Mr. Kiss and Tell Read Online Free PDF

Courthouse in a torn white dress. Shaking from head to foot, she’d sat across from then-Sheriff Don Lamb and had told her story. How she’d gone to Shelly Pomroy’s party the night before. How she’d woken up in a strange bed without her underwear, aching and humiliated. How she couldn’t remember anything else.
    She could still recall with cinematic clarity the conversation in Lamb’s office. The way the sheriff leaned back in his chair, leering across the desk. Her struggle to stay composed as he repeated questions, trying to catch her in contradictions. Lamb’s voice, his tone of cold, unvarnished contempt:
I’ve got not a shred of evidence to work with here but that really doesn’t matter to your family, now does it?
    She looked down at the open file folder on her desk, the pictures of the girl’s ravaged and broken body on top. Someone had done this to her. And so far, he’d gotten away with it.
    “Okay,” Veronica said steadily, holding out her hand. “I’ll do my best to find out what happened to this girl.”
    Hickman’s soft, dry palm was in hers then, and they shook.
    “Excellent,” he said.

CHAPTER FIVE
    “So,” Cliff said, flopping an arm around Keith’s shoulder. “How you feeling, Papa Bear?”
    Cliff’s breath was hot and boozy on the side of Keith’s face as he broke the silence. A few feet away, Mac was standing next to Veronica’s door, trying to eavesdrop. Weevil stood at her side, also making periodic efforts to snoop but clearly finding more entertainment value in the Keith-Cliff conversation.
    Keith raised his eyebrows. “Papa Bear? Is this a new thing we’re doing, or only when you’ve had the better part of a bottle of Scotch?”
    “You know what I mean,” Cliff said. He glanced around the room as if waiting for someone else to chime in. “We all just saw that, right? Like a Mamet play. The new hotshot taking the tired old man’s accounts?” He took Keith’s glass out of his hand. “Scotch is for closers.”
    Keith smiled.
    “We took the training wheels off Veronica a long time ago. She’s had some high-profile cases and done brilliant work on them. I’m proud, not surprised.”
    Mac chose that moment to dive in. “Me too. And just getting it out there, I’m always totally up for supporting either of you guys, playing no favorites, regardless of which…”
    Veronica’s door suddenly opened and she emerged, speedwalking across the room and past the conversation group on her way to the reception desk.
    “…
Death Proof
—okay, whatever, pat yourself on the back,” Mac improvised as Veronica opened a desk drawer and retrieved a folder. “But nowhere else can you say my boy’s just ‘making movies about movies.’ It’s more like a, a—what’s that word?”
    “Motif,” Keith said.
    “Yes! Thank you. A
motif
running through his body of work,” Mac said, glancing up at Veronica, who’d paused by the sofa and was scanning the group with a baffled expression. “Oh hey, Veronica, just a little movie chat going on here.”
    “ ’kay. Sorry to interrupt.” Veronica threw them a final quizzical side-eye before hustling back into her office and closing the door behind her.
    Unflustered, Keith picked up the thread right where it had been dropped. He leaned back against the sofa and stretched his legs out in front of him. “Like I was saying: No, I don’t resent any of the attention or responsibility Veronica’s been getting. Frankly, she’s welcome to it. I’m ready for a few weeks in my hammock.”
    “Like an old busted mule, out to pasture,” Cliff said.
    “Or maybe,” Keith said, a slight edge to his voice, “like a guy who’s
literally
been run over by a truck after spending months crawling through the open sewers of Neptune politics—and is about ready for a goddamn vacation.”
    He’d spent much of the last few months trying to verify the claims of planted evidence that had sprung up during the nearly four years of Lamb’s term. It