Between the Living and the Dead Read Online Free PDF

from some guy at a flea market.”
    â€œA burner,” Ruth said.
    â€œA burner?”
    â€œThat’s what we streetwise cops call prepaid phones. Burners.”
    â€œYou might have been hanging around Buddy too long,” Rhodes said. “He’s the one who likes cop talk.”
    â€œJust trying to clue you in.”
    â€œI’ll try to remember the term,” Rhodes said.
    â€œThey don’t really burn them,” Ruth said.
    â€œI know. They just buy a dozen or so and throw one away every couple of weeks.”
    â€œRight. So it’s like they burn them. I guess. You can even buy burner phone numbers now. Before long cell phones won’t be much use for catching crooks.”
    â€œNot unless we stay smarter than they are,” Rhodes said. “Look around. Foshee must have had a weapon, too.”
    They looked but couldn’t find anything else.
    â€œKiller probably took it with him,” Ruth said.
    â€œProbably,” Rhodes said. “We’d better call in the EMTs.”
    Ruth went to tell them they could come in and get the body. Rhodes heard her warning them to be careful of touching anything, but he thought it was probably unnecessary. The room looked to be clean of any clues. He’d have someone go over it carefully in daylight, but he wasn’t expecting to find anything. If there had been any bullet casings, they’d have seen them already. The killer had used a revolver, or he’d picked up the brass. Maybe the trash in the kitchen would provide some clues, but Rhodes knew even that was unlikely. They’d never find the prepaid phone, either. The burner. It would be at the bottom of a creek by now or smashed up with a hammer and thrown in a trash pile.
    If life were fair, Neil Foshee would’ve written a dying message in his own blood on the dirty floor of the sitting room and made things easy for them, unless the message was like the ones in books and movies and too cryptic to be figured out by anybody but some genius private investigator. Blacklin County lacked genius private investigators, and for that matter it lacked private investigators of any kind. Rhodes considered that a good thing.
    Neil Foshee might have looked at it another way. He might have thought that if life were fair, nobody would have shot him, but considering his life choices up to this point, it was almost inevitable that he’d come to a bad end, like Vincent Price in Cry of the Banshee.
    The EMTs came in, laughing at some joke or other one of them had told. Death didn’t bother them. They’d seen too much of it. Auto accidents, heart attacks, bad falls, lots more. To them Foshee was just another body.
    Rhodes wondered if there was anyone to mourn Foshee. Maybe his former girlfriend Vicki Patton would, but Rhodes didn’t think she’d have any reason to. Foshee had thrown her out of his pickup at a roadside park, leaving her without any clothes or even her purse. She’d been the one who’d helped Rhodes find the meth house where Foshee and his cousins were cooking up a batch of chemical mischief, and Rhodes hoped she hadn’t seen him since then. He’d have to ask Ivy about it. Ivy had become friends with Vicki after Rhodes had introduced them. It had been an awkward introduction, since Vicki had been wearing nothing more than a raincoat at the time. Rhodes grinned at the memory. It wasn’t often that he got to take a naked woman home with him and surprise his wife.
    Foshee wouldn’t be doing any grinning, not anymore. The EMTs loaded him into a body bag and hauled him out. That was the end of the story for him.
    Except it wasn’t, not really. His death would affect other people, and somebody would have to pay for it. Rhodes didn’t know who or how, but he knew that the story of a death like Foshee’s didn’t end when the body bag was zipped up.
    â€œIt’s kind of creepy, isn’t it,” Ruth said when