“Good luck with that.”
It often proved to be exactly that kind of luck that nailed a criminal. For some reason she would never understand, people seemed to need to talk or brag about what they’d done.
Duke was disappointed, even though he’d admitted yesterday that his original plan had deflated. She wondered if she should set up meetings with the other five poker buddies anyway. Just to settle Duke’s mind. Although at this point, if he thought it was a waste, he wouldn’t want to pursue it any further.
Like Bud, she wasn’t buying the teenage home-invasion theory. She’d had trouble with it since she’d discovered Larry’s body. Too savage, too brutal to be kids who just wanted to steal. It would have been much easier for them to hightail it.
“You know,” she said to Duke as they pulled into her driveway, “it would not be smart for us to start following a single theory about Larry’s murder. It could blind us to something important.”
“I agree.” But that was all he said as he followed her into the house.
Now they were faced with reading more of his brother’s articles. Or at least the stories that seemed as if they could have lit a fire somewhere.
Like the one about murder for hire in the Army. That was the most recent investigative piece, and considering what had been happening to Duke, someone had been disturbed. Maybe more than disturbed.
Then she remembered Duke’s reaction when he learned the crime scenes were too clean. “Did Larry ever write about corrupt cops?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I didn’t read everything he wrote, even the big stories. He rarely mentioned them to me, so basically I never thought about it.”
Thus, it appeared, they were going to wade through the work product of a very prolific man.
“I can’t imagine being a reporter and having to write on such tight deadlines.”
Duke followed her down the hall. “Larry seemed to thrive on them.”
“He’d have to.”
EVENING WAS SETTLING in with dim light, and once again the colder temperatures settled in with it. Spring around here could even mean snowstorms, but right now Cat thought she detected dry air with the cold.
Duke took himself out for a run. She watched him leave, loping easily. She wished she could find such a comfortable pace while running.
Then she headed for her refrigerator to see if she could rustle up something for dinner for the two of them. She didn’t think Duke was going to want to stop reading after a meal. Dog with a bone, she thought, not for the first time.
He might even want to stay up all night. She wouldn’t be able to blame him, but she groaned inwardly anyway. Lack of sleep never made any investigation easier. She’d had to do it plenty of times, but when the brain got tired, so did its thinking.
Of course, she hadn’t been out to shop for two. Her fridge stared back at her with little that would stretch that far. She headed for the cupboard that served as her pantry and started scoping out the other foods.
All of which was a distraction from thinking about how dead in the water this case had grown.
Nothing in the fridge, nothing in the cupboard and nothing in the file.
Remembering the Hodgeses, she called. Mark Hodges was willing to meet with Duke. As an instructor at the junior college, he had a more convenient schedule for setting up an interview. His wife, Marjory, taught kindergarten, however.
“I don’t think she could manage meeting Duke until tomorrow night,” Mark said. “Will that do?”
“Absolutely. I appreciate this,” Cat replied.
Mark Hodges sighed audibly. “Some of the questions from the cops who came to investigate made me uneasy.”
Cat instantly grew alert. “How so?”
“Well...” He hesitated. “Frankly, I wondered if they were trying to connect it to the murder last week. It’s not anything they said, but a feeling I got. It bothered me because of what happened to Larry Duke. Are Marjory and I alive only because we were out of town?”
Cat wanted to reassure him and sought a way to do so without denying what might be true, however remotely. “I don’t think it’s likely, Mark. I mean, the two crimes probably aren’t related to begin with. Otherwise, from what I read in the file, they aren’t at all similar in terms of the burglaries.”
The last part wasn’t exactly true. The fact that both scenes seemed to be clean of physical evidence seriously gnawed at her. But Mark sounded relieved, and that was what mattered.
After she hung up, she thought about dinner again, then just shrugged it away. She didn’t have anything to cook other than eggs and toast, she didn’t really feel like cooking, and if Duke was hungry, she could bring out the peanut butter, jam and bread.
She might be a woman, but that didn’t make her responsible to cook for him. Heck, he wasn’t even a guest so much as a necessary invitee.
Satisfied, she resisted the urge to go to the computer again because he’d just want to go over it all again. She doubted he’d be happy with her deciding what was important.
And my, wasn’t she working herself into an absolute tear of a mood?
“Aagh,” she said to the empty room, then settled in to wait for Duke. At this rate, she was going to want action as much as Duke. She wondered if he was exacerbating her impatience.
Go exercise, she told herself. She had the time.
WHILE DUKE WAS pounding the pavement and Cat was pounding her treadmill, the three men out in the gorge huddled around a fire.
“I’m not used to this cold anymore,” the third man said. “I know it was worse in the ’Stan, but I’m feeling the freaking cold now.” Grousing came with the territory.
“It’s not the cold that’s getting to me,” said the second man. “I am so sick of being stuck. We’ve got
