Keegan 00 Soft Case Read Online Free PDF Page B

alibi. Still, I learned a long time before that nothing should be taken for granted. If you wait, you get burned. I wanted to talk to Mrs. Mullins as soon as possible. If I waited, lawyers might get involved. That sucked. They only complicated things. Even more so, the media. I need to get to her ASAP.
    “I’m not ruling out anyone. Maybe we should have a couple of uniforms go pick her up, and bring her down here. Tell her she has to see the body, then we question her.”
    “Maybe we should give her time to grieve. Get herself together.” Rick had learned to temper that excitement of his, I noticed. Strange for him.
    “Not too much time, trust me on that.”
    “Okay. We’ll try and get to her sometime today or tomorrow.”
    I fumbled with a few things on my desk, a sign for Rick to go back to his cave. He didn’t get the hint. He stood over my desk, like a teacher in class, looking at a kid’s work. I looked up at him, and glared at him, sort of, but he still didn’t get the message.
    “Why don’t you go see when Geiger will have the warrant?” I asked. Translation, shoo.
    He looked around the station. “Okay.”
    After he walked away, I leaned back in my seat. Our area of the station looked old, with dark paneling on the walls and a white tile floor that was so worn, the seams didn’t show anymore. I never really looked around the place much. Not much to look at. The detectives had six small desks gathered in the right comer of the room. I had the one on the far left. Rick had the one on the far right. By the entrance, sat four offices - well, more like cubicles. Geiger occupied one of them, the smallest, actually. He picked it because it was in the center of the room. He had four windows that almost reached the ceiling. From there, he could keep an eye on all of us. He did that a lot. He wasn’t a ball buster or anything. You could describe him as meticulous. I liked that in a superior. I did my job, submitted my paperwork on time, and didn’t spend idle hours on the department computer chatting with women on the Internet. I’m not pointing any fingers, saying that any of my co-workers did such a thing. Of course, they did, and I never saw the use. You can’t talk to someone you can’t see, or hear. These guys were trying to meet women, whether they wanted to admit that or not. Desperate, I say. There was no way to be sure that the people they were talking to were females in the first place. Other guys played a golf game, pretending that they were doing work. They turned the sound down, which basically took the fun out of the game. Guys actually gambled on the game. Sergeant Peters lost two hundred bucks last week. Two hundred bucks on a video game.
    No one was doing much at almost eight in the morning. Peters was in his office, probably staring at the computer across the room, thinking about his stupidity. He had a lot to think about. Peters was in his forties, had been on the force for about twenty years, and was damn close to burnout. From what I knew of him, which wasn’t a hell of a lot, he was a gambler, both with money and with his work. Geiger was always on his case, mainly because Peters always tried to find his way around the hard stuff, and never got his paperwork done on time. I worked two cases with him. One of them, a murder of a convenience store clerk, went so bad I feared we were headed for a demotion. He was rough with interrogation, pressing witnesses that were supposed to be on our side, and he never went by the book. I didn’t mind that so much, mainly because I rarely followed “the book.” Actually, I doubted the existence of such a manual. Everyone did things their own way. Peters just had a more creative way about doing it. A dangerously creative way. I always wondered how he’d made Sergeant. Rumor said it was because of his father, who was a Sergeant himself, and had died on the job back in the seventies. I didn’t put much value on that rumor, but, after getting to know a