowl. Stone had tested the bowl for fingerprints. Nothing.

      Jack said now, “As you know, Hal, we followed up on Jessica’s ‘visions.’ Stone had the doctors examine the body, and the autopsy confirmed that Olivia had been injected with a dose of pure potassium, leading to immediate cardiac arrest. That’s all Jessica saw and it’s been noted.”

      “You can’t trace the poison?”

      “No.”

      “Why not? I thought you had computers for that sort of thing. Labs? What the hell is our budget paying for these days, anyway?”

      Jack grew tired. They’d had this conversation before. Nothing had changed. For a moment, Jack contemplated telling the man they’d get a lot further a lot faster if he’d shut up and leave them alone. Of course, he said no such thing. “Straight Arrow Stryker” never lost control.

      “Pure potassium is readily accessible,” he intoned quietly. “All hospitals commonly administer it in a diluted form to patients recovering from surgery. According to the doctors, it’s available at all nursing stations in a hospital, and the nursing stations are unlocked and unmonitored.

      “We interviewed all the hospital staff, and no one remembers noticing any potassium missing. Of course, the potassium may have come from an outside hospital. It might have been ordered directly from a medical supply store. At this point, there’s no way to know.”

      “You can’t tell a brand or a batch or something like that?”

      “If we had a bottle or label, maybe we could. If we had a needle, we could trace the parts, the manufacturer, maybe get prints or DNA. But we don’t. We just have a victim with a potassium level over ten mils per liter. We have a crime scene with no signs of a forced entry. There are no latent or patent prints. We have no hair, no fiber. At this point, the most likely suspect is Casper the Friendly Ghost.” Jack’s voice ended with an edge. He and Stone had the highest arrest record in Grand Springs, dammit. They were good, they were serious, they were committed. So how could they not determine who murdered such a fine woman as Olivia Stuart?

      “But…but…” Hal was struggling now. Jack couldn’t tell if it was from honest emotion or just frustration. Hal wasn’t a particularly strong man, but he was hard to read. He said abruptly, “What about my mother’s last word?”

      “Coal?” Stone shrugged. “To tell you the truth, we’re just not sure. My personal theory is that she was talking about the strip mining debates. She was really against strip mining in Grand Springs, just like you’re really for it….”

      Hal stiffened. Now his face was definitely shuttered. He’d been taking some heat on the subject, particularly from Rio Redtree, top investigative reporter for the Grand Springs Herald. “I sold my stock in the companies. And I’ve asked Josie to look into both the advantages and disadvantages of permitting strip mining in Grand Springs. I’m a fair man.” He paused, his eyes narrowing. “Do…do you think one of those

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