Free Skin Privilege by Karin Slaughter Page A

coming?’
    ‘Nope. Thought it’d be best to let her sit and stew for a while.’
    Jeffrey tried to put himself in the other man’s shoes, to look at the case from all angles. ‘Do you have an ID on the corpse?’
    ‘The car was too hot to tow off the field until this afternoon.’
    ‘Has your coroner seen this kind of thing before?’ Jeffrey asked. The burned corpse was crucial; the body was the only thing that might offer an explanation of what had happened on that football field. In Georgia, the job of county medical examiner was an elected position usually held by the local funeral director or anyone else who wasn’t afraid to touch a dead body. The fact that Sara, a medical doctor, had taken the job in Grant County was very rare. There was no telling who the local body handler was.
    Valentine offered, ‘Fred Bart’s a good man. He’ll let me know anything he finds. I gotta say he wasn’t too optimistic. Body like that – it’s hard to even say whether it’s a man or a woman, let alone how they; died.’ He shrugged, gave a goofy smile. ‘What am I saying? I’m sure you know how this works.’
    Valentine hadn’t exactly answered the question. Jeffrey tried to tread lightly as he fished for Bart’s qualifications. ‘Sara’s the coroner back home. She’s a pediatrician, too.’
    ‘Oh.’ Valentine shifted away from the shelves, flashed a smile at Sara. ‘That’s nice. My wife’s a schoolteacher. All she does is correct my grammar and tell me to sit up straight.’
    Jeffrey had more questions, but something told, him Valentine wouldn’t answer them. ‘What made you call me?’
    ‘Common sense,’ Valentine answered. He had seemed ready to leave it at that, but then he added, ‘I’ll be straight with you, Chief. Your detective’s just a little thing. Doesn’t seem like she’d hurt a fly. I can’t see her doing this. There’s gotta be something more to the story. I figured if I couldn’t get it out of her, maybe you could.’ He paused. ‘At the very least, you can save us a lot of time and money if you’d find out who’s in that car.’
    Jeffrey doubted he would prove to be any help, but he said, ‘All right. Let me see her.’
    Again, Valentine let Jeffrey and Sara go first. Sadly, Jeffrey guessed this was more because the younger man’s parents had always told him to respect his elders than out of any deference to rank.
    As they walked toward Lena ‘s room, Jeffrey tried to process what the sheriff had just told them. The facts were simple. Lena had been found at a crime scene where a car was torched and a body was burned beyond recognition. Why was she on the football field? What connection did she have to the dead person? Who had caused the explosion?
    He heard Sara’s earlier question echo in his mind: What has she done now?
    Despite Valentine’s newness to the job, Jeffrey could not fault the man on the arrest. Based on the circumstances, Jeffrey would’ve arrested Lena, too. She was an obvious suspect, and her silence wasn’t helping matters. Not that Lena had ever fostered a reputation for being helpful.
    He could still remember the first time he’d seen her. She was in the police academy gymnasium, hanging halfway up the climbing rope, determined to make it to the top even though she was sweating so hard that her hands could barely keep their grip. No one else was around – this was something Lena was doing on her own time – and Jeffrey had watched her trying and failing to reach the top of the rope for nearly half an hour before he went to the commandant’s office and asked for her file.
    The mayors of the three cities that comprised Grant County had brought in Jeffrey as police chief to shake things up, to help force the department into the twenty-first century. Lena was the first non-secretarial woman hire in the town’s history. Jeffrey had pinned everything on her, determined he had made the right choice even when sometimes the facts said otherwise. When Frank