Animal, Vegetable, Murder by Judy Dailey

Author:Judy Dailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

* * *

After Detective Stanislaus dropped Mac at his basement apartment, he kicked off his shoes and poured himself a Belhaven. He sucked down a mouthful, then hung up his kilt and jacket, carefully smoothing out the wrinkles before he shut the closet door. He padded back to the kitchen, wearing only his football jersey and knee-high socks. He wasn’t in any hurry to paw through the pile of dirty laundry on the bedroom floor for a pair of knickers.

When he’d first moved in, he’d had a few inadvertently intimate encounters with his daughter-in-law, Nasreen, which quickly led to an ironclad rule enforced on both sides: No one entered Mac’s domain without knocking first.

With no fear of interruption, he took another swallow of beer, scratched his groin thoughtfully, and considered Stanislaus’s position in the murder investigation.

When Mac had been part of the Strathclyde Constabulary, there’d been a couple of times when politics interfered with good police work. Not in a murder case, but he’d seen a couple of rapes and some drug busts that had been dismissed as naught but high-spirited pranks because Daddy, or in one case Mummy, was well connected. Cases like that left a burn in yer gut that took a shite load of pints to quench.

Today Stanislaus had exhibited all the symptoms of gut burn, including a fist-in-yer-face bellicosity that hadn’t been present the night Ace’s house blew up.

Stanislaus was too much of a professional to do more than tip him a nod and a wink during the drive from the clubhouse, but Mac knew she wasn’t satisfied with the outcome of what that daft wanker, Ace Pennington, insisted on calling the poker-club murders.

But if he was right, and the chief had ordered the investigation closed for political reasons, so fookin’ what? Stanislaus hadn’t asked him to interfere—couldn’t ask him to interfere. If Stanislaus had told the chief what she thought of his decision, her position on the job would be delicate enough without her inviting an outsider like himself to come tromping through the rye. Besides, she probably sensed his loyalty wasn’t to the Seattle Police Department, but to that cheerful young woman, the aptly named Sunny Day.

And there was the rub. Mac believed—knew, fook it—the poor bastard found in Ace’s basement wasn’t the killer. If Mac was right, then Sunny was still at risk. Another gut burn calling for another swallow of Belhaven.

In the end, Mac’s problem boiled down to one question: how to unearth a killer everyone else believed was dead.

That one problem spawned a whole host of smaller problems as dark and unknown as a badger sett. He needed to think on it.

Mac flipped on his telly and started his Braveheart DVD from where he and Pete had last left off. When his grandson dropped by, they automatically turned the movie on, part as background noise, part in defiance since Pete’s mother, Nasreen, had banned violent movies for her thirteen-year-old son, and part as sheer male bonding. For a Bible-thumper, yon Gibson had a right deft hand with the muck and the gore.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.