Free Heart of Ice by P. J. Parrish Page A

later Louis walked into the Mustang Lounge. It was a decent-size place, cut into several smaller rooms all walled in shiny pine logs. A pretty blonde in a tight T-shirt tended the small bar, chatting with Flowers while she cut limes.
    Louis slid onto a stool next to Flowers and ordered a Heineken, the first beer he’d had since he picked up Lily in Ann Arbor. The blonde gave him a smile with the beer, then wandered off.
    When Louis looked back at Flowers, he was bent over the bar, carefully folding a cocktail napkin. He then went about meticulously shredding and fluffing its edges.
    “What are you doing?” Louis asked.
    “Napkin art,” Flowers said. “Look.”
    Flowers held up the napkin. He had created a stemmed rose, complete with petals.
    “You spend way too much time in these places,” Louis said.
    “Not much else to do here.” Flowers took a brandy snifter from the overhead rack and an olive from the garnish tray. He set the olive on the bar and placed the snifter upside down over the top of it.
    “Bet you the next round you can’t put the olive in the upright glass without touching the olive or letting the olive touch any other object,” Flowers said.
    Louis stared at the olive under the glass. He should know this. He used to play all kinds of bar games in college.
    “Can’t figure it out, can you?” Flowers asked.
    “Let me think,” Louis said.
    “You’ll never get it,” Flowers said. He grabbed the brandy snifter and, without lifting its rim from the bar, started moving it in a tight circle. When he had it going fast enough, centrifugal force drew the olive up into the glass and Flowers flipped it upright, trapping the olive inside.
    “I guess I owe you a beer,” Louis said.
    “I’ll take a Labatt.”
    Louis ordered for Flowers, and for a while they sat in silence watching the baseball playoff game on the TV. Louis hadn’t seen the Tigers play since he was a kid. He didn’t know any of the players anymore. It made him feel like a stranger in the state he had grown up in.
    “I have the Kingswood school sending us some yearbooks,” Flowers said. “They’re also trying to locate a teacher from back then, someone who might remember Julie Chapman.”
    “Chief, we still need to verify who the bones belong to,” Louis said.
    “Julie Chapman,” Flowers said.
    Louis suppressed a sigh.
    “Let’s eat,” Flowers said. “They have really good chili-cheese fries here.”
    They ordered dinner and again fell into silence as they waited for their food.
    “You want another?” Flowers asked, nodding toward Louis’s near-empty beer bottle.
    Louis shook his head. “I’ve been trying to cut back a little.”
    Flowers signaled to the bartender and ordered a shot of Jack Daniel’s for himself. “Where’s your little girl, Kincaid?” he asked.
    “Her mother picked her up and took her back to Ann Arbor.”
    “Divorced, eh?”
    “Not exactly,” Louis said, not wanting to explain to Flowers that he never knew he even had a kid until this past spring. “What about you? You mentioned an ex in St. Louis or somewhere?”
    “Kansas fucking City,” Flowers said.
    “Sound a little bitter,” Louis said. “Rough divorce?”
    “We’re living down in Alpena, right? I’m a patrolman for the city police, putting in all kinds of overtime just to make ends meet so she can live in this ugly old Victorian on the lake. Everything is fine for seven years. Then out of nowhere she tells me she’s not happy anymore.”
    Louis picked at the chili-covered fries. He didn’t reallywant to hear this, but Flowers, flush with booze, obviously needed to say it.
    “So I let her go back to work at the bank,” Flowers went on. “A year later she’s made manager and putting in more hours than me, and her mother’s at the house a lot with the twin girls. It wasn’t a good time for us.”
    Flowers’s eyes slid to him, then back to the empty shot glass. For a long time neither man said anything.
    “Then Carol got