You Know Who Killed Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

money.
    Operator: If you leave your name, I’ll have an officer get in touch with you.
    Caller: The billboard said I don’t have to give my name.
    Operator: Without a name, the church can’t make out the check.
    Caller: What’s wrong with “cash”?
    Operator: Would you like to speak to an officer?
    Caller: Let me think about it.
    The caller’s voice was female, no accent except maybe Midwestern. Her name was Carol Thompson. She was a neighbor of Ray Henty’s, ten blocks removed, on the other side of the boulevard that separated the little town from Iroquois Heights. Another possibility.
    This time I didn’t call. I had the cassette tape playing in the dashboard and only one bar showing on my Fisher-Price cell phone; a dropped call is the worst way to make a good first impression. I took the Chrysler Expressway from Jefferson and drove again through the quiet streets until I came to a ranch-style house with garage attached. Christmas lights were still attached to the roof, but they weren’t burning by daylight, and maybe not at all until next December. Some people leave them up all year.
    â€œMs. Thompson?” I asked the woman who answered the door. She wore red-and-black buffalo plaid over a pink T-shirt with SUPER BITCH lettered across it in blue letters. Black tights encased legs ending in red knuckles and thick yellow nails sticking out of open-toed mules. She was shaped like a witch’s cauldron inverted on top of a sawhorse. Her age was whatever you like.
    â€œMrs.,” she snapped. “Please go away. I keep telling you people I’m a Christian. I don’t witness.”
    â€œI’m not peddling The Watchtower, Mrs. Thompson.” I showed her the ID. “I’m a Michigan State Police–licensed private investigator, looking into the Donald Gates homicide.”
    A dim glimmer of brainpower showed in a pair of mud-colored eyes; disregarding everything I’d said between “State Police” and “Donald Gates.” It was all in the order of how you identified yourself. As the taxidermist said, I can give you an eagle or a duck using the same materials.
    â€œI don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    â€œYou indicated a coworker of Gates’s is responsible for his death. I have to run all these reports down, Mrs. Thompson.”
    â€œBut, how—?”
    â€œPeople gossip. May I come in? They’re recalling the company car because of a faulty heater. I’m frozen through and through.” A Big Wheel tricycle stood on the winter-killed grass of the lawn. I was counting on maternal instinct.
    â€œLet me see that card again. Roy don’t like me inviting in strangers.”
    I let her see it again. She lip-read it from top to bottom.
    â€œOkay, I guess. But just the front room.”
    The doorway led straight into a living room with a pea-green shag rug, a console TV and stereo with a converter box plopped on top, a Christmas-tree lamp next to a brown plush recliner, and a jumble of splashy paperback novels and Reader’s Digest s on a coffee table made of faux-medieval dark wood and antiqued brass rivets. If the TV were on, Sonny and Cher could sass each other and nobody would think it odd. The house smelled of Twinkies deep-fried in hog fat.
    â€œI don’t have much time,” she said. “I design Web sites, and people who want Web sites aren’t patient people.”
    A door stood open on what should have been a spare bedroom, where a flat-screen monitor displayed a bunch of information that meant as much to me as sushi in Switzerland.
    At her invitation I sat in the plush chair. It offered no resistance all the way down to the frame; I was already worrying about getting back up out of it. “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. What do you know about where Donald Gates worked?”
    She lowered herself into an upholstered rocker printed all over with deer made