Read The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries) for Free Online

decorated to suit my grandmother’s no nonsense, spartan tastes, but the seating area consisted of two well-made easy chairs and a matching sofa. The chintz upholstery may have faded some, but the springs and cushions had held up to years of constant use. With a glass-topped coffee table in the middle, it was the perfect place to put your feet up after spending a long day doing the downstairs hustle.
    When I brought the coffee—a mug for Charles and one for me, too, I found him studying his surroundings. “You live here by yourself?” he asked.
    I nodded. “Once burned, twice shy.”
    He gave me a rueful grin. “Ain’t that the truth. So tell me the story. Pop told me some of it, but if I’m going to help you, I need to hear the whole thing—from the very beginning.”
    There’s something demeaning about having to confess the intimate details of the worst failures of your life to complete strangers. For the second time in a single twenty-four-hour period, I found myself having to go back over that whole miserable piece of history, but I didn’t hold anything back. I understood that if the threatening phone calls to Faith had originated from my place of business, then I was in deep trouble and needed all the help I could get. In that regard, Charles Rickover was the only game in town.
    He didn’t bother taking notes as I talked. He listened attentively but without interruption as I made my way through the whole thing, ending with a detailed description of my encounter with Detectives Jamison and Shandrow earlier that afternoon. When I went to refill our coffee cups, I returned to find him staring at the office space at the far end of the room. It consisted of an old wooden teacher’s desk that Grandma Hudson had liberated from a secondhand store somewhere in front of a bank of used and abused secondhand filing cabinets.
    “Is that your computer?” Charles asked, nodding toward my desk and my pride and joy, a tiny ten-inch Toshiba Portégé. The laptop sat in isolated splendor on the desk’s otherwise empty surface. Having learned my lesson about allowing other people, namely Faith, handle accounting records for my business, I do those functions myself now, on the computer. The Toshiba also holds the first few chapters of my several unfinished novels.
    “That’s it,” I said.
    “Mind if I take a look?”
    “Sure.”
    Charles walked over to the desk, slipped on a pair of gloves, and flipped up the lid on the computer. It lit up right away. He leaned over, studied the screen, and then turned back to me with a puzzled expression on his face. “Dead men don’t lie?” he asked.
    “It’s a story,” I explained. “Fiction. It’s the title for one of the novels I’m working on.”
    “You leave your computer sitting here like this?”
    I shrugged. “Why not? I’m the only one who lives here.”
    “You may be the only person who lives here, but you’re not the only person who has access.”
    That was a scary thought and one I had never considered. Since I was downstairs all day, every day, I never locked the place up except on those very rare occasions when I was out of town.
    “You’re saying one of my people may have been coming up here and messing with my computer behind my back?”
    Charles didn’t deign to respond. “Tell me about this mystery convention you went to. What’s it called again?”
    “Bouchercon.”
    “How did you register for it?”
    “On line,” I answered, nodding toward the computer. “On that.”
    Charles sat down in front of the computer and made himself at home. He typed in a few keystrokes. “Yup,” he said. “Here it is in your browser history, the Bouchercon Web site. What about your hotel? What was that again, the Talisman didn’t you say?”
    I nodded. The man may not have been taking notes during my long recitation of woes, but he had clearly been paying attention.
    “Is there anything in here about your dealings with your ex?”
    I nodded again. “There’s