Free Racing the Devil by Jaden Terrell Page B

off the advances of gorillas like LeQuintus.
    Yes, I know. Gorillas are quiet, gentle creatures. But they are also very strong and not too bright, and if you make them angry, they can smash a person’s fragile little skull as if it were a pumpkin.
    I wasn’t desperate enough to break into the Hartwell house. Not yet.
    Instead, I parked down the street and watched, my air conditioner running to combat the heat. Visitors came and went with casserole dishes and cake pans. No one stayed long. At one point, Calvin Hartwell came outside and sat on the porch steps with his two girls, one arm around each. The smaller girl laid her hand on his shoulder, and he absently kissed the top of her head. The older girl sat stiffly, looking off into the distance, her body a hand’s-width away from her father’s.
    I thought of the photos Frank had found in my truck and wondered.
    Not long after, a silver Cadillac DeVille pulled up, and a woman with strawberry blond hair blown big like a Charlie’s Angel climbed out. Her black sheath dress rode high on her thighs and hugged the taut curves of her hips. She was muscular and lean, and there was something both sensuous and feral in the way she moved.
    The girls hung back as the woman gave Hartwell a stiff hug. Then all four of them climbed into the Hartwells’ Buick Park Avenue. Nice car. Nice house, a vine-covered Victorian with arched glass panels on the second floor. The yard was landscaped with perennials, flowering shrubs, and grass so plush and green a dandelion would have been ashamed to grow there. Someone had put a lot of care into that yard.
    With the family gone, I turned my attention to the neighbors. They’d probably seen me on TV, but most people have a hard time placing faces in unexpected contexts. It’s why you sometimes fail to recognize a co-worker you meet in the grocery store.
    Besides, most people think once you’ve been locked up, you stay locked up until you’ve been convicted or found innocent. They wouldn’t expect me to be out on the streets. For once, I was glad it didn’t work that way.
    I started with the house across the street. The name on the mailbox read, Mitchell . By the time a woman in her mid-to-late forties answered the door, sweat streamed down my face, and not just from the heat. I held up my Private Investigator’s license with my thumb partially covering the face and said, “Hello, Ma’am. I’m a private investigator looking into the death of . . .”
    The door slammed. I knocked again.
    “Go away,” said a muffled voice from behind the door. “We’ve already talked to the police.” “Ma’am, if you’d—” “Go away!”
    I went. I didn’t know if she recognized me, or if there’d been so many cops and reporters around that she was tired of talking. Or maybe it was because I still looked a little like I’d been mauled by a rhinoceros. I took a chance it was one of the latter two and moved on to the next house.
    There was no one home at the next two houses. At the third, an elderly man offered me a glass of iced tea and said he didn’t know the victim well, but that she always spoke politely to him. The little girls were well behaved, and the husband seemed to work long hours. They went to church on Sundays and on Wednesday nights, but he didn’t know where they attended. He wished he could be of more assistance, but he kept to himself and didn’t get involved in gossip. I thanked him for the information and the refreshment and moved on.
    The fourth door I knocked on flew open, and a middle-aged woman with a disheveled red mane leveled a Beretta 9mm at my forehead. With the clarity that often accompanies impending death, I noticed that the barrel looked immense, a yawning hole from which the bullet would come hurtling toward my forehead. To a man about to have his brains blown out, it looked more like a cannon than a handgun. I forced myself to look beyond the barrel, where a pair of hazel eyes glared back with a wild-eyed,