The Alibi Man Read Online Free PDF

anything to go on. The only good it would do to have the cast would be once they had a suspect and could get a warrant to look in the guy’s closet.
    “Looks like a boot,” the evidence tech said without looking up. “A work boot. Round toe. Blundstones or something like that with a medium-deep tread.”
    “Are you doing the tire tracks?” Such as they were. A few ridges in the powdered shell along the other side of the canal. A stiff wind would blow them away.
    “Grant is on her way. She’s better with the fragile ones.”
    Landry jammed his hands at his waist and looked around. They had stretched the yellow tape across the road from his car to the bank. Behind the barrier was a bottleneck of white-and-green county cruisers, unmarked sedans, the ME’s van. News vans had rolled in to further choke off the only way in or out of this backwater shit hole.
    The reporters swooped in on a death scene almost as fast as the buzzards and were just as hungry and noisy. A corpse to feed on? Their favorite fodder. They didn’t get that many in the Wellington environs, though the statistic climbed a little each year. The area was growing fast. Construction was constant. And with the influx of people came an increase in every kind of problem, including crime.
    “The natives are getting restless,” Weiss said, nodding at the growing crowd.
    “Fuck ’em.”
    “Hey, Landry,” another of the detectives called from farther up the bank and back into the scrub. “Got something here. A purse.”
    The bag was small, cylindrical, gold encrusted with rhinestones. Landry snapped a photo of it with his digital camera. The crime-scene photographer took half a dozen shots from varying heights and angles. One of the crime-scene guys took measurements from the purse to where the body was found, and from the purse to the boot print.
    When the evidence marker went down to mark the spot, Landry picked the purse up and opened it. A cherry-red lip gloss, a compact, an American Express gold card, three twenties, two condoms.
    “Guess we can rule out robbery as a motive,” Weiss said, loudly enough to catch the attention of a reporter or two on the other side of the canal.
    Landry gave him a look. “Girls don’t get dumped in canals because they carry too much cash.”
    “I’m just saying.”
    Weiss was always just saying. The man never had a thought cross his mind that didn’t fall out of his mouth.
    “There’s no driver’s license,” Landry said. “No cell phone.”
    “Haitians have been stealing cell phones,” Weiss said. “They’ve got a racket going. My brother-in-law got a bill from Verizon that was twenty-seven pages long. Calls to Zimbabwe, the Ukraine, all over the world. The farthest he ever called was his mother in Astoria, Queens.
    “So maybe some Haitians followed her out of a club, grabbed her…”
    Landry tuned him out. Another couple of sentences and Weiss would be into his theory that Castro was behind the influx of criminal types from the islands to South Florida. Maybe he was, but Landry didn’t want to hear about it. He had to deal in the present, the here and now, the corpse du jour. The anti-crime unit could worry about Castro.
    He opened a little zippered compartment in the purse. Inside was a foreign-looking coin. The girl was Russian. It was probably something from the old country to bring her luck.
    The ME’s people came past with the body bag.
    So much for that theory.
    “All right,” he said on a sigh. “I’m going to go deal with these people and get it over with.”
    As he made his way to the other side of the canal, he dug in his pants pocket, came up with a couple of extra-strength Excedrin and choked them down without water, shuddering at the bitter taste left in his mouth.
    Like hogs at a trough, the reporters tried to muscle one another out of the way for the honor of being the first to stick a microphone at him.
    “Detective!”
    “Detective!”
    “Detective!”
    The pushiest was the