Free Magic Line by Elizabeth Gunn Page B

one. They after somebody you want?’
    â€˜Yeah. He’s a bad one, Will, watch your back tonight.’
    â€˜Always do.’ He got into the driver’s side of his vehicle and rode away with his face set in its standard street-cop expression: No Big Deal. Watching him go, she felt lucky and, momentarily, not at all tired.
    She pulled a warm apple Danish out of a sack, walked back into the busy crime scene house and ate it leaning against a kitchen counter. She had been appalled the first time she watched crime scene detectives ordering in pizza at a crime scene. But she was a seasoned homicide detective now and accepted that the hard mental work of an investigation burned through calories like wildfire and made her ravenous. So she relished the good pastry and fresh coffee, ignoring the bloody crime scene all around her. When she was done she went back to work with fresh energy.
    Delaney, his face like an overwound clock, walked into the house and asked Ollie, ‘You found the Glock yet?’
    â€˜Yeah, it’s there on the table.’
    â€˜And you got all the rest of the weapons sequestered in here, right? Have you disarmed them yet?’
    â€˜No. I want to list them first, with the ammo just as I found them. When we start diagraming how this all went down, the bullet count might make a lot of difference.’
    â€˜I guess that’s right,’ Delaney said. ‘But why don’t you do that next so we can get the weapons bagged and tagged?’ He frowned at the neat array on the table. ‘I don’t like them lying around like this with everybody walking through. If you step out – we’ve got people working here now that aren’t even sworn.’
    Ollie’s face froze into a craggy slope of freckled rock. The usually cheery clown morphed into a proud detective with twenty years’ experience, unaccustomed to having his work criticized. Oblivious to the anger he was leaving behind him, Delaney, frowning and thinking so hard he forgot to chew his gum, stomped out over the bloody doorsill.
    â€˜Go shit a brick, Sergeant,’ Ollie said softly behind him. ‘Whose idea was it to bring in the extra crew?’ He’d waited till Delaney was out of earshot though, Sarah noticed. Proud or not, he was still too mindful of his mortgage to get in a pissing match with his boss.
    â€˜Listen, don’t waste your energy getting mad,’ Sarah said. ‘We’ve still got a lot of miles to—’ She stopped, staring out the door.
    â€˜What?’ Ollie said. ‘You see something?’ But she had already bolted out the door, calling, ‘Boss?’ because she had just remembered what she should do next.
    Delaney didn’t hear her and kept right on walking. Not willing to scream at a crime scene, she broke into a fast trot and caught him just before he reached the tape. When she was directly behind him she took a deep breath and said quietly, ‘Sergeant?’
    He whirled, bug-eyed, and said, ‘ What? ’
    â€˜Sorry.’ She gave him a minute to recover before she said, ‘The shirt.’
    â€˜What shirt?’ Back to his stony calm, he stared past her left ear, concentrating on some info nexus in the middle distance while she told him about the shirt stolen from the firehouse driver. ‘Fitz said he changed right there in the street,’ she said. ‘Chances are he just dropped the bloody shirt and left it there.’
    â€˜Might have. Did Fitzgerald say where they were when this happened?’
    â€˜He couldn’t remember exactly – somewhere near the hospital. But the driver should know.’
    â€˜You know the driver’s name?’
    â€˜No. But somebody at the fire station ought to.’
    â€˜Which station?’
    â€˜I don’t know. But what use is it being a detective if I can’t find that out? OK if I—’
    â€˜Sure, go for it.’
    She called 911, got the