Free Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery by Rosemary Harris Page B

since he’d sat down. “Won’t see anyone, though. Not even her husband. Poor bastard—he keeps coming by the station anyway. Bringing her food and clothing. Her toilet items. Yesterday he brought a suitcase filled with creams and lotions. We had to go through every one of those tiny bottles. Is your bathroom filled with stuff like that?”
    It was. And I knew what Caroline used. I seriously doubted whether Grant Sturgis could smuggle a file or a poison pill into jail in a flat jar of YvesSaintLaurent eye cream. “What happens next?” I asked. I took a small bite of cake and washed it down with cold coffee.
    O’Malley told me Caroline would be extradited to Michigan and a judge there would decide her fate. He’d either send her back to prison to finish her sentence—possibly with a few years tacked on for escaping—or send her home with a suspended sentence. Presumably they’d take into account the way she’d turned her life around, but you could never tell. She could get titanically unlucky and get a judge who prided himself on being a hard case or one who was running for reelection and didn’t want to appear “soft on crime.” I didn’t know what Ithought; it was all too fresh. O’Malley was silent and looked longingly at the half-eaten piece of cake on my plate.
    “Go on,” I said. “You know you want it.”
    “What makes you think my lean and hungry look is directed at your leftover cake?”
    That was as close to a pass as O’Malley had come since I first moved to Springfield. I didn’t mind. I never minded, but I kept that to myself. I guess I could sip wine in front of the fire with a man like Mike, talk about our days, laugh at the stupid things that happened, I just hadn’t done that for so long. And I wasn’t sure I knew how not to be sarcastic and distant with Mike O’Malley.
    Just as things were getting interesting we were interrupted by his coffee coming and my cell phone ringing. I fished it out of the bottom of my backpack and froze when I saw the name on-screen:
Caroline
. I fumbled to unlock the keypad and hit answer before the phone kicked into voice mail mode. Would she be calling
me
from the Springfield jail? Why? I waited for what seemed like an eternity. “Who is this?” I whispered.
    “It’s Grant. Grant Sturgis. I need to talk to someone. Someone I can trust.”
    Of course. He most have reconnected their home phone and I had saved the number as
Caroline
.
    “Will you meet me?
    “All right,” I said, “where?”
    “Your place?”
    “No way. Yours?”
    “Not a chance. There’s an entourage here. I can lose them and meet you. How about Guido’s?”
    “Yes. Yes. Good-bye.” I turned off the phone and shoved it back in my bag.
    I slid the rest of the cake toward O’Malley. “It’s all yours. I’ve got to leave. I think it’s a new client.”

Ten
    Guido Chiaramonte’s old nursery had been shuttered since his death. The courts had not been able to find any of his relatives in Sicily to claim the property, so it sat there waiting for an out-of-town buyer who either wouldn’t know or wouldn’t be scared off by its bloody history. There weren’t many local takers for the large parcel right on the road and not far from the highway exit. People in town had long memories, and what had happened at Guido’s was still fresh in their minds.
    Early on, nearby residents worried the nursery would be sold to a developer who’d raze it and put up a multiple-dwelling housing unit, but sewage issues and zoning restrictions put the brakes on that idea. For the last two years nothing much had happened except that a few windows had been broken, some graffiti had appeared, and Guido’s remaining stock had either died; been stolen; or, the way plants sometimes do, burst through their burlap sacks and thin plastic nursery pots and put down roots right where they had been displayed for sale.
    About a year earlier, the bank posted a
for sale
sign, fueling rumors that the IRS was