Read Online Cop Out by Susan Dunlap - Free Book Online

page. “Lots of short reports. Years apart. Here’s one on the resale of stolen T-shirts from a vendor’s table on the Avenue and another on vandalism to display tables. Doesn’t look like there’s anything major, but there’s no name or address on the file.”
    “Must be a regular customer.”
    I nodded, replacing the file. “And Ott’d know how to reach him.”
    I plucked another file. “Pot thefts.”
    Leonard laughed. “Ott is hard up. Even we give marijuana low priority.”
    “No, not drugs. Flowerpots. And some land of chemicals, missing along with the pots. And no name or address.”
    Outside, footsteps resounded on the stairs.
    Leonard moved back, opened the door. The draft wafted under Ott’s big desk and tossed an eight-by-eleven sheet, a printout of a newspaper article, onto my foot. I scanned the sheet. There was no header, nothing to suggest which newspaper had been copied.
Historical Review Subject Chosen: Famous Mine Case Disinterred. Mediation to be tried this time.
    At a meeting of the Historical Society last Thursday board members J. Reynolds Remington, Martin A. Burbacher, Christian Jensen III, Devlin P. O’Malley, Dr. Thomas Ashford Everett, Eldridge Everett, Cornelius E. Whipple, and Kyle Lovington Jones reviewed the records of suitable local cases for the third annual historical review to be presented this next spring in the community meeting hall at City Hall. It was decided that the
    Presumably the article continued on a following page, but that was a page I didn’t have. I bent, eyed Ott’s floor in all directions. It offered no other sheet.
    “Looks like Hemming brought it himself,” I said.
    But Leonard’s attention was already on the hallway.
    I turned the sheet over. Blank. I read it again and wondered why the printer couldn’t have started at the top of the page so the entire article fitted on it. So much for the benefits of technology.
    “Smith!”
    I glanced up at Inspector Doyle, my old boss from Homicide Detail.
    “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Smith! I guess it’s no surprise to find you here in Herman Ott’s office. So the little rat finally bought it, huh?”
    “No, not Ott, Inspector. Bryant Hemming.”
    “In Ott’s office? Where’s Ott?”
    I shrugged. “Out. No sign of him.”
    Doyle sighed. “Isn’t it just like the little rat? Leaves a corpse in his office, hightails out, and holes up. And how many man-hours’ll he eat up till we dig him out?”
    “Aren’t you talking ‘scenario before evidence’ here?”
    He didn’t answer, a tacit yes. “Well, Smith, you can go on back to patrol.”
    That would have been the safe thing to do, the smart career move. I glanced at Ott’s desk, seeing not its clean surface but remnants of the sparrings he and I had had over the years, many I’d lost, some I’d won, but none I’d left without baring bits of Ott he wouldn’t otherwise have exposed. Encounters like Sunday afternoon’s that had bared the “thing” Ott couldn’t bring himself to reveal. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, wouldn’t—or couldn’t—return my calls, and now a man was dead in his office. I didn’t know whether my words came from outrage at Ott, or worry, or just plain foolhardiness. “Inspector, no one knows Ott as well as I do.”
    “You saying you can find him, Smith?” Before I could answer, he said, “Well, then, you go ahead.”

CHAPTER 9
    I GOT I NSPECTOR’S D OYLE’S okay to get back into Ott’s office after Raksen, the ID tech, had finished. Ott had been in this office since he left college a quarter of a century ago. The walls here had to be a fingerprint archive of the Berkeley left. When he walked in here, Raksen would be in heaven. He would dust every surface; left unleashed, he would turn the office and its contents black.
    But print dust was the least of Ott’s problems. I made my way out into the hallway, through a knot of off-duty officers. The garden-variety murder scene is no great draw, but one in the