Free Monument to the Dead by Sheila Connolly

alcohol. Why the heck does toxicology take so
     long in the real world? On these television shows, you get results in about three
     minutes. If these are murders, a whole lot more people could get killed before anybody
     even sees the first reports. Stupid, isn’t it?”
    “I can’t argue with that. But everything costs money, and a lot of police departments
     or government agencies don’t have as much as they need, and the labs are underfunded
     and understaffed.”
    “True enough,” Marty said. “I’ll take this stuff home with me and go over it again
     tonight. You going to talk to Jimmy?”
    “I . . . don’t know. I’d rather wait until we had something solid to tell him.”
    “Good luck with that. See you in the morning.”

CHAPTER 8
    All the way home, I wrestled with whether to call James. And then wondered why I was reluctant. Okay, I’ll admit it—I wanted to hear his voice.
     I wanted to reassure myself that we were actually together in some way, shape, or
     form, and I wasn’t just fantasizing about a relationship with a hot FBI agent.
    But maybe part of the problem was precisely that he was an FBI agent. I felt flattered
     that he considered me a good resource for certain information, and I was happy to
     help, but almost every time he called me, I had to ask whether it was for business
     or pleasure. I felt like a frustrated teenager.
Does he like me? Really like me?
    So here we were in the thick of it again. Someone might be killing Philadelphia board
     members, with the stress on
might
, for reasons nobody could fathom. Being a board member for a cultural institution
     is boring, most of the time. Nobody had ever thought it was dangerous, except to your
     checkbook. You sat through meetings, reviewed budgets (well, you were supposed to—I
     knew our board members usually gave them no more than a cursory glance), planned events,
     and hit up friends and peers for financial contributions. The last was probably the
     most important, and some board members were clearly better at it than others. Was
     it possible that some disgruntled soul had been asked once too often for a gift and
     had decided to eliminate anyone who asked? That would be an interesting addition to
     Shelby’s chart: who had asked whom for a contribution. I knew we had some sort of
     records for that in our own files—development usually assigned board members an “ask”
     list. But finding that for any other place, like the museum? Not likely, and probably
     overwhelmingly large, even if the institution was willing to share.
    It would be a lot easier to look at this Forrest Trust, because the Society had a
     direct connection. I
should
know more about it, since the Society currently had possession of some of its objects
     and money, but since there had never been any problems with the arrangement, I suppose
     we had mainly ignored it. I didn’t know how much the trust was worth, but it couldn’t
     be large, and I doubted that the trustees had much to do. Why kill any of them? There
     was neither power nor money to be gained.
    I went home, threw together an uninspired dinner, then settled down in front of the
     television for some mindless entertainment. Then the phone rang: James.
    “Hey there,” I said articulately. “I hope you’re not calling because someone else
     is dead.”
    “No, I’m not.”
    “Have I violated any laws?”
    He chuckled. “Not that I know of. Have you?”
    “Nope. I’m a sterling, upright citizen. But I’m glad you called.” I pulled my bare
     feet under me on the couch, and we talked happy piffle for a while. Nice. Maybe I
     was too old to be doing this, but I didn’t care. Neither, apparently, did James. Maybe
     he’d had a romantically stunted youth, like I had.
    It wasn’t until we’d begun winding down that he said, “You’re still looking into the
     boards?”
    Back to business, then. “Yes. Marty and Shelby are making great progress. I didn’t
     want to bother you with