Free Law and Disorder by Mary Jane Maffini Page A

him.”
    “In the knees?” What the hell? Mombourquette sure hadn’t mentioned that. I’d assumed Rollie had received the fatal shot in one of the usual places: head or heart. My dinner had lost its appeal. I pushed my plate away.
    P. J. had ordered the fish and chips, and apparently his appetite was unaffected by the details of Rollie Thorsten’s fate.
    After a while, I said, “Are you saying Rollie would have been conscious when he went into the water?”
    P. J. chewed slowly for a while before saying, “That’s what my source thinks. You know I can’t reveal my—”
    I snapped. “I’m not asking for the name of your sources, although anyone with half a brain could figure out it’s that girl in the path lab. The one who has the hots for you.”
    “Really? How did you…?”
    “Let me see. She works in the pathology department. She drools when she sees you. Tough one.”
    “Anyway, calling her ‘that girl’ isn’t too politically correct, Tiger. Especially from such a knee-jerk left winger as yourself.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with girls, P. J. Try to remember that for future reference. Now, just to finish up. Maybe Rollie was knocked out first and then shot and drowned.”
    P. J. shook his carrot top vigorously. “I think my source would have mentioned that.”
    I felt a buzzing around my ears. “So, then he knew what was going to happen to him.”
    “He must have.”
    “And he wouldn’t have been able to move his legs properly when he went into the water.”
    “Yeah.” P. J. actually put down his fork this time.
    I said, “Someone really wanted Rollie to go out the hard way.”
    “That’s it.”
    “They wanted him to know what would happen and probably why it was going to happen.”
    “Could have been up to three minutes, my source figured until he lost consciousness and drowned. That would be pretty rough.”
    “I can’t even imagine who would do that to another person. Even Rollie. He was just sleazy and opportunistic, not evil. I think that Brugel is behind this. He’s the only person I can think of who is capable of it. And he stood to gain from Rollie’s death.”
    “He’s locked up solid in the RDC.”
    “And you think he couldn’t make something like this happen?”
    “I hear you,” P. J. said, although I noticed he’d picked up his fork again.
    I didn’t.

    When I arrived home, Alvin was in full swing, standing on a shiny new ladder in the third bedroom. Two boxes containing blow-up beds and several overstuffed plastic shopping bags were parked in the hallway. I managed to navigate my way into the room.
    “Oh,” I said. “I see you found time to paint after all. I thought we said that we weren’t—”
    “It needed brightening,” he said.
    “Well, it’s certainly bright now. You know, I never would have considered Chinese red myself.”
    He shrugged and wiped a bit of paint from his nose. “They are here for the dragon boat races, Camilla.”
    “Hard to argue with that,” I said.
    “Too bad it’s going to take four coats to cover this boring sand colour on the walls. I’ll be here all night.”
    “My sympathies,” I murmured as I shut the door.

    I fell asleep mentally working my way through Rollie’s better-known cases and the people he’d come up against. My list was by the side of the bed in case more names came to mind. At three in the morning, my eyes popped open, something that happened all too often. Gussie grunted reproachfully and Mrs. Parnell’s cat stretched and turned her back to me to make a point. The point being that the night is for sleeping, not for gasping, twisting and sitting up in bed for the second night in a row. But sleep had been chased from my head by a face.
    Annalisa Fillmore’s face.
    Of course.
    It would be hard to imagine anyone who could have hated Rollie Thorsten more than Annalisa Fillmore. Why had it taken me so long to remember her? Annalisa’s black eyes had flashed in my dream, but even after I snapped awake,