Free Death On a No 8 Hook (A Willows and Parker Mystery) by Laurence Gough Page A

car, was coated in a layer of thick white dust. He turned on the wipers. The blades swept away enough of the dust to make driving possible. The road was deserted. He made a U-turn and accelerated, changed up into second gear. Dust was blown swirling across the painted metal of the bonnet. He hit thirty-five miles an hour and shifted into third.
    When the wind of his passage had washed most of the dust from the car, Willows rolled down his side window and then leaned across the seat to roll down the window on the passenger side. Ahead of him, the white road glittered in the sunlight, making him squint.
    The same guard was on duty at the gatehouse. He glanced up as Willows drove by, his wounded face registering surprise. Willows gave him a beep of his horn and kept going. After he’d borrowed the guard’s phone to call the RCMP, the man had been all questions. Willows hadn’t answered them then, and had no intention of answering them now.
    It took him half an hour to drive back to Squamish. He turned off the highway and drove past the Chevron station Dickie had said was owned and operated by Naomi Lister’s father. The lights were on inside the office and service bays, but the pumps were dark and the station was closed.
    There was a fitful wind blowing up from the Sound, but it wasn’t strong enough to drive away the sour smell of the mills. Willows supposed people eventually got used to it, stopped noticing it just as they stopped noticing everything else that was unpleasant. He turned left, following the directions Rossiter had given him. Squamish was a small town. It looked as if it had been that way for a long time and had no future ambitions. He made another left and drove half a block and parked in front of the RCMP detachment, a tidy one-storey lemon brick building crouched behind clusters of white, blue and pink hydrangeas.
    Rossiter and Dickie were waiting for him out on the street, lounging purposefully against a blue and white highway cruiser with reinforced bumpers and a light bar crammed with red and blue flashers and white spots. The car was a perfect match for the garden. Somehow Willows doubted if it was deliberate. He rolled up the windows and locked his car. As he got out of the Olds, Rossiter gave him a big smile.
    “Welcome to our fair city,” Rossiter said.
    Willows nodded.
    Dickie opened the rear door of the cruiser. Willows got into the car. Dickie slammed the door shut a little harder than should have been necessary. The car smelled faintly of vomit and urine and stale beer and industrial strength cleansers. It was neither better nor worse than being outside.
    Dickie slid behind the wheel. Rossiter sat in the passenger seat. Both men were in uniform. Dickie had crossed pistols on his shirtsleeve. From where he was sitting, Willows had a wonderful view of the angry red rash beneath the close-cropped hair at the base of Dickie’s stump of a neck. He glanced up, and saw Dickie watching him in the wide rearview mirror.
    “Would you mind telling me something,” Dickie said. “Would you mind telling me what the hell you’re doing here?”
    “He’s a special guest detective,” said Rossiter. “How many times do I have to tell you, for Christ’s sake?”
    Willows watched the flesh at the back of Dickie’s neck rearrange itself in overlapping folds as Dickie twisted in his seat to glare at his partner.
    “He found the girl’s body,” said Rossiter. “If you were her father, wouldn’t you want to talk to him?”
    “Just don’t get in the way,” Dickie said into the mirror.
    “In the way of what?” said Rossiter. “This isn’t a criminal investigation, it’s a sympathy call.”
    “We won’t know what happened to her until after the autopsy,” said Dickie. “Let’s just try to keep that in mind, okay?”
    Rossiter half-turned in his seat to face Willows. His left arm lay along the top of the seat. He raised his hand, turned it palm upwards, and let it drop. “You have to