Page 24 of Wild Justice

“I should finesse you, instead? Okay, I like the shirt you’re wearing, Kai. Is that…boyfriend material?”

She couldn’t even keep a straight face when she said it, just enjoying busting his balls for fun. He wasn’t upset about it. In his humble opinion, the world needed to stop being so uptight and laugh more.

“Why yes, it is,” he said, running a hand down his sleeve. “Thank you for noticing.”

“I’m a cop. I notice all sorts of things.”

“Oh yeah, what else?” he challenged, relaxing and enjoying the banter.

“I think I’m going to save some of that for after lunch. Seriously, what questions do you have? Like I said, I’ll answer any that won’t put the investigation at peril.”

He’d come here for an update on the case, not to share a pizza with her. This wasn’t a social call.

Right?

“I was hoping for an update on the case,” he replied. “What you know, what you don’t know. I was thinking that I would ask for any possible witnesses or people with information in the article that I write. If that’s okay with you?”

“I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “Sometimes pleas to the public can backfire. It can bring out a lot of people that don’t know anything to help, but they desperately want the attention. Next thing I know, my deputies are spending all of their time on the phones taking false tips and then having to wade through them to possibly get one that’s useful. Let me think about that.”

“I didn’t consider that,” he confessed. “If it helps, I could have the calls come to the newspaper office.”

“You have that large of a staff?”

Lulu had to already know the answer - which was a resounding no. Kai had an administrative assistant that worked part-time, and another reporter who also worked mostly part-time or whenever they found a story that was worth printing.

“No, I could put my phone number in the article.”

“Now you’re just being a glutton for punishment,” Lulu laughed. “You do not want to do that. One of my uncles did that, and he’s lived to regret it. No, if we list any number in, it should be to the station. But honestly, I don’t think we need to worry about saying that in the paper. If anyone has any information, they know to call the sheriff’s office.”

“True, I was thinking about someone who might be reluctant. Anyway, the latest?”

He didn’t want to belabor the idea. It had been a passing thought, and he wasn’t married to it. She’d made a good point about wading through all the calls they might get. He didn’t need crazies calling him at all hours of the night.

The timer dinged, and Lulu stood up to retrieve the pizza from the oven. She quickly cut it into slices and filled two plates.

“I don’t have a lot of information,” she said, handing him a plate before settling onto the floor and using the coffee table for her food and drink. He slid off the couch and did the same so that they were eye to eye. For some reason, he liked to see the expressions flit across her face as she spoke. “Right now, we don’t have an official time of death, although the coroner estimates it as between two and four in the morning. Dana’s purse was intact, including her identification, but any cash she was carrying was gone plus her credit cards. The initial murder scene was in her garage. That was obvious. That means she was transported to the lake. There was no sign of a struggle. We didn’t find a cell phone at the lake or her house. Nor any type of laptop or tablet. I’ll need to ask her family and friends whether she had one.”

“So, robbery is a possibility?”

“I can’t rule it out.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“That’s because I’m not,” she replied. “I don’t have strong feelings one way or another. What I do know is that we don’t have a rash of robberies in Harper that sometimes turn into murder. In fact, we don’t have a robbery problem at all. People generally don’t get mugged on the streets of our town. I suppose it could be the start of something, though. Never say never.”

“You think someone killed her? On purpose.”

“The most dangerous person for a woman is the man in her life. That’s just statistics,” Lulu said, popping a piece of the crust into her mouth. “I also have doubts as to whether a robber would bother with transporting her body to a second location. They usually want to get in and out as quickly as possible.”

“Unless he or she could be tied back to her home somehow,” he finished the sentence for her. “Then they would want to move her.”

“They’d be taking a chance of being seen. They also couldn’t be a weakling. Dana would have been - pardon my phrasing here - dead weight. She was five-nine and around a hundred and forty pounds. That would be a lot for a woman to handle unless she had help. Not impossible, of course, but awkward if she didn’t know the best way to carry that weight. And I’d assume that they wouldn’t want any attention on them while carrying a body in the middle of the night.”

“You haven’t ruled out a female?”

“I’m keeping an open mind. It’s amazing what a determined human being can achieve.”

“Can we go back to the head wound?” he asked. “Do you have any idea of the weapon?”

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