A Perfect Grave Read Free Page B

lieutenants to issue an edict to the sergeants to pass to detectives.
    “I’ve been ordered to tell you the obvious,” Sergeant Stan Boulder, biting back on his anger, advised his team at the start of a recent shift. “We need a win and we need it fast.” As his people grumbled, Boulder crumpled his memo, then pulled Grace into his office for a private moment.
    “We’re getting pissed on from every direction over this clearance crap.”
    “You paint a pretty picture.”
    “People are getting distracted, second-guessing, they need to stay focused, Grace.”
    “Yeah, we get that.”
    “You’re one of my brightest, it’s why we brought you on. We need to pull one out of the fire.”
    “Which one? I’ll just run out and solve it, now.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    She did.
    Grace always came at things with a fresh angle, a talent that had evolved during her teens, when her quick thinking had helped save lives during a shooting at her high school. In the aftermath, Grace knew she was going to become a cop.
    She had graduated from college in the top 5 percent and considered applying to the FBI before deciding on the Seattle PD. As a patrol officer, she was decorated for tackling and disarming a fleeing robbery suspect. She soon made detective and worked in several units where she’d earned the praise of her commanders before becoming one of the youngest investigators to join Seattle’s homicide squad.
    She gave everything to the job, putting in sixty hours a week, allowing nothing else in her life. She was a loner. Had been ever since the school shooting. That’s just the way it was. But over the last few years, as she grappled with death twenty-four hours a day, she didn’t think she could stand being alone much longer.
    Yet her attempts to do something about it hadn’t really gone anywhere.
    She went out with Jason Wade, the guy from the Mirror , a few times. There was chemistry, something electric between them, but work always seemed to get in the way. Or maybe they let it get in the way. Anyway, she broke it off before it got serious but he seemed hurt. She saw it in his face. Had she made a mistake?
    She didn’t know.
    Then there was her disaster with Drew Wagner, the FBI agent. Upon transferring from Boston he pursued her with animal ferocity. God, he was so smooth, so good-looking. She never saw it coming. First, he says he’s single because there’s no ring, but she points to his tan line, so, all right, all right, he admits, he’s divorced. She buys it, as he tells her about the heartache, and he does it so well. Later, she overhears him on a phone call to his wife and it’s, all right, actually he’s separated. The heartache stuff again and maybe Grace wants to believe him but she does a little checking and finally gets the truth. Turns out her all-star is only biding his time until his wife sells the house in Charlestown and moves to Seattle with their kids.
    Some detective she was.
    How could she have been so stupid? she asked her reflection in the diner’s window, letting the question go into the night and back to Jason. Was she wrong not to work on something with him? There was just something about him that she liked. A brooding, brilliant honesty.
    Stop it, Grace! Stop this “poor me” garbage!
    Passing headlights stabbed at her for being selfish, hurling case images at her. Of Sharla May Forrest, a runaway not-yet-out-of-little-girlhood who was addicted to crack but kept a stuffed teddy bear on her bed and signed birthday cards to friends with happy faces. Of Sharla May’s naked corpse in the urine, vomit, and dog shit alley, with a metal hanger garrotted around her neck, twisted at the back with a lead pipe so tight it nearly decapitated her.
    And of Isabella Martell lying about Roberto while Jesus watched.
    And of Special Lying Bastard Agent Drew Wagner at the mall with his wife and kids. And of Grace Garner alone with her unsolved murders, trying to get a handle on it all as