Caught Redhanded Read Free

Sergeant Poole of the Amhearst police.
    Jolene ignored me just as she ignored anything she didn’t want to hear. “It says M-A-C. MAC. ” She looked at me. “Our Mac?”
    Yikes. The very thought made me uneasy.
    “Even if it is, it doesn’t mean anything anymore,” Jolene hastened to say, obviously trying to undo her previous suspicious thoughts. “He’s going with Dawn Trauber now.”
    He wishes. Dawn was the director of His House, a residential ministry to teen girls in trouble, most of them unwed mothers. She was also a strong Christian and Mac wasn’t. I didn’t think he was any kind of a believer, strong or weak, committed or un. Therein lay their problem. In spite of mutual attraction, Dawn was holding tough against too deep an emotional attachment. At least she was trying hard. It was a case of unequally yoked.
    “It looks new, doesn’t it?” Jo asked, still studying the tattoo.
    I knew nothing about tattoos except that they were permanent and that it hurt to get them. Oh, and that as you aged and your skin sagged, so did your tattoo.
    The first response team arrived in an amazingly short time, swarming the area, cordoning off the crime scene with yellow tape. My friend Sergeant William Poole led the police contingent.
    “What is it with you two?” he asked, his furrowed face curious as he studied Jo and me. “You turn up at an inordinate number of homicides, especially you, Merry.”
    I gave him a sickly grin. “You think I enjoy it?”
    He smiled kindly, his furrowed face wrinkling like a shar-pei’s. “Of course you don’t, any more than I do.” His eyes took on a teasing glint. “But I think you love the stories.”
    I couldn’t deny that, ghoulish as it made me seem. For a reporter everything is a potential story and bomb-shells like local murders are guaranteed to interest readers. I looked at the crime-scene investigators hovering over Martha. “The stories may be great, William, but I’d rather not have them. They hurt too many people.”
    I thought of Martha’s family. Were her father and stepmother about to be devastated? Or wouldn’t they care? Did she have more siblings than Tawny and Shawna, perhaps ones who shared the same mother? Had Martha been close to her much younger half sisters? Where was her mother now? Had Martha had contact with her or had she disappeared completely from her daughter’s life?
    Oh, Lord, they’re all going to need your comfort. Be there for them.
    William nodded. “This one definitely hurts. I watched her grow up.” He sighed. “Her family lives down the street from us.”
    “What kind of a young woman was she?” I asked. There I went, story-writing again.
    “Most of the time she was great. When she was in high school, she babysat for our kids. At college she went a little wild for a time—a couple of DUIs, a bust for pot—but she straightened herself out.”
    “Did she still live at home?”
    “No.” He and Jolene said it together.
    “She had her own place,” William said.
    “Over in those new condos off Chestnut Street,” Jolene said.
    I knew the condos she meant. They were nice, moderately priced units, built about four years ago. They didn’t begin to compare with the luxury condo that Jolene shared with Reilly, but then, not many did. Not many people had an income like Jolene’s. Twenty-five thousand dollars a month for twenty years. She and her late husband, Arnie, had hit it big in the state lottery.
    “Did she live alone?”
    Jo shook her head. “Her latest boyfriend is Ken Mackey. They share.”
    “Mackey?” William cast an unhappy eye in her direction.
    Jo nodded but for once kept her mouth shut. Hmm. Definitely something to be learned there. Between Jo’s silence and the way William said Ken Mackey’s name, we had an issue with a capital I. When Jo and I were in the office, I’d nail her for the scoop on old Ken.
    “You two can go home and get ready for work,” William said. “Just stop at the station today and