The Gone Dead Train by Lisa Turner Page A

“Dr. Thomas Paul. Another pain in the ass, just like Travis.”
    â€œIs Travis dead?”
    â€œAneurysm. He collapsed on top of a corpse at a scene. Only time the guy ever fucked up.” Edgar chuckled. “Dr. Paul is gone too, if that’s your next question.”
    Billy would check the archives to verify Kellogg’s opinion of Travis’s track record. If Travis was that good at his job, his name would be all over the commendation lists.
    â€œDo you remember the Poston case?”
    â€œI remember the time. King had been shot, and we were all pulling double shifts. We put trouble down where we found it.” He pantomimed whipping out a baton and whacking someone. “Bam, bam. Don’t nobody move.” He laughed and holstered his invisible baton. “The mayor, the director, the DA, the governor—all of them were trembling in their wingtips.”
    Edgar had been an eyewitness to the times, a primary source. Billy thought about the stack of photos and the possibility that Edgar could identify the locations, maybe even the two guys in the shots. He would try to come by with the photos this afternoon.
    He sat down to summarize his notes. Could the medical examiner have designated the case “undetermined” instead of “accidental”? Absolutely. The ruptured fuel line provided reasonable doubt, but only by the slimmest margin. Had Dr. Paul made his choice out of political expediency? Probably, but impossible to know. Would the DA have pushed to avoid sensationalizing the death of a controversial black woman? No doubt about it. But Billy wouldn’t go into all of that with Augie. It would only encourage him.
    Billy turned his attention to Davis’s and Lacy’s sheets. They were clean except for a few offenses of public drunkenness and vagrancy. What surprised him was finding reports that predated Katrina. The guys had put it out that they’d been forced to leave New Orleans because of the storm. Tacking on the word “Katrina” added sympathy to any hard-luck story, but that didn’t seem like Davis’s and Lacy’s style.
    Frankie had texted that she planned to research the Davis and Lacy cases after signing off duty today. When she finished, she would call. That left him to contact a friend at the medical examiner’s office who could check on their autopsy reports. The medical examiner was back in town. The ME’s findings would dictate how involved he could be in either case. A closed case, which was what he expected Red’s to be, made it available to anyone. An open investigation would be off-limits, even to him, until his reinstatement, which was several days off.
    As he walked out, he checked for Frankie’s call. What he found were thirteen texts and six voice mails from Augie. They added up to one message: “Meet me at Rock of Ages Funeral Home, midtown.”

Chapter 19
    F rankie’s night shift dragged until dispatch notified her of shots fired during a home invasion. Turned out the burglar was the homeowner’s soon-to-be ex-wife. After a girls’ night out, the drunken woman had made the mistake of returning to her old address. When her key didn’t fit, she crawled through the dog door. Her husband was waiting with an unlicensed Ruger .357.
    Paramedics said the husband had only winged her. However, possession of the Ruger and the possibility that the man had seized an opportunity to shortcut an unhappy divorce put him in the back of Frankie’s squad car. She transported the husband, still in his pajamas, to the Glamour Slammer, better known as the Criminal Justice Complex at 201 Poplar.
    After processing him, she’d checked in as off duty with dispatch and took the elevator to the tenth-floor burglary squad room. Her friend, Detective Wayne Dixon, had offered to take a break so she could use his computer to do a search on Davis and Lacy and have her findings available for her meeting with