Into The Heat (Sandy Reid Mystery Series Book 6) by Rod Hoisington

Author:Rod Hoisington
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2015-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

With both hands gripping her umbrella, Sandy leaned against the rainstorm. She stood watching the crime scene investigation from the front porch of the Bardner home as close to the rain soaked body of Charlene Faulk as the police would allow. Outside the yellow tape, stood a rank of umbrella-tented neighbors shuffling under the rain like motorists trying to get a better look at a roadside disaster. The cops inside the tape had already seen too much.

It was one thing to learn that someone she liked had died—quite another for her to watch the humbled body being zipped up in a black body bag by the police in their yellow foul-weather gear. Sandy was angry, but she knew it wasn’t about her; it was about a precious life and a useless death. She remembered reading that all deaths come too soon, but that touch of philosophy added no comfort.

She wondered what Charlene could possibly have known of life in her few short years. Barely enough time to begin thinking about living, before being zipped out of sight, cold, wet and dead. What had she experienced in life before the few weeks of a fantasy fling with Lester? An exciting yet loveless fling, which she’d scored as both good and bad. Of her total lifetime, her involvement with Lester was a mere split second—a brief encounter now proven fatal; the collateral damage of someone else’s wrongdoing. Much of her talk in the office had been about being lonely; had she ever experienced romance in her short life? Whatever the opposite of loneliness is, Charlene might never have known it. She could not have looked lonelier lying there on the rain soaked lawn.

At last, the scene was quiet. The police vehicles with their blazing red-blue rack lights had left the scene, along with the Medical Examiner’s van bearing the body of Charlene Faulk. Her car was also hauled away. When the jumbo, satellite TV van closed up and sauntered away, the show was over, and the last of the neighbors drifted back into their homes. Two police officers in their vehicles remained stationed silently at the curb. One would stand watch over the yellow-taped crime scene until CSI returned in the morning to continue in the light of day; the other was assigned to safeguard Sandy.

She closed her eyes tightly for a minute to block it all out, then shook the umbrella and went inside the Bardner house. She would weep later.

For the next hour and a half, Lester Bardner, with Sandy at his side, sat in his spacious Florida room facing questions from Detective Jaworski and Mel Shapiro. When the officials had left, Lester made himself a drink from the sidebar and sat on the couch across from Sandy. He continued to be distressed, not with the death, but from their questioning.

“I thought you were supposed to protect me from such questioning. They burst in here and started ordering me around. Turn off the TV. Don’t mix a drink. Sit down.

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