Free Swept Up by Holly Jacobs Page A

to add to your annoyance, but.…”  He slid the local paper at me.
     
    LA’s Maid for Murder Does It Again
    Local business owner, turned screenwriter and Mortie winner, Quincy Mac, had her evening of celebration interrupted by another dead body…
     
    Oh, come on.  I’d accepted the fact that the Erie media was going to cover the murder, but LA is a huge market.  There had to be bigger stories.
    But there it was in black and white.
    Well, boogers.
    “So we’ll keep going,” Cal said when I’d finished reading the name-dropping article. 
    “Keep going?”  I had no clue where to look next.  How could you keep going if you didn’t have a direction to go in?
    “Yes.  That’s what you did before.  You simply kept talking to people and taking notes, and eventually—”
    I thought about my laundry basket analogy.  I was afraid I could keep collecting facts from now till I was old and gray, and I’d never find the killer.  “I lucked into the right answer.”
    “You know what Dick says about luck?” Cal asked with a grin that said he knew exactly what Dick said.
    Dick was always spouting helpful sayings when I got stuck on a writing project.
    “ Luck means being in the right place at the right time .  So you’ve got to keep moving forward and looking for that place. ”  I sighed.  “I don’t think it’s one of his better sayings.”
    “But he’s got a point.  That’s what I do when I work on a case.  I keep looking at people until something comes up that makes me take a second look.  We need to keep crossing people off our suspect list and when we get the potential murderer pool down enough, something will come up.  I don’t think it’s really luck.  It’s more perseverance.  That’s how you solved your ot her two cases, and that’s how we’ll solve this.  Now, we’ve had Cilla and Dylan alibi Shia and Jonas.  That’s four more people we’ve eliminated.  Let’s check with Shia and Jonas.  We’ll make sure their stories mesh with Cilla and Dylan’s, and see if maybe they saw something different.”
    He sounded far more optimistic than I felt.  To be honest, sometimes when you gathered up minutia in a laundry basket you just ended up with a bunch of dirty clothes.  “Fine.” 
    Cal kissed me.  It was simply a non-thinking sort of kiss.  An everyday sort of thing.  And maybe that’s what made it so sweet.  Kissing me was just second nature to him now.
    I turned and kissed him back in a much more thinking-about-it, but equally second nature sort of way.  He didn’t seem to mind.
    When I pulled back he said,  “Quince, I know it’s not very glamorous but that’s the real truth about cop work.  It’s not glamorous.  We don’t solve cases in an hour show like The Closer , Major Crimes, or Law and Order .”
    “I wish Mary McDonnell were in charge of this case.”  Sharon Raydor would have her crack team from Major Crimes on it, and they’d have not only solved the crime but coerce a plea deal from the murderer.
    “Even she couldn’t solve this in an hour.  And I don’t think any departments have a CSI quality crime lab that finds forensic evidence and makes the arrests themselves like the show does in under an hour.  Police work is mainly nose to the grindstone, slogging through enough facts until you figure it out.  Forensics gets a lot of the glory, and maybe our team will find something, but in most cases its just nose—”
    “—to the grindstone and dumb luck,” I finished.
    “Nothing dumb about putting yourself in the right place at the right time.”
    “So we start.…”
    “We start crossing names off the list, one by one.”
    I nodded.  “Let’s start with Shia and then Jonas.”
    Cal nodded.  Sounds like as good a place as any.
     
     
    Shiantay Miller was known as Shia to her coworkers and the millions of viewers of the hit reality series, LA Shore and Casting Callers .  She was driven, beautiful and while not the most talented