Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

flashing as it sat on the side of the highway, a single bullet in the back of his head.
    In the days before dashboard cameras and in-car laptop computers, dispatchers last had contact with Trooper Robert Martz when he was initiating a 2 a.m. traffic stop on the state highway that then ran north and south through Jubilant Falls. He’d radioed in the plate on the car he was stopping, but either dispatch got the information wrong or the plate wasn’t on file. He also didn’t give a reason for the stop. When my father Walt Addison, the shift supervisor, found Martz’s body an hour later, there were only skidmarks dug into the road’s soft shoulder in front of the cruiser as his killer escaped into the night.
    I revisited the story periodically, mainly because of the family connections between Bob Martz’s family, my father and me.
    In my last story, his three children, now grown, were each photographed somberly holding a corner of a large sepia-toned family photograph from their childhood. The pull quote, printed in the white space above their heads was stark: “We’re still hoping for justice for Dad.”
    Martz’s widow and kids moved away from Jubilant Falls after the youngest graduated from high school. It was just too damned hard to stay in a town where their father had died and justice hadn’t been served. I’d stayed in touch until the last story, but had no idea where to find them now.
    Gary was right: reexamining the stories would bring phone calls to us and to the police. Folks always seemed to enjoy, in some perverse way, rehashing the gory details of past crimes. Somebody would call, asking a few questions—most of it not relevant to the story or asking salacious questions we would have no idea about.
    People , I thought to myself as Dennis handed me a proof of today’s front page.
    Who knows what might come up? Maybe some justice this time?
    *****
    At the staff meeting later that afternoon, I presented the idea to my reporters. I’d found copies of the stories in the morgue and passed them around at the meeting.
    “I just got a call from Gary McGinnis who said they were taking new looks at the cases and thought one of the stories might spark someone’s memory,” I said.
    “I’d love to look into these,” Charisma said. She didn’t look up as she perused the yellowing copy of the paper with Robert Martz’s murder screaming across the front page: TROOPER FOUND SHOT.
    “Chief G mentioned these to me this morning,” Graham said. “I told him I didn’t think I could do a whole lot right now until Gwennie starts sleeping through the night. Besides, I’ve got a couple trials coming up that will keep me pretty tied up for the next couple weeks.”
    “The Jessop trial?” Dennis asked, making notes. “The woman who is suing the county commissioners for unfair termination?”
    “Yes. I’ve also got that school bus driver picked up on DUI charges. If Charisma wants these cold cases, she can have at it. It won’t hurt my feelings at all,” Graham said.
    Marcus nodded in agreement. “Our son Andrew is coming home on leave from the air force pretty soon. My wife wants me to take some time off while he’s here.”
    Charisma looked up at me with a gleam in her eye, the first I’d seen since she’d started here.
    “These stories would help me learn about the town, maybe learn a little history…” Charisma practically begged to cover these stories.
    “Go for it,” I said. There was a knock on the door; my publisher Earlene Whitelaw poked her head into the office.
    “Hi ya’ll! You havin’ a staff meetin’?”
    My jaw clenched. Ever since Earlene had taken over the publisher’s chair from her father, J. Watterson Whitelaw, it had been a string of bad ideas born from a woman who had no concept of how to run a newspaper.
    In a time when newspaper readership was sinking like a rock and revenue harder and harder to come by, she’d increased the number of special sections advertising had to