Free The Associate by Phillip Margolin

secretly grateful not to have to view the body.
    Kate walked slowly toward the room she had seen through the window and stood in the doorway. Part of the roof had collapsed and a ray of fading sunlight illuminated a section of the room. Charred wooden beams had crushed a table and what had once been a video monitor. Near the monitor was a rack of plastic test tubes that had been melted by intense heat.
    Kate edged around a burn-scarred desk that was tipped on its side. She noticed another roof beam resting on the top of two filing cabinets whose drawers had all been pulled out. The paint on the cabinets had blistered off. The metal was charred and scarred but intact. A breeze gusted through the broken window and drifted down through the gaps in the roof. It blew blackened scraps of paper around the room. The source of the paper was a pile of ashes in the center of the floor that Kate guessed had once been the contents of the filing cabinets.
    Kate’s eyes stayed on the pile for a moment more before being drawn, almost against her will, to the two bodies sprawled in the center of the room. One was human, its skull charred and its clothes seared to ash. Kate’s stomach heaved, but she closed her eyes for a second and kept it together. When she opened her eyes they shifted to the second corpse. For a moment Kate was confused. The body was too small even for a child, unless it was an extremely young one. She braced herself and stepped closer. That’s when she saw the tail. Kate backed out of the room.
    “What’s in there?” Daniel asked when she stepped outside.
    “A human corpse and a dead monkey. I’m going to look down the hall.”
    “We should get out of here,” Daniel said nervously.
    “In a minute.”
    “No one’s alive. We would have heard them.”
    “Just give me a second.”
    The light from the doorway barely reached the end of the hall, so Kate had to use the flashlight. She spotted two open doors but had no idea what was inside. The smell of burned flesh grew more intense as she neared the rooms. Kate held her breath and cast the beam inside. The first room was filled with cages, each containing a monkey, and every monkey was pressing against the wire mesh as if it had been trying to claw through the wire when it died.
     
     
     

ELEVEN
     
     
    A uniformed officer was taking Kate and Daniel’s statements when an unmarked car parked behind the van from the medical examiner’s office. Homicide detective Billie Brewster, a slender black woman in a navy-blue windbreaker and jeans, got out of the car. Her partner, Zeke Forbus, a heavyset white man with thinning brown hair, spotted Kate at the same time she spotted him.
    “What’s Annie Oakley doing here?” Forbus asked Brewster.
    “Shut the fuck up,” the black woman snapped angrily at her partner. Then she walked up to Kate and gave her a hug.
    “How you doing, Kate?” Brewster asked with genuine concern.
    “I’m doing fine, Billie,” Kate answered without conviction. “How about you?”
    The black woman shot her thumb over her shoulder toward her partner.
    “I was doing great until they partnered me up with this redneck.”
    “Zeke,” Kate said with a nod.
    “Long time, Kate,” Zeke Forbus answered without warmth. Then he turned his back to her and addressed the uniformed officer.
    “What have we got here, Ron?”
    “Crispy critters,” the officer answered with a sly smile. “If you ain’t had dinner, I’ll get you a bucket of KFM.”
    “KFM?”
    “Kentucky Fried Monkey,” the cop answered, cackling at his joke. “We’ve got a passel of ’em inside.”
    “Why am I investigating monkey murders?” Forbus asked. “Don’t we have animal control for that?”
    “One of the crispy critters ain’t a monkey, that’s why,” the uniform answered.
    “I understand you called this in,” Billie said to Kate. “Why were you out here at night in the middle of nowhere?”
    “This is Daniel Ames, an associate at Reed, Briggs, the