Free Summer Breeze by Catherine Palmer Page A

her. “Cold cream can really clog young pores!”

    As Derek steered his boat toward the mile marker where he and another officer had agreed to meet that afternoon, the recent unusual drowning nagged him. But for some reason, Lydia’s unexpected outburst bothered him even more. The child had sassed her stepfather with more venom than most of the belligerent drunk boaters he’d ticketed. Worst of all, her rage seemed to come out of nowhere.
    He had been crossing the living room to greet Kim before heading to work when he spotted Lydia on the stairs. At the sight of her heavily made-up face, he had stopped dead in his tracks. All he said was “Whoa,” and the kid lit into him. It was almost as if she knew he would forbid her to go out wearing makeup, so she had preplanned her temper tantrum.
    But why had that one word triggered such a response? Why had Lydia kept mentioning her real father, when she and Luke always dreaded spending time with Joe? And how about the way Kim had rushed to Lydia’s side before even stopping to talk to him? That bugged him more than he cared to admit. Then his mother had jumped into the fray.
    “Women,” he muttered as he pulled up beside Larry Marshall’s patrol boat.
    “What’s that?” the other officer asked.
    “Too many women at home,” Derek groused. “Mother, wife, daughter. All on my case.”
    “Yow, that bites.” Larry paused. “Speaking of women, did you hear the news? We just got the call from headquarters in Jefferson City. The unidentified Code 4 you found over by Deepwater Cove was a female.”
    A wash of disbelief ran through Derek. “No kidding? I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles it was a man. The jeans, the boots, the T-shirt.”
    “Me too. I had it pegged as a male all the way. But you’ve gotta admit, the decomposition was pretty bad.”
    Derek frowned at the memory of the body he had found tangled in fishing line not far from the small cove where he and Kim made their home. That afternoon, a light breeze had carried an odor in his direction, and he recognized it immediately. As a patrolman, he had worked deaths on the lake before, but he’d never been the one to locate the remains. It was an image he would just as soon forget.
    Trained to treat every death as a homicide, they would have to wait until that scenario was ruled out. All the same, such circumstances were rare at Lake of the Ozarks.
    “My guess is she was drinking on a dock or a boat,” Larry said. “She sure wouldn’t be the first drunk to fall into the lake, and she won’t be the last. Probably passed out and drowned.”
    Derek shrugged. “If you’d seen the way the line was wrapped around her, you might think differently.”
    “You really believe it could have been a homicide?”
    “It’s possible. Then again, who would wrap a person in fishing line?”
    “Someone who wanted to immobilize her?”
    “I can snap that line with my bare hands,” Derek said. “I checked.”
    “Yeah, but this was a woman.”
    “True, and there was an awful lot of line. I just can’t believe that no one has called her in as a missing person.”
    Derek shook his head at the realization that not only was the woman still unidentified, but she hadn’t had a funeral, nor had her body been buried. Whether her death was a homicide or an accident, she had once been a living, breathing human.
    “I’d better get on over to Party Cove,” he told his friend as he checked his watch. “It’s prime drunk-hunting time.”
    “I reckon we’ve got five or six hundred boats out there,” Larry told him. “People are starting to head home so they can get ready to go barhopping.”
    “Every weekend they cut the animals free.”
    Larry chuckled. “It’s Sodom and Gomorrah all right.”
    As Derek parted from his friend, he thought about Larry’s reference. Derek knew that Sodom and Gomorrah were bad places, but he had no idea why. He thought it might be from the Bible, but he had grown up in a home where God