Free Framed by Nancy Springer Page A

okay.
    Guinea pig siren noises, woot woot woot , and something with flashing lights pulled into the convenience store parking lot. Ronnie glanced up. Cop car.
    What the hell? Was somebody trying to rob the place? She’d stay until she was sure it was safe to go up there. With a click she pushed open the door of 129.
    Empty.
    She stood there a moment to be sure the shadows in the corners weren’t fooling her. But it was…empty. Ronnie clenched her teeth, mentally framing a thing or two to say to that fish-eyed man.
    “Police officer,” said a male voice behind her. “Turn around slowly and keep your hands where I can see them.”
    About that time Veronica remembered why Groat’s Mini Storage had been in the news months back. It was the place where they’d found the body.
    * * *
    “Tell it to me one more time,” said the police detective, looking bored.
    “Why? It’s way past my bedtime.” Ronnie tried to speak pleasantly even though her head ached with stress and fatigue. It had to be 3 a.m.
    It had been a woman’s body, she remembered. The cops wouldn’t tell her a thing, but it seemed to her that it had been a woman’s body jammed into a footlocker in the mini storage. Sawed in pieces.
    “Because I’m asking you nicely,” said the detective not very nicely. Llewellyn, his name tag said. He was her type, damn it, lean and dark, but he was too young; he wouldn’t be interested in her. Anyway, she didn’t like his attitude. “Start at the top.”
    “No.” Ronnie found that she had had enough. “You want to stay here all night, fine, we’ll stay here all night, but I’m calling a lawyer.”
    It was the smell that had given it away. The fish-eyed man probably wouldn’t have bothered with the contents of #129 for a few more months if it hadn’t been for the stench. Just like the frame shop hadn’t bothered with the deadbeat order until months past the six-week deadline.
    “You’ll have to wait till morning for that,” said Detective Llewellyn. With a name like that it was no wonder he had to act tough. “I can put you in a cell if you like.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake,” Ronnie cried, her voice breaking, “if you won’t let me go, tell me what it is I’m supposed to have done. Just tell me what you think I did!”
    He wouldn’t, of course. What was driving Veronica toward the edge was the way none of them would tell her anything. But he did leave her alone for a while. When he came back, he carried papers. “Okay,” he said, still bored, “just read over this transcript of your statement, sign it, and you can go. For now.”
    The transcript was accurate enough. While she read it, Detective Llewellyn diddled with papers on his desk, his hands irritated, jumpy. But as she signed, she saw his hands freeze like rabbits. She looked up; he was staring at her hand holding the pen, definitely not bored any longer.
    “How’d you get that callus on your little finger?” he asked.
    “Huh?” She put down the pen and looked at the rough patch on the outside of her little finger, right at the first joint. “Pulling the wire taut.”
    “Wire? What wire?”
    “Picture framing.”
    “And you get a lot of little cuts doing that?”
    “Oh, yeah.” She had bandages on two fingers right now and half-healed glass cuts on her knuckles.
    “And you keep your fingernails short.”
    “Yeah. Have to.” She’d never liked those acrylic claws anyway. “Why?”
    “Nothing. No reason. Just curious.” Llewellyn stood up, dismissing her. “I’ll be calling on you again. Don’t leave the area or you really will need a lawyer.”
    “Is that a threat?”
    “Ma’am, that’s a promise.”
    Damn him. Ronnie hated it when anyone called her ma’am, it made her feel so old. And what was all that rigamarole about her callus and her cuts and her fingernails?
    It came to her intuitively when she was in bed, finally, trying to go to sleep but too wired to relax, thinking about what she should have done…what