you working one case at a time, while we have tons of active cases.”
She winced at that. “You’re right. It isn’t fair, and I know I’m not doing anything you guys wouldn’t do, if you had the spare man-hours.”
“If we had spare man-hours,” he repeated, “we could do all kinds of stuff.”
She could hear the fatigue and the frustration in his voice and knew it wasn’t fair for her to egg him on. She was only doing it because he had laughed at her earlier. Then again, she still wanted to ask questions about stringers and decking but didn’t think it would work out so well for her. “We were talking about dinner,” she said cautiously.
“I can’t do it tonight,” he said regretfully. “I’ll be lucky if I get out of the office today at all.”
“You’re not sleeping there, are you?”
“It won’t be the first time,” he said, “although it’s typically more like catnaps in my chair. Then I get up and walk around, clearing my head.”
“You’d be much better off to go home and to get at least four hours of sleep and then go back refreshed,” she said, with just enough of a tone of authority in her voice to make him chuckle.
“What is this?” he asked. “Are you worried about me? And when did you become such an expert on sleepless nights anyway?”
“Well, that was my life,” she said. “Not that I was working, but I would sit up and worry.”
“Worry about what?”
“My future, my marriage, my lack of children, what I was doing with my life, and how I got into such a loveless marriage, for starters.”
“Sorry.” A note of surprise was in his voice. “I wasn’t expecting to dredge up bad memories.”
“No, I’m sure you weren’t. I was thinking I do need to talk to your brother, since my second fall through my little bridge canceled our first attempt.”
“Good,” he said with hearty satisfaction. “I’ll set it up.”
“Fine,” she said, “and it better be soon, otherwise I’ll wish I hadn’t brought it up.”
“Calling him now,” Mack said with a chuckle. “I’ll let you know how the call goes.”
“Good enough,” Doreen responded. “I have a few other things I can work on today.”
“Work on?”
“Yeah, work on,” she repeated. “Nothing to do with ice picks or any other cases.”
“Good. How about you just work on your garden and leave the rest of this criminal work to us?”
“Sure, as apparently you’ve got places to go and things to do on your criminal cases,” she said with an airy tone of voice, “maybe I will.”
Mack snorted at that and hung up.
Doreen grinned and looked down at her phone, realizing just how much she liked talking to him. She placed the phone on the counter, then put on a pot of coffee, and said to her critters, “You know what? It’s lunchtime.” She was kind of bored and restless, but, at the same time, she was happy. She’d done her day’s work at Millicent’s, and Mack would owe her money again for the gardening she’d done. Millicent had tantalized Doreen with the thought of another case, but she was happy to put it all off to one side and just rest for a bit.
Maybe a secondhand bookstore would be a good idea. She’d love to grab an armload of books, then come back and chill on her deck. Speaking of her deck, … maybe she should mark off the accumulated materials from her supply list, so she knew what she would still have to buy. Or maybe it was really just a time to do nothing and to relax. She could visit Nan.
She leaned against the counter as she contemplated her afternoon. It was hard to imagine it could be a bad afternoon when it was a beautiful sunny Friday.
As soon as the coffee was done, she grabbed a cup and walked to her kitchen table, putting down the cup for now because it was too hot to drink. She stared at the papers and files all over the small room and snatched up the basket of newspaper clippings.
Bob Small. She went through the clippings. She hadn’t done anything about that serial killer yet. She didn’t want to think of it as something that could wait, but it was a big project, and she needed to be at her best to find the clues. And apparently he was suspected of killing over a dozen people, so she didn’t want to get into something so horrific without having a fresh notepad