Free Murder Grins and Bears It by Deb Baker Page A

Pull over,” I said when he
finally turned off. “He’s gone now.”
    I felt the truck’s acceleration. Cora Mae
and I clutched the dashboard and both of us stomped on an imaginary
break.
    “ No, he’s not,” Kitty said.
“I just caught a glimpse of him and you know how duplicitous he can
be.”
    “ He can’t be back there, or
he’d have pulled you over by now for speeding and reckless
endangerment of innocent passengers. Enough of this
rigamarole.”
    Rigamarole was the biggest word I could come up with to
counter Kitty’s duplicitous , considering the kind of
pressure I was under.
    Kitty made a right turn on two wheels.
    “ Holy cripes,” Cora Mae
said, which is the closest she ever comes to swearing.
    I pulled my stun gun out of my purse and
threatened to use it on Kitty.
    “ You wouldn’t,” she
said.
    “ Try me,” I said, turning
it on.
    And that’s how I got my truck back.

    ****

    I drove down the bluff, around the outskirts
of Gladstone, past the train station, along Lake Michigan, and
crossed the bridge over the Escanaba River as it flows into
Escanaba.
    Kitty guided me through the big-city traffic
and pointed out a parking space across from St. Francis Hospital on
Ludington Street.
    “ I’m waiting in the truck,”
Cora Mae announced. “This is too creepy for me.”
    “ No way,” I said. “An
investigator can’t wait it out in the car anytime things get
messy.”
    “ I can’t do it,” Cora Mae
insisted.
    “ You go on ahead, Kitty.
We’ll be right behind you.”
    “ Don’t take too long,”
Kitty called. “You have all the questions in your little
notebook.”
    Kitty had already tracked down her source by
the time Cora Mae worked up the courage to enter the building.
    “ Johnny here is going to
help us,” she said, pointing at a thin, hairless man holding a
broom. The janitor. Just great. I needed a medical analysis on two
dead bodies and Kitty gets a janitor to help us.
    “ Hey, Kit,” he said with a
big smile. “Come on back.”
    We followed him down a long, narrow hallway,
rode the elevator to the basement, and turned into a room that
smelled of disinfectants.
    “ Want to see the bodies?”
One eye winked at Kitty.
    She looked at me. I wondered if the bodies
were naked and had been stitched up after the autopsies or if their
insides were in a bag somewhere leaving body cavities exposed.
    I shook my head, clutching Cora Mae’s arm so
she couldn’t escape. “That won’t be necessary. Just tell us what
the medical examiner learned.”
    “ Well,” he leaned closer in
a conspiratorial gesture, the fluorescent lights of the morgue
reflecting off his scalp. “One had his head blown off and the other
one’s lungs were punctured by arrows.”
    I looked at the janitor. “We already know
that.”
    “ Well that’s the whole
thing then,” he said, slapping his hands together. “I can’t tell
you anymore.”
    I glared at Kitty. I could be searching the
woods for Little Donny instead of wasting my time here.
    “ Might be something you
could use in his belongings,” he said, watching Kitty.
    Now you’re talking, I thought.
    “ But I could get in a whole
lot of trouble. If you know what I mean.”
    Kitty, pin-curls and all, weighing three
times more than Johnny, licked her lips. “I’ll make it worth your
while.”
    Cora Mae and I slipped to the other side of
the room while negotiations continued between Kitty and Johnny. A
few minutes later, Kitty waved us over.
    I already knew what Billy Lundberg had with
him because Cora Mae and I had searched his pockets in the woods.
So I went right to the warden’s bag, and I pulled out his clothes
and shoes and glanced at the items that had been removed from his
pockets. Nothing unusual.
    I picked up his shoes and turned them over.
Noticing a small downy feather imbedded in the deep crevices of one
of the soles, I carefully pulled it out.
    “ A baby bird feather,”
Kitty whispered in case I didn’t know what it was.
    Kitty’s