Free The Last Dead Girl by Harry Dolan Page A

long time, but someone knocked on the door and Moretti stood up slowly and took his notebook and went out.
    He stayed away for twenty minutes. After the first ten, I got up and checked the door (locked) and stretched and paced around the table. I couldn’t hear any sound from the hallway, but I figured Moretti was out there talking to someone—maybe about whether I could really cause them trouble if they refused to let me go. I hoped they were talking about that, and I hoped the prospect made them nervous. But I didn’t think it would—not if they made any kind of inquiry about my family’s connections. Because everything I had said to Moretti was a bluff.
    Moretti had been the first to bring up Austin Malone, who had managed to get his name on some buildings at Bellamy University. Austin was my great-grandfather, true enough, and he had been a wealthy man in his day. He had inherited a business from his father: a mill that produced copper wire for telephone lines and copper pipe for plumbing. But a mill is a grubby place, and Austin Malone had no interest in spending time in grubby places. He sold the mill after his father died—to the Revere Copper Company in 1928—and used the money to buy as much prestige and refinement as it could buy.
    It bought quite a lot. Austin Malone kept his money out of the stock market and managed to weather the Great Depression and the Second World War. But when he died in 1949, he left behind five sons and three daughters—and a great fortune divided eight ways works out to eight rather modest fortunes. Flash forward two more generations and there was nothing much left, just a name carved into a stone façade here and there, and a comfortable middle-class existence. My father was a building contractor and sent me to college to study engineering. I had relatives with good careers—I even had a cousin who practiced law. But it was tax law, not criminal law. Not the kind that could help me.
    So my threat against Frank Moretti was empty talk: I couldn’t begin to make any trouble for him. And if he wanted to make trouble for me, there was no one in the Malone clan who could pick up a phone and make it go away.
    I don’t know if my bluff worked, or if Moretti was an honest cop who didn’t want to arrest someone for murder without being sure, but something changed in the twenty minutes he was gone. When he came back into the room the glare had gone out of his eyes and they looked tired again. He had a plastic bag that held my wallet and my phone and my other possessions. He tossed it on the table and held the door for me and said, “You’re free to go.”

10
    T he central police station in Rome is in the old courthouse building on North James Street. There are broad steps in front that lead down to a plaza with a pool and a fountain. There are cherry trees planted around the pool, and benches among the cherry trees.
    I’d been there before and I knew the fountain was something to see, especially after sundown when they turned on the lights around the pool. But at three in the morning there was no one to appreciate the spectacle: the lights had been dimmed and the water had gone still.
    I walked down the courthouse steps and through the plaza, past a sign that read NO LOITERING AFTER
DARK . I didn’t loiter. I came to the street and thought about my truck, which would still be at Jana’s. I could get a cab to take me there, but there were no cabs in sight.
    I hiked a block to a bus stop and sat on one end of the bench under the shelter. An elderly black man in a trench coat sat on the other end. His coat had a tear along the shoulder that had been mended with duct tape.
    â€œDo you know when the next bus comes?” I asked him.
    â€œSomewhere ’round six a.m., I guess.”
    â€œIs that the one you’re waiting for?”
    â€œMight as well wait for that as wait for anything.”
    There was a map of the bus