Free All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming Page A

could have told without further search. No one after easily shopped swag would have passed up those rings. He paused for a moment, trying to exorcise the ghost sitting at the vanity, examining her skin, dipping her fingers into the expensive little pots littering the mahogany surface. What else would thieves possibly take?
    His gun safe was usually in his closet, but he had taken it to his mother’s when he left. Linda’s passport? No, it was still in her bedside drawer—always within reach for a quick getaway, she used to joke.
    Lyle came out of the connecting bathroom. “It doesn’t look like anything’s been touched in here,” he said. “Did she have any prescriptions that might have tempted somebody?”
    “Not unless estrogen’s suddenly become a black-market commodity.”
    Lyle’s mouth quirked upward, and Russ found himself half-smiling, thinking of Linda cracking jokes about hot flashes, and in the next instant his eyes filled with a rush of tears and he had to turn away, fumbling for the doorknob. “Better get to the rest of the house,” he said, when he could make his throat work again.
    He knew before they went downstairs that nothing would be missing, and he was right. The stereo, the DVD player, the silver collection she had amassed over the years—all of it was there. He and Lyle were headed for the small office off the parlor, where Linda paid the bills and managed her paperwork, when Kevin Flynn poked his head in from the living room. “Chief?” he said tentatively. “I’m sorry to disturb you…”
    “What is it, Kevin?”
    “It’s just—where did Mrs. Van Alstyne keep her purse?”
    “Her purse?”
    “I was going over the barn, and looking into her station wagon, and it made me think about my mom, who likes to keep her keys in the ignition in her car, so when I came back into the house I was sort of looking to see if you had some of those hooks for keys like folks sometimes have, you know, in the kitchen or the mudroom, except you don’t, so then I got to thinking where do ladies keep their keys if they aren’t in the car or on a hook and I figured their purses. Right?”
    Russ didn’t want to contemplate the amount of lung power it took for Flynn to get that sentence out. One of the advantages of being twenty-three. “Mrs. Van Alstyne hangs her purse on one of the coat hooks on the mudroom wall, Kevin. It probably has a coat tossed over it.”
    “No, sir, I thought of that. There aren’t any purses on those hooks. I checked.”
    Russ was through the living room, across the kitchen, and in the mudroom before he remembered to be afraid of the room in which Linda had died. He tossed the barn coats and parkas and rain slickers on the floor, one after another, until they blocked the door to the summer kitchen and the old-fashioned iron hooks gleamed dully in the morning sun streaming through the diamond-shaped window in the mudroom door.
    There was no purse.
    He swung toward Lyle. “AllBanc,” he said.
    “I’m on it,” Lyle said, fishing in his jacket for his cell phone.
    Russ headed back through the kitchen, all his dread evaporated in the heat of a possible lead. “I’ll get you the account numbers,” he shouted over his shoulder.
    “You think the perp might have taken her bag?”
    Kevin’s voice surprised him. He hadn’t noticed the kid tagging along in his wake.
    “Yeah,” he said. He wanted to scream,
Why didn’t you notice this last night, you idiots
?! but he knew recriminations wouldn’t get him results. He opened the door leading from the kitchen into Linda’s office. Two file towers flanked her desk, one for home and one for her business. He yanked open the top drawer of the home file. He might as well use this as a lesson for Flynn. “The perp leaves behind fenceables but takes the purse. What does that tell you?”
    “He’s an amateur,” Kevin said promptly. “An opportunist. He doesn’t know anyone he can palm stolen goods off on, but he can use