Free The Pink Flamingo Murders by Elaine Viets

standard doctor trappings. She drove a pickup and she had a big old used hound—his previous owners sent him back to the pound and she saved him from death row. Her one medical weakness was golf, but she refused to join a country club. Instead, she played on the public golf course at Forest Park, an old city park about the size of Liechtenstein. She was waiting by the clubhouse with her friend, Mitch, another doctor who worked on some research project at Washington University he wasn’t anxious to discuss. Mitch was a big gray-haired guy who didn’t say much, which was okay because Katie talked for two. Both wore jeans and golf shirts, instead of funny-colored outfits. Before I could say anything, they grabbed me and ran for the tee.
    “We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to tee off as a twosome,” said Katie. “This
never
happens on crowded public courses. We’ve got to get going before they change their minds and pair us with a couple of geeks. Mitch and I usually walk, but we’ll rent a cart for you.”
    “I’ll walk,” I said. “I can use the exercise.”
    “Good. We move quickly,” Katie said. “A round takes us about four hours for eighteen holes.”
    “Four hours! How do you stand the boredom?” I was never going to make four hours. The grass looked short and dry, and there were heat waves shimmering on the course. And this was a cool day.
    “You were never in med school,” she said. “Besides, I like golf. Mitch and I are relatively closely matched, but I’m the better driver.”
    “I thought you walked,” I said.
    “Drives,” she said. “As in long shots. He drives about two hundred yards and my good drives are two-twenty. We shoot between eighty-six and ninety-five. I’d rather play with old guys like Mitch, because they’re not intimidated by a good woman golfer.” The fifty-something Mitch acknowledged this with a snort. “The young guys get into arguments and accuse you of being a lesbian if you beat them, and want to bet for big money. We bet for beer.”
    She proceeded to explain a complicated betting game where the first time someone three-putt they were “holding the snake.” This sounded like something a lonesome teenage boy did, and the rules were too complicated for me to follow. I did figure out the loser bought beer for everybody.
    I never understood how people as interesting as Mitch and Katie could play something as dull as golf. I know Tiger Woods has made the game cool again, but before him the nation’s best known golfer was Dwight Eisenhower, which said it all for me. Forest Park was very crowded, so we waited on every shot, broiling in the sun like hot dogs. I wanted to set my buns down somewhere. I kept wishing I was in a cool booth at Uncle Bob’s. Not only was golfing dull, it was dangerous. While we stood around and talked, there was a
whump!
noise, and some fool lobbed a golf ball right in the middle of us.
    “He could have beaned us,” Katie said.
    Mitch looked disgusted. “All because he’s too impatientto wait for us to move,” he said. “Some idiot shot with people around. He should be banned from the course.”
    “I’ll fix him,” Katie said. She picked up the ball and wrote “Nice shot, asshole” on it with a Sharpie pen, then put it back down. “He can play it where it lays. I gave him a little souvenir.”
    I figured I better start asking about Otto and the other murder before one of us got killed in action. Or nonaction. I paced around while we waited, to make more of a moving target. “What’s this about two murders in two days? Didn’t Otto die of a heart attack?”
    “That’s what I first thought,” Katie said. “But then I saw the small, telltale marks of electrocution—a black hole in the palm and sole. That’s where the current entered and came out. The victim broke his arm and one leg falling off the ladder, but he was probably dead before he hit the ground because there are marks on his face. Live victims—at least the