Free Bootlegger’s Daughter by Margaret Maron

he couldn’t make out the woman because she was turned toward the man beside her, but her back was pressed against the window and he saw her shiny red coat.”
    Scotty twirled his straw between his fingers. It was clear plastic and coated with dull red tomato juice. “That little detail would have made us take him more seriously. Wonder why he left it out when we talked with him?”
    “Did he?”
    “This is the first time I’ve heard it.”
    “What about when you reworked the case?”
    “We didn’t get a chance. We’d just started when he dropped dead.”
    I’d been living with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash in Dobbs by then and had forgotten-if I’d even noticed-that the two things occurred simultaneously. After all, Howard Grimes wasn’t someone important to me, and the SBI had kept their heads down so low when they returned to Cotton Grove seven years ago that I’d barely been aware they were there before they were gone again, leaving some uneasy talk that soon faded. Still, for Howard to have died so abruptly?
    I stared at Scotty and he gave an ironic grin. “Yeah, but we had him autopsied and it really was his heart. His doctor said he’d had a bad one for years. Just our luck it picked that week to give out on him. Wish I’d heard about the red raincoat, though. We might have leaned on him a little harder the first go-round instead of thinking he was just the town busybody.”
    “He was that, too,” I said and nodded to the waitress who’d come over to refill my coffee cup.
    She glanced inquiringly at Scotty’s empty glass, but he shook his head. “I’ll have a cup of brewed decaf if you’ve got it.”
    As she snaked her way back through the TGIF crowd gathered noisily around the bar for happy hour, he said, “Except for Janie’s parents, nobody had much of an alibi. You know that?”
    “Yes. Gayle brought over a box of newspaper clippings yesterday and I spent last night going over them.”
    The beagle look was still there. “Law school makes a difference, doesn’t it?”
    It did. I’d found myself studying bland and equivocal statements with a jaundiced eye, wishing whoever’d reported the stories for the county papers had been less solicitous of family feelings and had asked harder questions. The News and Observer and the now defunct Raleigh Times had both covered Janie’s death once she’d been found; but even though her murder had made a brief sensation, they’d merely rehashed what was already known.
    Janie and Gayle had vanished on a Wednesday. By Thursday morning, when her car reappeared, some five hundred people were out actively looking for them: rescue squads, a local unit of the National Guard, town and county police, state troopers, and at least four aircraft, including the traffic helicopter from one of the Raleigh TV stations.
    “That’s when we got into it,” said Scotty. He thanked the waitress as she set coffee before him, then briefly encapsulated their investigation.
    “We coordinated the search but there were a lot of loose cannons rolling through Cotton Grove that week. Later, when we tried to chart everyone’s movements from Wednesday noon through Friday midnight, it was like documenting an anthill.”
    “And Friday night was when she was actually killed,” I murmured, taking a deep swallow of coffee.
    “Friday night was when she actually died,” he corrected, shaking out the pink paper packet of artificial sweetener.
    “We didn’t publicize it, but after the autopsy report came back that she’d been dead considerably less than twenty-four hours by the time we found her, we took a closer look. No marks on her hands or wrists, yet the baby hadn’t been fed or changed.”
    He waited for me to make the connections.
    “She hadn’t fought or been tied up, so why hadn’t she taken care of Gayle?”
    He nodded. “Page Hudson was still ME back then. He put it in medical terms, but what it boiled down to was that she’d sustained a really bad head wound-probably