Read Murder in the Choir (The Jazz Phillips Mystery Series) for Free Online

Other folks call it a shitty outlook.
    Dee looked up hurt, as if I had slapped him in the face. “There’s plenty of evidence,” I said gently. “We just have to find it. Focus on the investigation. Don’t let the bastards get to you like that.”
    “Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I got everybody and his dog on my back with this one. You’re damned lucky to be out of it these days. It ain’t much fun anymore.” Then he grinned. “Maybe I ought to go to work for you. Retirement seems to be treating you good.”
    “It has its moments, believe me,” I answered. “Now, tell me about that. Is it what I think it is?” I pointed to the wall. There was a reddish brown stain I had not seen before. It was in the shape of a human hand and looked liked blood.
    “That’s one of the jokers in this deck,” Dee told me. “It is blood. Smiley’s blood, and the print is the same size as his hand. Whether this is his hand print is not certain. There are no fingerprints or palm prints, and his hands were normal size.”
    I stood looking around. No obvious explanation how the handprint got where it did came to mind. “What do you think?”
    “Well, if it is Smiley’s hand print, then the neck shot would have had to come first. The eye shot would have taken him out immediately without much bleeding.Then, too, the angle is all wrong for the torso shot, unless the shooter was lying below him. There’s no bullet hole in the ceiling of the porch, so that would mean it would have to happen down on the grass. I guess that’s possible, but it doesn’t seem very likely to me. It would explain the hand print, but there’s no bloody trail showing that Smiley stumbled back onto the porch. No blood we
    could see on the roof, either.”
    I nodded. “It would put the shooter at a high risk of exposure, too.”
    “That’s what I thought, but faking a heart attack would be one way of getting Smiley off the porch. But why bother? Why not just walk up to him and blow him away?”
    “The amount of blood seems to say the throat shot came first.”
    Dee nodded. “Yeah, it probably would’ve killed him, but he might have survived if someone got the bleeding stopped. Still, the torso would have bled a lot, too. There was no way of telling. There was nothing in the hand print but blood—his blood—no fibers or other tissue.”
    I nodded and walked to one of the large smudges at the east end of the porch. “Let’s say Smiley was standing here. He could’ve been shot from down by the privy.”
    “Yeah, if he was facing the outhouse.”
    “How sure is the medical examiner about the throat wounds? Which was entry and which was exit?”
    Dee shrugged. “That’s one of the main problems. Young Frankenstein at the mortuary really messed things up. The ME couldn’t say for sure. He thought it went in the front, but he also said there was at least a forty-nine percent chance it came through from the back.”
    “Have you talked to the kid?”
    Dee shook his head. “No. He’s only fifteen and his dad’s a lawyer. Refused to let us interview the kid at all. I’m working on getting him immunity, but the local prosecutor is being ornery. Apparently the kid’s dad beat him up pretty bad in court a couple of times.”
    “Maybe we need to make the prosecutor an offer he can’t refuse,” I suggested lightly.
    Dee laughed. “I’m not going to ask what you mean by that.”
    I looked around. Between the pines and the oaks, the light was going fast. “I think I have enough for today. I need to read the file. We’ll come back in the morning.”
    As we walked across the square, an old man came out of the church and hobbled down the steps. He raised his cane and waved at us, trying to flag us down, and we turned and walked over to him. He stopped when he saw us turn and waited, breathing hard.
    “You the police?” he gasped, leaning on his cane and squinting at us. He was short and slight, bent almost double over his cane. His hair