Free Touch of Evil by Colleen Thompson Page B

rattling cages. You get anything out of the Girl Who Cried Hate Crime?”
    Justine shot him a dark look. “Could you be any less politically correct?”
    Her father grinned. “You don’t really want to go there, do you?”
    Justine pinched the bridge of her nose.
    “Your head hurting?” he asked, as if he weren’t a leading contributor to the cause.
    “Yeah, it is.” She dropped into an empty chair and looked across her desk at him. She had to admit, the great Ed Truitt appeared a hell of a lot more at home than she ever had in Lou’s place.
    Lou’s place, but not hers. Not yet, not ever, really. Not considering the way she’d claimed it.
    Her father flipped shut the file, which exposed a stack of pink phone message slips and the row of yellow number two pencils she always kept there. The tips had all been snapped off, as they had on numerous occasions in the past weeks.
    Yet another expression of admiration from one of the deputies working the bullpen just outside the office door she always left unlocked.
    Her face heating, she itched to sharpen the damned things again, just to show she wasn’t going to be run off by petty bullshit.
    Her father saw her looking, shook his head. “Forget that, Chili Pepper, and let’s get this show on the road. Can we take this file with us? There are a couple of things here I want to ask you about.”
    Snatching up the messages, Justine riffled through them, finding the usual calls from the two main contenders trying to convince her that jail privatization was the way to go, along with another reminder from County Judge Ellis Major that she had better have that revised budget to him by Friday at the latest. If she gave in on the jail issue, she knew she could come up with the required cuts, but she remained determined to find some way that wouldn’t put a dozen of her people out of work. Especially after several employees had come to her on the eve of her election and given her so many good reasons to rethink her late husband’s plan.
    But right now, budget shortfalls, pushy bidders, and thecounty judge’s wrath would have to be bumped to the back burner. Behind three hanging deaths and her assault, though well ahead of broken pencils.
    Shoving the messages into her pocket, she told her dad, “Sure thing. I’ll make copies of all three files, and we’ll go over them, see if there’s anything my guys and I missed. And don’t let me forget my notebooks.”
    “So you’re still using my old system.” Her father sounded gratified.
    “Always steal from the best,” she said. “You taught me that one, too.”
    It took longer than she expected, tracking down the other files and wresting them from Savoy, who was racking up a lot of overtime this week, in spite of all her memos warning deputies about the budget. But finally she and her father were heading back to her place, discussing Noah’s recent fascination with digitally recording and collecting sound files. Though Justine had turned him on to the hobby, mostly in the hope of an eventual escape from his years-long fixation with crashing, clashing, and banging pots and pans, she felt the need to warn her father about her son’s new interest in sneaking about and capturing any unusual noises, including those that emanated from the human body.
    Her father laughed at that, then changed the subject. “I like the way you stepped up back there, in your office.”
    “What do you mean?” she asked.
    “The way you said we’d be looking for anything your men and you missed showed a willingness to take blame rather than trying to pin it on your men.”
    “You grab a share of the credit, you shoulder a share of the grief.” As the still-green border of her pasture came into view, Justine threw the old man another bone. “Couple of good lawmen taught me that much.”
    Behind the wheel, her father nodded. “Lou was a good sheriff. A decent man, too. I’ll admit that.”
    It was quite a concession coming from the father who