Read As Dog Is My Witness for Free Online

area rabbis who wanted him to report any
Orthodox Jews caught speeding on Saturday, when they were barred
from getting behind the wheel of any car, speeding or not.
    Strikingly, he still chose to take my call. “Aaron,
I’m not going to send a patrol car to follow Leah home from school
every day. I’m not. The child can walk the three blocks on her
own.”
    “If it was your daughter . . .  I
began.
    Barry rumbled, which I took for a chuckle. “My
daughter,” he said, “is a six-foot-one black woman and can kick the
ass of anyone who gives her trouble.”
    “Could you send her to follow Leah home from
school?”
    “What do you want, Aaron?”
    I had to be delicate about this, because Barry is a
sensitive guy. The two other times I investigated a murder, he felt
my participation was—shall we say?—inappropriate. In fact, he
thought I should “stick to writing about which DVD player is cooler
than the others.” Because the proper presentation here would be
extremely important, I decided it’d be better to ease into the
subject.
    “I’m investigating this murder . . . 
I began. I actually heard him drop the phone.
    “I’m sorry, Aaron,” Barry said after picking up the
handset. “I thought you said something about investigating a
murder. And I’m sure you couldn’t have said that, because I
remember telling you the last time that if you chose to do that
again, the next murder you investigated would be your own.”
    “This is different.”
    “The last time, you said it was ‘different.’ And I
ended up sending two officers to cut you out of a chair you’d been
duct-taped to in a hotel in New Brunswick. So don’t tell me it’s
different.”
    “I wasn’t in any danger, was I? Besides, this is an
Asperger’s thing. Lori Shery wants me to do it.” Lori once spoke to
the state association of police chiefs about AS people getting
involved with the criminal justice system, and she had so wowed
Barry, he was offering to instruct a course for his officers by the
end of the same week.
    He knew when he was trapped. “Lori?” he asked
tentatively.
    “Yeah. And you don’t want me to tell her you called
me off, do you?”
    He groaned, which sounded like Darth Vader having an
asthma attack. “What do you need, Aaron?”
    “How well do you know the chief of police in North
Brunswick?”
    “Not very. Her name is Les Baker.”
    “ Her name?”
    “They’re very progressive in North Brunswick.”
    “Cool.”
    Barry’s voice showed concern. “Is this about that guy
shot with the old gun?”
    “Yeah. The kid they picked up for it has AS. He’s
into guns, but his mom swears he doesn’t own any.”
    “The fact that they found the gun in his room might
indicate otherwise. Did you tell your mother everything you were
doing when you were twenty-two?”
    “I don’t have Asperger’s. They’re not incapable of
lying, but most of them are really bad at it.”
    “You probably did tell your mother everything
you were doing when you were twenty-two.” Barry is a nice man, but
he can be a real pain when he puts his mind to it.
    “Anyway,” I sighed, “I’m guessing you don’t know
Chief Baker well enough to call her and put in a good word for
me.”
    “Which word would that be? ‘Irritant?’ ‘Problem?’
‘Obstruction?’”
    “You’re a nice man,” I told him, “but you can be a
real pain when you put your mind to it.”
    “That’s exactly what I could tell her about you,”
Dutton said, his chuckle rumbling again. “If you want me to.”
    I hung up on him. It gives me a certain feeling of
power to do that to my local chief of police, no matter how much
he’ll make me pay for it later.
    The cell phone rang a minute or two later. I checked
the incoming number, but didn’t recognize it, so I opened my
phone.
    “Hello?”
    The voice was female, but authoritative. “Aaron
Tucker?” “Depends. Who’s calling?”
    “This is Chief Leslie Baker of the North Brunswick
Police