The Alibi Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

perpetrator.
    Landry was lead on the case. He would stay there and oversee every detail. And he would have to deal with the press, because the news crews, like bloodhounds, would have picked up on the scent of death by now and beat it out there.
    Still, I hurried back upstairs and replaced the bills. The copies I folded and tucked inside the waistband of my pants.
    The crunch of tires on the crushed-shell drive drew me to the window—the farrier come to replace a thrown shoe. The delivery truck from Gold Coast Feed rolled in behind him.
    The world kept turning. That fact always seemed cruel to me. There was no moment of silent respect for the dead, other than within the minds of those she left behind.

chapter 5
              “WHAT A fucking mess,” Landry muttered as he watched the ME’s people load the various pieces of the girl into a body bag. Everyone was sweating and swatting at flies. It had to be eighty-five degrees, with wet-blanket humidity. His hands were sweating inside the latex gloves he wore.
    A floater, a dump job, no crime scene, and Estes was involved.
    “Why was
she
here?” Weiss asked with an edge to his voice.
    “’Cause somebody dumped her here,” Landry said, purposely misconstruing the detective’s question. Weiss was a pain in the ass, always with the chip on his overly developed shoulder. The guy spent so much time in the gym his arms stuck out from his sides like he was a blow-up doll.
    “I meant Estes. What was
she
doing here?”
    “She found the body. Turns out the DB was someone she worked with.”
    “Yeah? How do we know she didn’t do it?”
    “Don’t be an ass.”
    “I don’t like her being around,” Weiss announced.
    “She didn’t ask to find someone she knows dead in a canal.”
    “She’ll be a problem.”
    Landry said nothing. Weiss was right. Elena would be a problem. She wouldn’t stand back and let the detectives do their job. She knew their job. She’d done it herself, and she’d been good at it. Irina was someone she’d worked with every day. She was going to take the girl’s murder personally. She was probably doing something she shouldn’t be doing on Irina’s behalf at that very minute.
    Frustrating, maddening, difficult, attitude up to here. It pissed him off no end that he wanted to be with her.
Had
wanted—past tense. That was over. Thank God they had been discreet. No one in the SO knew (at least not for a fact) they’d been seeing each other, therefore no one knew they’d split.
    “Did she call you?” Weiss asked. “You weren’t up. I was up. Why didn’t I get the call?”
    Landry rolled his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake. You have a bug up your ass because you didn’t catch this case? We got no murder scene, no evidence, no witness, no suspect, a dead body mutilated by an alligator. Say the word, Weiss. You can have this gem. And you can deal with Estes too. She’ll be so glad to cooperate with you, I’m sure.”
    “I don’t want it,” Weiss said. “I’m just saying. The call didn’t come through the channels.”
    “Well, you go tell the teacher on me,” Landry said sarcastically, as he went toward an evidence tech making a mold of the shoe print Elena had pointed out to him along the bank.
    “Why’d she call you?”
    Landry looked over at him. “What’s the matter with you? She called me because she knows me. If you found a friend of yours dead—assuming you have any—who would you call? You’d call someone you know. You wouldn’t take your chances on getting the first incompetent moron up on the board.”
    Weiss puffed up. “Are you calling me incompetent?”
    “I’m calling you a pain in the ass. Just shut up for once and get your mind on the job. Jesus, you act like some jealous woman.”
    The shoe print. Landry looked down at it. Maybe it belonged to their perp. Maybe it belonged to some redneck who dumped his used motor oil into the water a week ago. It didn’t tell them anything, didn’t give them