Free Carolina Rain by Rick Murcer Page B

would and clean the damned garage. She was learning that his retirement also meant procrastination but , really, she was okay with it—he’d hurried his whole life.
    Sighing, she put her keys, cell phone, gun, and badge on the teakwood table and reached for the kink in her shoulder. This getting-old thing wasn’t the storybook version she’d always heard about ; the one of boundless wisdom, energy, and free time. More like late nights and early mornings of pain shooting from the bottom of her feet to the top of her head, taking turns on a different body part every few hours. Throw in this pain in the ass job , and it just couldn’t get any better, could it?
    Ginny walked into the family room. “Old man? You still up?” she asked quietly.
    The fifty-inch plasma was still on but he wasn’t in his favorite easy chair. He must have gone to bed, leaving the TV on again. They’d just talked about how expensive that was and how he needed to stop doing it. The “talk” had evolved into an argument, as usual these days, and ended when he slammed the door and headed into Wilmington. She crossed her arms and rubbed her hand over her left arm . They would both have to get whatever cob was up their respective cracks removed and exposed so they could solve th ose dilemma s . Retiring with a pissy spouse wasn’t going to be fun for either of them. But they would get it together; they always had. That’s what made marriage last—working things out.
    The antique grandfather clock her dad had given her read one seventeen a.m . She shook her head , again . This Morgan case was taking far more time than it should and they still had almost nothing to go on in spite of the pressure the Morgan family was exerting on New Hanover County’s finest. That made the captain moody and demanding , w hich meant long days and nights like this one. Funny thing about crimes in the twisted-murder arena: money didn’t create clues or puke out suspects, no matter how many dollars one had. And , given Lance’s proclivity for whoring around, the suspects who might conceivably want him planted six-feet-under could be in the fifties. There was a picture of the man o n Wikipedia beside the term “love them and leave them.”
    Exiting the family room, Ginny went to the kitchen, pulled open the refrigerator, and popped open a cold beer. She sat at one of the padded barstools and contemplated further. Multiple suspects were only part of the problem. Forensics wasn’t doing so well either. There should have been more biological material to work with at the scene. Whoever killed Lance had spent some serious time on the body, maybe they’d even had sex but , for some odd reason, there wasn’t any secretion evidence of that — just her educated guess. There were no skin epithelia, hair, or follicle, or skin under the fingernails, no saliva—at least they had found none to date — apart from the victim's. Weird as hell . . . and never mind the damn snake. She’d never seen Ben pull his gun so fast. With one shot, he’d blown the black and red reptile to kingdom come. She was a big animal lover , only she hated anything that slithered. Those belly jocks could all go straight to hell in her opinion. But the question still remained: why was it there?
    She took another long draw from the can. They’d already gone over Lance’s cell phone record and came up empty. There were several calls to one pay - as - you - go, and a couple more to known numbers, but nothing had panned out yet. They went to his usual haunts and talked to some of his former girlfriends and got squat. They did have one lead from one of the security cameras at Big Louie’s, his favorite bar. It showed him leaving with a blond who walked very slowly, but it could have been one of a hundred women. No one seemed to recognize her, not even the bouncers.
    “Imagine that, no concrete leads,” she muttered.
    Police work was always so glamorized on the boob tube , but in reality , you had to