Songs of Love & Death Read Free Page A

know they had a gift.
    In other words, goose eggs.
    Fortunately, Murphy got the job done.
    Sometimes hard work is way better than magic.
    M URPHY’S SATURN HAD gotten a little blown up a couple of years back, sort of my fault, and what with her demotion and all, it would be a while before she’d be able to afford something besides her old Harley. For some reason, she didn’t want to take the motorcycle, so that left my car, the ever-trusty (almost always) Blue Beetle. It’s an old-school VW Bug which had seen me through one nasty scrape after another. More than once, it had been pounded badly, but always it had risen to do battle once more—if by battle one means driving somewhere at a sedate speed, without much acceleration and only middling gas mileage.
    Don’t start. It’s paid for.
    I stopped outside Murphy’s little white house, with its little pink rose garden, and rolled down the window on the passenger side. “Make like the Dukes of Hazzard,” I said. “Door’s stuck.”
    Murphy gave me a narrow look. Then she tried the door. It opened easily. She slid into the passenger seat with a smug smile, closed the door, and didn’t say anything.
    “Police work has made you cynical,” I said.
    “If you want to ogle my butt, you’ll just have to work for it like everyone else, Harry.”
    I snorted and put the car in gear. “Where we going?”
    “Nowhere until you buckle up,” she said, putting her own seat belt on.
    “It’s my car,” I said.
    “It’s the law. You want to get cited? ’Cause I can do that.”
    I debated whether or not it was worth it while she gave me her cop look. And produced a ball-point pen.
    I buckled up.
    Murphy beamed at me. “Springfield. Head for I-55.”
    I grunted. “Kind of out of your jurisdiction.”
    “If we were investigating something,” Murphy said. “We’re not. We’re going to the fair.”
    I eyed her sidelong. “On a date?”
    “Sure, if someone asks,” she said, offhand. Then she froze for a second, and added, “It’s a reasonable cover story.”
    “Right,” I said. Her cheeks looked a little pink. Neither of us said anythingfor a little while.
    I merged onto the highway, always fun in a car originally designed to rocket down the autobahn at a blistering one hundred kilometers an hour, and asked Murphy, “Springfield?”
    “State fair,” she said. “That was the common denominator.”
    I frowned, going over the dates in my head. “State fair only runs, what? Ten days?”
    Murphy nodded. “They shut down tonight.”
    “But the first couple died twelve days ago.”
    “They were both volunteer staff for the fair, and they were down there on the grounds setting up.” Murphy lifted a foot to rest her heel on the edge of the passenger seat, frowning out the window. “I found skee-ball tickets and one of those chintzy stuffed animals in the second couple’s apartment. And the Bardalackis got pulled over for speeding on I-55, five minutes out of Springfield and bound for Chicago.”
    “So
maybe
they went to the fair,” I said. “Or maybe they were just taking a road trip or something.”
    Murphy shrugged. “Possibly. But if I assume that it’s a coincidence, it doesn’t get me anywhere—and we’ve got nothing. If I assume that there’s a connection, we’ve got a possible answer.”
    I beamed at her. “I thought you didn’t like reading Parker.”
    She eyed me. “That doesn’t mean his logic isn’t sound.”
    “Oh. Right.”
    She exhaled heavily. “It’s the best I’ve got. I just hope that if I get you into the general area, you can pick up on whatever is going on.”
    “Yeah,” I said, thinking of walls papered in photographs. “Me too.”
    T HE THING I enjoy the most about places like the state fair is the smells. You get combinations of smells at such events like none found anywhere else. Popcorn, roast nuts, and fast food predominate, and you can get anything you want to clog your arteries or burn out your stomach lining