Free A Mammoth Murder by Bill Crider

and peered in through the screen. Rhodes knew she was taking in every detail and would provide her readers with an accurate description even though she didn’t have her camera.
    â€œWhy would anyone want to kill her?” Jennifer said after they’d gone back to stand beside the county car. Her eyes were a little damp, which didn’t really surprise Rhodes. “She was an old woman. She couldn’t hurt anybody. It doesn’t make sense.”
    Rhodes thought that killing never did. It was a way of avoiding something, or a way of getting something, but it was never fair and it never made sense, except maybe to the person who’d done it. He wasn’t good at saying things like that, however, so he offered a motive.
    â€œRobbery?” he said.
    Jennifer gave him a look. “There couldn’t have been much money in the cash register, not in a place like this.”
    â€œProbably not,” he said.
    â€œWhy, then?”
    â€œI don’t know. I’ll try to find out, though.”
    â€œI hope you do,” Jennifer said.
    Rhodes waited with her beside the car until the justice of the peace got there, and then he had to go back into the store.
    The JP agreed with what Rhodes had already decided: that Louetta Kennedy had been killed by person or persons unknown. She had been a small woman, and it seemed to Rhodes that someone much bigger than she was had argued with her and then hit her. Hard. So hard that her neck had snapped.
    The JP left and the ambulance arrived. Rhodes had a good look
at the body before he let it be taken away. Aside from the mark on the side of her face where she’d been hit, there was nothing to indicate any kind of a scuffle. The cash register hadn’t even been opened.
    Rhodes looked at everything in the store. It seemed to him that something was missing, but he didn’t quite know what it was. He shifted his feet, and the old wooden floor creaked. If only he could interpret what it was saying, he thought, maybe he’d have his answer.
    Or maybe not.
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    Jennifer rode back to town in the ambulance, which pulled away just as Ruth Grady arrived to go over the crime scene with Rhodes. Not that he expected to find anything.
    â€œDo you think this has something to do with Larry Colley?” Ruth asked as she snapped on her rubber gloves.
    Rhodes looked at the items on the sparsely stocked shelves. Dust on some of the cans showed they’d probably been there a while. He wondered much how longer Louetta would have been able to keep the store open if she’d lived.
    â€œI wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, and he went on to explain why he’d stopped there.
    Ruth nodded. “So you think that whoever killed Colley thought he might have been seen yesterday. He came back to make sure she didn’t tell, and they got into an argument.”
    â€œThat’s what I think,” Rhodes said. “Something like that, anyway. I wish I’d come by a little earlier.”
    But he knew that it wouldn’t have done any good. He knew that Louetta had been dead for a good while. Hours, probably. She had
so few customers these days that it wasn’t surprising no one had come in and found her.
    While they were working the scene, Rhodes asked Ruth if she’d found out anything that morning. He’d asked her to check into Colley’s whereabouts on the day he was killed, and he was hoping that she might have learned something.
    She hadn’t.
    â€œNobody saw him around,” she said. “At least not in any of the usual places he’d go.”
    â€œWhat places are those?”
    â€œThe Pool Hall,” Ruth said. “And the Dairy Queen. He hung out at both places.”
    The Pool Hall was an imaginatively named establishment that had set up shop in one of the formerly vacant buildings in downtown Clearview. It had quickly become a favorite spot for people like Colley who lived with hardly any visible