R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning Read Online Free PDF

cut in half so cleanly it was nearly surgical, meaning the murderer knew what he or she was doing. I wasn’t making any assumptions on this one. No fuck ups. No mistakes. That place inside me that wells up for the victim really went into overdrive. Shit, I actually felt like crying. I stared at the open, striking green eyes. That was it. She reminded me of Amber. The girlfriend I’d once been forced to kill in self-defense.
    I ached, and it wasn’t just the frigid air.
    I walked the small amphitheater setting. The Capitol Building was actually across the street but it was so large it felt like the naked victim’s halves were lying on the very steps of our state’s towering symbol.
    My bones continued to ache. Now it was the cold. Weather forecasters had the high temperature hovering in the low teens. The sun was out, which helped, but I had never been a fan of the cold months. Denver was a well-kept secret; we saw a lot of sixty-degree days in the middle of winter. Unfortunately we saw our share of days like this one. A dry cold. People joked about “dry heat”, which was silly to argue—the problem in Denver on a hot day was that we were a mile closer to the sun than most cities and we had over three-hundred and fifty sunny days a year. You wouldn’t think a mile in terms of a ball of heat ninety-two million miles away would be significant.
    It was. Denver sun on the skin made air temperature nearly completely moot. The feeling was easily twenty degrees hotter than the official “temperature”. The sun slipping behind a summer storm cloud instantaneously erased the extra twenty, just that fast.
    The sun in winter, however, was much lower in its elliptical, so it didn’t bring you that extra twenty when you could really use it.
     “Who called it in?” I said to Cindy.
    “Taxi driver. She saw the upper half first. Thought it was a homeless drunk in need of an assist. She phoned in an ambulance before she walked over. Good thing—they took her to Swedish for a psych eval.”
    “First respondents?”
    “Pair of uniforms from the First. Over there.” She motioned to a gaggle of police huddling to keep warm next to the barricade.
    I walked over and recognized one in the group right away.
    “Quaid,” I said, smiling.
    “Shit, Mac, never seen you out in the cold like this. Not since patrol anyway.”
    “Fuck you.”
    Olson Quaid smiled wide and grabbed my hand with his own. He was the supervising officer on scene. “Just bustin’ your balls. What’re left anyway, old man.”
    I was old. Fifty next month. Mornings like that I felt a hundred.
    Quaid owned a nice Beechcraft inboard. He had a cabin up at Grand Lake and spent every weekend trolling for Mackinaw. He’d held the state record for three years, pulling one just under fifty pounds in 2004. Then in 2007 another guy beat his catch trolling at the Blue Mesa Reservoir—it outweighed Quaid’s fish by only six ounces. I knew those half-dozen ounces were a sore, sore subject.
    “You still up on the lake summers?” I said. “Looking for those extra six?”
    “Speaking of ‘go fuck yourself’.” Quaid smiled. “Hell yes, I am. Been a few since you came up.”
     “I’ll take you up on it if that’s an official invite,” I said. “Pining away for the warmth of summer as we speak.”
    “It is. Bring the brood.”
    “You got it, pal.”
     “Guess you’re looking for the boys who got here first? This is Rico and Gibbs,” he said, pointing to two officers standing to his right.
    “Detective Bobby Macaulay, gents,” Quaid said. “He’s good shit.”
    “Detective,” the cop named Gibbs said. I nodded.
    “I know you,” said Rico. Not in that friendly way; more like, and screw you .
    “Officer Rico?” I said, a look of confusion shrouding my face. He did look vaguely familiar. Not from the job, though.
    “That’s right. Ned Burke was my T.O. and I used to bowl on the same team. He was my friend.”
    “Ned was a good man,” I