Execution of Innocence Read Free Page B

sure ain’t going anywhere tonight.”
    “You're impossible, you know that?”
    He grinned at her as he opened his truck door.
    “And you’re a bitch, Mary, did you know that?”
    She refused to open her side door. “I am not a bitch. No one calls me a bitch.”
    “Get in and shut up. Remember, you have to study tonight.”
    She opened the door of his creaky truck. She spoke with scorn.
    “What are you doing tonight, drinking beer?” she asked.
    Charlie just smiled and said nothing. God, how annoying he was.
    In the morning her car was parked out in front of her house with a huge red ribbon tied around it. When she started it, she was amazed how soft it purred, like a new car. Only later did she learn Charlie had stayed up the whole night to rebuild her entire engine. He had practically given her a new car. When she called him to thank him, to pay him, he just laughed and told her to forget it. But she knew she was going to have trouble forgetting him. She asked him out and he said he'd be honored.
    That was the beginning; that was the end.
     
     
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    Lieutenant Sharp and Lieutenant Riles decided to have a mini-conference in the hallway. After telling Mary to relax, they left the interrogation room and huddled next to a water cooler that doled out water as lousy as the coffee they made out of it later. Riles looked worried, but Sharp thought they were making progress.
    “She's not being straight with us,” Riles complained.
    “She's eighteen years old. We're cops. It's the middle of the night. I'd expect her to have her facts a little messed up.”
    “No. A guy she dated is dead. Her boyfriend is missing. She's not stupid, she knows how serious this is.”
    “I didn't say she was stupid,” Sharp said. “Just confused.”
    “You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Riles said.
    Sharp considered the something he couldn't quite find in Mary's eyes. “Maybe not,” he admitted. “Do you want to take over the questioning?”
    “No. You’re doing a good job. But I would like a second opinion. Let's get Dick’s sister in here. But let’s talk to her together. I don't want to split up.”
    “We’ll have to keep Mary waiting.”
    “Let her wait,” Riles said.
    Before going to fetch Hannah from the clutches of her unpleasant father, they stopped in to see Dr. Kohner and dead Dick. Normally the body would have been brought to the morgue for an autopsy but the place had burned down the previous month when Dr. Kohner had accidentally set some chemicals on fire with his lit pipe. Neither of the officers was happy to see that Dr. Kohner was smoking a pipe as he worked on sawing Dick's head open. Riles was older and had seen many autopsies but Sharp had to take a deep breath as Dr. Kohner literally opened up half of Dick’s skull. The boy's gray brain sagged onto the makeshift autopsy table and thick blood trickled down a stainless steel gully that had been set up to capture the overflow. There was a portable X-ray machine in one corner. Before picking up the saw, the coroner had taken plenty of pictures. Dr. Kohner looked up and grinned when he saw Sharp pale.
    Dr. Kohner was a mixture of German and Japanese. He often joked he was a product of Germany's alliance with Japan during World War II, and it was true he must have been born sometime before the war. He wore a thin mustache as white as a line of sugar and his hair was closely cropped to reveal amazingly youthful skin. He stood firmly erect, and although he was always friendly, he clearly preferred the company of the dead. There was an unverified rumor that he had been a surgeon before he was forced into pathology for refusing to close a patient from whom he had just removed an appendix. The joke was that the patient had been his own father. It was probably all a lie, but operating on his own father would not have intimidated Dr. Kohner. He had once remarked that his only regret in life was that he wouldn’t be able to perform the