Free Obstruction of Justice by Perri O'Shaughnessy Page A

with one airline bag, one laptop Macintosh Powerbook, his cell phone, and his spanking-new Czech semiautomatic, purchased at a Cow Palace gun show just a few weeks before. Opening the bag on the bed, he laid out his swim suit, tennis racket, a pair of Dockers, and some polo shirts.
    The leather toiletry bag he tossed into the bathroom, and the thick manila folder he laid on the table by the window, where he had already arranged the Powerbook and the phone. The gun went on the nightstand beside the bed, still in its holster.
    Room service arrived with breakfast just as he finished unpacking, and he ate while he booted up the Powerbook. He was calling his investigation of Anna Meade’s death the Windshield Case in his ClarisWorks file. He had already entered the notes he had made over the weekend from Hallowell’s files. He had ideas and he had a list of people he wanted to meet.
    Somebody in this town would know the name of the driver of the hit-and-run car. Even a tourist left a paper trail in this day and age. Hansel and Gretel wouldn’t have needed to rely on bread crumbs to find their way out of the forest if they had lived at the end of the twentieth century; any number of things would have been tracking them, from satellites on down.
    He clicked his mouse and looked at the accident-reconstruction expert’s report.
    No skid marks. Possibly the driver just didn’t see her. Even if she was hit accidentally, the driver might not stop. Panic always headed the reasons, but the panicked innocent often showed up at the police station later to blab a weeping, guilt-stricken confession. The less innocent could choose from a thousand reasons not to come forward, ranging from trouble with the law to irresponsibility, immaturity, or sociopathy. Half the world had one of those problems, and the other half probably had them too.
    For the purposes of his investigation, Paul decided to start with the idea that Anna Meade was killed deliberately. She had been happily married, if he believed Hallowell, which he did, so most likely he wouldn’t have to look at any hanky-panky, although there was always the possibility of a psycho somewhere obsessed with her. He sighed. A world full of bad boys. If I can’t have her, nobody can! How many times had he seen the bloody outcome of that kind of primitive emotion when he was a cop?
    There was also the possibility of a revenge killing by one of the bad boys her husband the prosecutor had helped into jail. This, Paul found unlikely. Most criminals lacked subtlety. Collier would have been the one left to drain on the asphalt, not his wife, and Collier had not mentioned any intimidation or blackmail attempts.
    Then there was the most likely possibility, that one of her clients had come after her. The cops had painstakingly checked and double-checked alibis on all sixty-two of the parolees and probationers assigned to her, but there was still the chance.
    In her position, if she was good, she would have learned all the dirty family secrets. She would know what her parolees wanted and dreamed about at night, their weaknesses and strengths, who might stay out this time and who would be going down again. Had something she’d known about one of her clients gotten her killed?
    According to the statement in the file by Marvin Gates, her supervisor, Anna was top-notch, one of those caring professional types who burn out after ten or fifteen years and move on to something less stressful. If she had lived, she and Collier would probably have had children. She might have changed to a part-time job or quit for a while to raise them, and Collier wouldn’t have that achy-breaky look of a man who goes through the motions of life without enjoying its fruits.
    Too much info, too many possibilities. He needed to start simple with a single end of the string and from there he could follow it through all its tangles, all the way home. He turned away from the Powerbook and picked up the pictures from the on-site