Read Brody & Hannigan 02 - Grand Theft Lotto for Free Online

store brand chili.
    "You two hungry? I can open another can."
    "Marie, has anyone else contacted you in the last couple of hours?"
    Marie turned to look at them. "Contacted me?"
    "Called? Dropped by to talk?"
    Marie shook her head slowly. "No. Should they have?"
    Hannigan slanted a quick look at Brody. He put his hand on her back, understanding her hesitancy but beginning to lose patience. There was no good way to tell a woman her son was dead, and putting off the dreadful moment wasn't going to change that fact.
    "Mrs. Barlow," he said, "I'm sorry to have to tell you that your son Dwayne is dead."
    Marie's only reaction was to turn back to the stove and pick up the wooden spoon still sitting in the pot of chili. She gave the pot's contents a couple of slow stirs before she spoke. "Car crash?"
    "He was murdered," Hannigan answered.
    "Oh." Marie took the spoon out of the pot, scraped the chili residue off on the inside rim of the pot and laid the utensil on a small metal plate that seemed to be for that very purpose. She turned off the stove and removed the pot from the burner before she turned back to face them. Her eyes were still dry, but she had aged about a decade in the span of seconds.
    "I'm so sorry, Marie," Hannigan said.
    "Do you know who did it?"
    "Not yet," Brody answered, letting his left hand settle against the small of his partner's back. He felt her body tremble beneath his fingertips, and while his ego might like to think it a response to his touch, he was pretty sure it was delayed reaction to finding her cousin brutally murdered.
    She was tough as nails, but even tough girls had their breaking points.
    "We're going to find out," Hannigan said firmly.
    "I don't know if Dwayne even has a suit that still fits," Marie said. "He stopped going to Sunday school so long ago."
    Hannigan glanced at Brody with an expression he'd never seen before on her familiar face.
    Helplessness.
    "Why don't I help you find a suit?" Brody offered, giving Hannigan's back a final stroke before he got up and went around the bar to Marie.
    Marie seemed startled by the offer but managed a wan smile. "Okay. His room is at the back."
    As Marie started slowly toward the back of the house, Brody turned to look at Hannigan one more time. She was looking down at her hands, which were so tightly clenched her knuckles had gone white. She didn't turn to look at him, her profile distant and untouchable.
    He felt an answering hollowness in the pit of his stomach as he followed Marie Barlow to her dead son's room.
     
     
    "So, you're not going to talk to me for the rest of the night?"
    Brody's murmur filled the heavy silence that had fallen over the car from the moment they'd left her cousin's house for the cross-town trip to her own little bungalow on Rosedale Drive. Though his tone was so low as to be almost imperceptible, it was such an intrusion on the quiet that it sent a little shockwave jangling through Hannigan's nerves.
    "I think I'm out of things to say," she admitted.
    "I know you said you weren't close to Dwayne, but you seem to be taking this whole thing pretty hard."
    She didn't know how to answer his unspoken question. She hadn't lied; she and Dwayne hadn't spoken ten words to each other in the past decades. Her job and his lack of scruples had conspired to keep them spinning away from each other any time their orbits came into accidental contact.
    But there had been a time, years ago when they were both just kids, when Dwayne had been her favorite cousin. Unlike her older brothers, who saw her as a nuisance when she tagged along behind them, trying to keep up with their rough and tumble activities, Dwayne had welcomed her as an ally and a compatriot in his own adventures. They'd hiked mountain trails, fished woodland streams, pitched baseballs and footballs and done a hundred different things that had delighted her tomboy heart and sealed a bond of friendship between them that had lasted until their teenage years.
    She felt Brody's