Gin Jones - Helen Binney 01 - A Dose of Death by Gin Jones

procreational. Getting Laura involved was the only way to distract Lily.
    By the time Laura ran out of newly discovered tidbits about pregnancy and infant care, Helen was able to avoid giving Lily Tate ‘s name by claiming it was late, and she needed to get some rest.
    Helen tried to go back to the newspaper articles about the Remote Control Burglar, but it turned out that she really was too tired for the sort of detailed analysis that would be necessary for any insights the police and the reporter had missed. She decided it would be best to get a good night’s sleep and return to the clippings when she was refreshed.
    After breakfast the next morning, Helen checked the newspaper ‘s website to see if there was any breaking news on the investigation of either the murder or the burglaries. The only thing she found of interest was the notice of a memorial service for Melissa, scheduled for late that afternoon. She hadn’t expected it to be so soon, but if there were no family members who might need to travel to get here, she supposed there was no reason to delay putting Melissa to rest.
    No matter how much Helen had loathed the nurse, she felt obliged to attend the service. As her ex-husband ‘s ambassador, she’d been to plenty of memorials for people she’d detested. She could do it one more time.
    Helen called the car service and arranged for Jack to pick her up in time to arrive halfway through the service. Normally, she ‘d have planned to arrive early, slip in and out quickly and largely unnoticed, but it had struck her that it would be interesting to see who else was mourning Melissa. Pierce was adamant that Melissa had no family, no significant other, while Tate was confident that the killer would turn out to have been someone close to the victim. Helen hadn’t thought to ask Tate whether killers routinely showed up at memorial services, the same way arsonists reportedly showed up at the fires they set. If so, someone should be checking out everyone who attended the memorial, and the police weren’t likely to do it, not as long as they were convinced the Remote Control Burglar was their culprit.
    After checking her closet to make sure she ‘d kept at least one outfit suitable for attending a funeral, and finding a plain black sweater set and black pants, Helen settled down to study the print-outs she’d made from the newspaper’s archives. Even after Loring had realized the crimes had likely been committed by a single person, the articles were short, mostly just paraphrasing of the police blotter summaries, with the occasional bit of speculation about the culprit’s motive for taking such inconsequential items. They verged on opinion pieces, rather than investigative journalism.
    There was one longer article by Geoff Loring a few months ago, starting with a summary of the dates and locations of the burglaries, the names of the victims, and a fairly detailed list of the items stolen from each location. He ‘d also interviewed the police chief, eliciting only the standard response about how the police department was doing the best it could with limited resources. The article also included a few comments by random people on the street, most of whom seemed to think the burglaries were some sort of joke, not to be taken seriously.
    Despite the official police stance that every crime was serious, they hadn ‘t seemed any more concerned about the incidents than the general public was. Helen could understand why the police would work harder at catching a killer than catching a petty burglar, and even why they might have felt a little guilty when that petty burglar had become a vicious killer. But why did they think the one type of crime had morphed into the other?
    As far as she could tell, there hadn ‘t been any sort of gradual escalation that might hint at the future violence. If the police theory was correct, the burglar had made a sudden switch from one end of the crime spectrum to the other, from petty