Turn to Stone Read Free Page A

with dark, intense eyes, and Stride stared back. Cigarette smoke drifted across the road.
    “Lieutenant?” the coroner repeated.
    “Sorry, something like this always hits hard,” Stride said. “Did you know Percy?”
    Gandy shoved his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, I did, but I guess you never really know people. I mean, from the outside, he looked like he had everything. Pretty wife. Famous around here for what he did. Good guy. Everybody loved him.”
    “Things can go south on you fast,” Stride said.
    “Tell me about it. Me, I was a tennis phenom up until seventh grade. Next Sampras or Becker. Except my dad left his old revolver on a shelf in his closet, and I found it and managed to shoot off two of my toes. Ouch. Things change, but you never see it coming. I don’t suppose Percy had any idea when he got out of his squad car at the Novitiate that his life would never be the same.”
    “No. It just happens.”
    “Yeah, I think about that whenever we deal with a traffic fatality. Somebody woke up that morning and had no idea it was the last day of their life.”
    Another car passed on the rural highway. Not far behind, a pick-up truck slowed near the church. For Shawano, this was a traffic jam. It wasn’t an accident; word had begun to spread. Gossip spread like a virus in a small town. The high beams of the pick-up illuminated the boy on the moped again. Something about the teenager’s solemn face made Stride want to cross the street and talk to him, but as if the boy knew what Stride was thinking, he shot away, his engine whining and his tires slipping in the snow. Stride watched him go.
    “Everyone’s curious,” he said.
    “Sure. We’ll get the tabloids in here, too. They all covered the story when Percy and Kelli got married.”
    “Do you know her?” Stride asked the coroner.
    “Kelli? I’d know her if I passed her on the street. Everybody does. Other than that, no.”
    “Does Percy have other family in town?”
    “Not that I know of. He’s not native. Me, I was born here, but Percy moved to Shawano in his twenties. He was a popular cop. People liked him. A lot of newcomers feel like they’re never accepted, but folks around here took to Percy, even before the hero business. It was probably because he and Tom became best friends. If Tom said he was okay, then locals figured they could trust him.”
    “Tom?” Stride asked.
    “Tom Bruin. He was the coroner before me. Tom was a real doc. If you were born in Shawano in the last 20 years, Tom probably gave your ass the first slap. The whole town took it hard when we lost him last fall.” Gandy shook his head and spat on the ground.
    “What happened?” Stride asked.
    Gandy made the letter C with his right hand.
    “Sorry,” Stride said.
    “Yeah, it’s a bitch. Tom was a good guy.” The coroner winced and took pressure off his bad leg. “I told him once that it sucked to have my foot ache all these years later.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He said, ‘Then why the hell did you shoot off your toes, you moron?’” Gandy chuckled. “That was Tom. I miss him. Sucks, too, because he and Anna had been trying to have a kid forever, and he was diagnosed just after she finally got pregnant. Baby wasn’t even six months old when he died. It’s been rough on her, being alone. My daughter babysits for her a lot. Percy was over there all the time, too. This is going to be as hard on Anna as it is on Kelli.”
    Stride nodded. Death was messy, no matter how or when it happened. It knocked around people’s lives like bowling pins. Cancer especially. His instinct in this case was to do what he always did. Investigate. Ask questions. He wanted to know more about Percy Andrews, the man whose life had intersected with his own at that one pivotal moment. Then he remembered that he was far from home, in someone else’s town.
    He shook the snow from his hair again and zipped up his leather jacket. He extended a hand to Neal Gandy. “Well, good luck,”