Free The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries) by J. A. Jance

Katherine Melcher who was living in Las Vegas. Then you decided to go to Vegas for that writing convention. What’s it called again?”
    “Bouchercon.”
    “Yes, Bouchercon. At that point they must have thought they hit the jackpot because it all seemed to fall into place. At some point along the way your sweet little Marina made a copy of your car keys—the trunk key anyway. I checked the tapes. The week of October fifteenth, the week Katy Melcher died, Marina cleaned your apartment on Thursday rather than Friday. I’m pretty sure she and Jeffrey drove to Vegas together the next day to scope out the situation. I’m sure they used the old Twelfth Step ruse to lure Katy out of the house at that hour of the morning. According to Katy’s widower, she took late night calls from addicts trying to kick their drug and alcohol habits.”
    That was way more than I could get my head around. The idea of Faith or Katy or whoever she was going out on a late night mission of mercy and being murdered for it seemed utterly unlikely.
    “What about the threatening phone calls?” I asked.
    “They came on days when Marina Ochoa would have been working for you. They must have figured that would make your situation a slam dunk. Threatening calls come from the victim’s ex before she’s murdered? What could be better?”
    “What about the e-mail from Deeny?” I asked.
    “That’s apparently legit,” Charles said. “Because of the phone calls, Katy Melcher really was worried that you were coming after her.”
    “In other words, Marina and Jeffrey expected that the local cops would focus on me to the exclusion of anyone else.”
    “Exactly,” Charles Rickover agreed. “It might have gone just that way had it not been for Pop. Without him, you would have been a goner. Had you decided to forgo a public defender in favor of hiring your own defense attorney, you would have been forced to sell the Roundhouse to the first available buyer just to cover legal fees. You’d be amazed to know how much a top flight homicide defense team costs these days.”
    Evening was settling in. Across the street, lights switched on in various units as people came home from work or whatever it was they did during the day.
    “So what happens now?”
    “The two cops from Las Vegas . . .” he paused.
    “Detectives Jamison and Shandrow,” I supplied.
    “They may be a bit slow on the uptake, but they’re not stupid. Bright and early tomorrow morning, I expect Harold will point them in the right direction. It may take a few weeks to straighten all this up, but sooner or later your name will be cleared, as though nothing ever happened, and Jeffrey and Maria Fuentes will be up in Vegas facing first degree murder charges—both murder and conspiracy to commit. They’re the ones who are goners now.”
    Rickover reached down, turned the ignition, and the Corvette rumbled to life.
    “Where to?” he asked. “Back home?”
    “If you don’t mind, I’d like to stop off in Sun City on the way. I need to see Tim O’Malley and tell him thank-you.”
    “Great,” Charles said. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
    When Tim let us into his house that night, I shook his hand and said, “Thank you, Pop. It was the first time I ever called him that—the first but not the last.
    “How on earth did you find all those guys?” I asked. “Harold, Roger, Matt, and even old Charlie here.”
    Charles Rickover and I had been through enough together that I thought my calling him Charlie was . . . well . . . long overdue.
    Tim and Charlie both grinned. “You’ve heard of how cops used to be called the Thin Blue Line?” Tim asked.
    I nodded.
    “Our little group calls itself the Old Blue Line,” Tim said. “Some of us are thinner than we ought to be and others are wider, but when one or the other of us has a problem and runs up the flag, we all come on the double.”
    “Thank you,” I said again. “More than you know.”
    Pop served us iced tea and