Read Valley of the Lost for Free Online Page B

remain on the heroin case. We have too much going on to drop it now, and anyway there might be a connection with the girl Ashley. You don’t have any more daughters getting married this summer, do you?”
    Lopez grinned. “Vacation all finished for the year, boss. Although I do have a ticket in tonight’s big lottery. Thirty mil on the line.”
    “That ticket wins and we’ll be closing the whole department. We’re all in on it. I’ll back you up and take the Ashley case. In my gut, I think she was killed. Tied up and shot full of heroin. Whether the dosage was intended to be enough to kill her’s for the courts to decide. But even if she was tied up, quote-unquote, voluntarily,” he made marks in the air with his hands, “and took the drug of her own free will, I intend to find out who and where she got it from. We done?”
    “Done, boss.”
    Winters walked down the hall to the office administrator’s office.
    She was at her desk. Typing with a speed that had her fingers a blur of motion. Barb was the longest serving member of the department. Even more than Jim Denton, the daytime front-desk constable. The young guys joked that over the ages Denton had worn an imprint of his big boots into the floor underneath the console.
    “Barb,” Winters said, very politely. They were always polite to Barb, otherwise she might report her displeasure to the Chief Constable, who lived in fear of her. “Can you please find out who the Ashley Doe baby’s been placed with? Then find a public health nurse and set up an appointment for us to go and have a look at him. When you have a minute, but sooner would be better than later.”
    “Sure,” she said.
    “And remind me what the number for the Gazette is. For some reason I keep forgetting.”
    “I’ll e-mail it to you,” she said. “Or you’ll lose it between here and your office.”
    “Thanks. The cop brain is genetically programmed to avoid any and all contact with journalists. I couldn’t remember that number if I tried.”
    “But you won’t try. You haven’t told me what you’ll be bringing to the annual summer pot luck at my place.” Barb turned back to her computer. “I expect the Winters’ family specialty.”
    “We’re working on making a decision. It’s not easy.” He himself couldn’t cook anything that didn’t involve a microwave, and Eliza was worse. They’d have to buy something, and hope it looked homemade. As always, the thought of his wife lifted his heart just a bit. Twenty-five years of enthusiastic sex verses home cooked meals. He’d always known that he’d made the right choice.
    ***
    Lucky Smith, nee Lucy Casey, had never had a fondness for the police. Pigs, she and her friends called them in their youth. She’d been arrested for assaulting a police officer at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. When, in her opinion, the police had rioted. She’d worn that arrest as a badge of honor for many years. She’d been a sophomore at the University of Seattle when her boyfriend, a math student who failed his year because he spent more time on campus politics than on math, had been drafted. Andy Smith had asked her to come to Canada with him. Until the day he died, Andy’s father, Andrew Smith Senior, had refused to have anything to do with his draft-dodging son.
    But Andy Smith Junior and Lucy Casey had settled in Trafalgar where they’d set about making a life and a family of their own.
    With one child a lawyer for a big oil company and the other a cop, Lucky sometimes reflected on the irony.
    She’d finished feeding Miller, and was settling the baby down for a nap when the phone rang. Sergeant Winters asking if he could stop by to talk about Ashley. Moonlight aside, Lucky still didn’t care much for the police, force of habit perhaps, but there was something about John Winters that made her think she could be persuaded to change her mind. He was in his late-forties, early fifties maybe. Tall and lean and