Alicia Scott - Partners In Crime

“Mom? Mom? Mommy!”

Twist.

“Olivia! Dear God, Olivia!”

Her friend was motionless on the floor and the scent of gardenias was cloying and thick.

Josie fell to her knees, shaking her best friend’s shoulders. Olivia didn’t move.

Dear God, Josie couldn’t find a pulse.

“Don’t die on me,” she whispered. “Please, please, don’t die on me. You’re the only person I’ve trusted. The only person who’s believed in me. Olivia…”

Twist.

The feel of the old hardwood floors against her tender knees. The scent of the lemon beeswax her mother used to polish what life she could into the old floors. Little Josie touched her mother’s beautiful gold hair and felt the chill on her cooling skin.

Keening, sobbing, crying. Rocking back and forth, not knowing what to do. Her mom looked so beautiful, her golden hair pooled around her, her white cotton dress draped around her twisted limbs. Her blue eyes, so much like Josie’s, were open. But they stared sightlessly at the ceiling, and would never blink again.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Twist.

“Think, Josie, think—911. Call 911!”

She grabbed the cordless phone from the kitchen counter. No dial tone. The power outage had rendered it useless. She threw it across the room. Another bolt of lightning seared the kitchen. She spotted Olivia’s purse on the kitchen table. The cell phone.

Josie grabbed the purse. She pawed through it then turned it over and dumped out the smart phone. Dial, dial, dial.

“Please, I need an ambulance. I think she’s dead.”

The dispatcher asked questions. Josie fumbled through answers. She checked for noticeable injuries. She began to administer CPR. She hunched over her best friend’s body, massaged her chest and tried to will the life back into her.

Live, live, live.

Sirens cut through the roaring night. Then the jangle of EMTs sounded down the sidewalk. Dimly, she heard herself cry, “In here, in here. Breathe, Olivia! Damn you, breathe!”

The EMTs rushed into the kitchen. They pushed her aside, then hunched over Olivia, muttering to each other, continuing with CPR.

“Let’s move.”

Suddenly they had Olivia strapped to the stretcher. They were rolling away, back into the horrible night. Josie wanted to go in the ambulance. She wanted to hold Olivia’s hand and beg her to live.

The EMTs left Josie behind. She stood in the rain, watching the ambulance disappear, reaching out her hands. The storm continued. She didn’t notice it anymore.

Live. Live. Live.

Twist.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

* * *

Josie jerked awake at her desk. She rubbed her temples furiously, then scrubbed at the moisture now staining her cheeks. It didn’t help. The images remained behind her eyelids, the past and present too intertwined to be separated.

And all the work in the world, all the nightmares in the world, didn’t change the outcome of either night.

Olivia had died at the hospital. A heart attack was the initial ruling. But days later, Detective Stone Richardson raised some questions, and further investigation revealed that she’d been poisoned—someone had thrust a hypodermic full of undiluted potassium into her leg, causing nearly instant cardiac arrest.

Olivia had been murdered, and nothing in Grand Springs had been the same.

Death. Pain. Betrayal.

I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it, Josie reminded herself. Sitting alone in her shadowed office, however, she still couldn’t escape her next thought.

Not this time.

September 22

“Uh-oh. Here comes trouble.”

“Hmm?” Detective Jack Stryker lifted his scrunched eyes from the coroner’s report and belatedly followed his partner’s gaze. “Damn.”

“Just what we need,” Detective Stone Richardson agreed, “like a hound dog needs a flea.”

“At least fleas don’t campaign for your vote—they know they’re a nuisance.” Jack sighed. He tucked the coroner’s report back into the Olivia Stuart file with a last glance of frustration and longing. The answers were in there somewhere, he just knew it. He’d missed something the first time around, made a mistake. He didn’t screw up often, but he must have this time, because it had been more than three months and they still had no leads on the Olivia Stuart case.

And now Hal Stuart, acting mayor of Grand Springs and one of the most annoying men God had ever created, had entered the police station. He wove through the corridor like a tin soldier, his arms held tightly against his double-breasted suit as if he didn’t want to touch anything—the dirt might rub off.

Hal Stuart didn’t come to the police station often—Jack figured it was too long on chaos and too short on decoration for his taste. The plain corridor poured into the main room, comprised of a beat-up wood floor, numerous metal desks and one wall of windows. In the corner, the lone office belonged to Frank Sanderson, the chief of police. It was as bare bones and worn as the rest of the place. As Sanderson had informed Hal during his last visit, he had better things to do than pick out wallpaper.

Grand Springs was becoming a big city in many ways, and it had a growing drug problem and overworked police department to prove it. Now it also had the murder of Grand Springs’s mayor, Olivia Stuart, making the pressure even more intense.

Jack planted his feet on the floor and summoned a last deep breath. He was tired—he often worked until ten at night, then brought work home with him—but it didn’t show. He’d already smoothed his face into the bland, capable expression cops wore for outsiders. He’d learned a lot about how to handle politicians over the years.

Stone, who prided himself on irreverence, leaned back and propped up his feet on his desk in a deliberately casual pose.

“Don’t antagonize him,” Jack ordered under his breath as Hal entered the main room. “It just encourages him to talk more.”

“But baiting him is the only sport I get around here.”

“It’s not a sport—to be a sport, it would have to be a challenge.”

Stone was still chuckling softly when Hal planted himself in front of their desks. The acting mayor’s soft features were already screwed into a scowl. His blond hair, normally carefully smoothed back, looked mussed, and his tailored suit was uncharacteristically disarrayed. Someone, Jack thought, must be making the acting mayor actually work. Judging by the look on his face, he wasn’t happy about it, either.

“Howdy, Hal,” Stone sang out. “Nice of you to drop on by. Did you bring us poor slaving public servants any lunch?”

Hal’s frown grew, the look in his eyes uncertain. He crossed his arms over his chest and adopted a firm expression.

“No. Look, I’m a very busy man, so let’s make this quick—”

“Of course,” Stone said politely. Jack hid his wince behind a small cough. When Hal said “let’s make this quick” it meant it was going to be long.

“I’ve given you three months!” Hal announced. “In the beginning, everything was upside down from the power outage, I understood that. Then there were the immediate needs of restoring order and policing the streets after the ensuing accidents and incidents. But it’s late September now. The other situations are in the past, and I want to know—why isn’t my mother’s case being given top priority?”

“It is,” Jack said. He didn’t need a lecture on his job. He already knew that the chances of solving a three-and-a-half-month-old murder case were slim. It ate away at him every night as he pored over old case notes, wondering why they couldn’t connect the dots.

“Then, you have new leads to report?”