Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

if I was dreaming, but not really caring. It felt real enough.
    I passed the night in a dreamless sleep, not waking until the telephone rang at the ungodly hour of six in the morning. Crawford was next to me and closer to the phone; he mumbled a greeting into the receiver before passing it over to me.
    “I wanted you to hear this before anyone else.” I recognized the gravelly voice of my friend Mac, the medical examiner. An apology for the early hour would have been nice, but obviously was not forthcoming.
    “What’s that?”
    “You were right. Or should I say, ‘she was right.’ ” I heard him take a loud sip of something and mutter, “Jeez, burned my tongue.”
    I waited a beat before asking him again why he had called.
    “Oh, Ginny Miller. She was right. Wilmott was poisoned.” I could picture him looking at the ceiling, deep in thought. “Cause of death? Poisoning. By arsenic. A rather old method but a quite effective one.”
    I sat up straighter. Crawford, a champion sleeper, had already fallen into a coma and was missing the entire conversation, or at least my side of it. “Really?”
    “Really.”
    “You know Ginny is dead, right?”
    Mac chuckled. “Of course I do, Alison. She’s already here. She arrived just after eight o’clock last night,” he said, so casually that it seemed like she had kept a dinner reservation as opposed to a date with the autopsy table. “Okay, now I’m in a heap of trouble, so let me get back to work. Gotta figure out how I’m going to spin this one so I don’t lose my job. Reezie doesn’t have expensive tastes but she does like to eat.”
    “Thanks, Mac.” I don’t know why he had heeded my plea to look at Carter’s tissue samples after ignoring Ginny, but I was glad that he did. George Miller was now a widower but at least he wasn’t a guest of the state, as well.
    “No problem,” he said, adding before he bid me adieu, “I don’t know why, but I like you. But I have to be honest, you are a giant pain in the ass.”
    “Thank you, I guess?”
    “You’re welcome.”
    I looked over at Crawford. This was an interesting but not unexpected turn of events. I leaned into his warm body again and fell back to sleep wondering if I would at least get a thank-you card from George Miller for all of my trouble.

Twenty-Eight
     
    I didn’t get a thank-you note for my trouble. What I did get was a citation from the police department for having cars parked in front of my house overnight and having obstructed the DPW’s pickup on garbage day.
    No good deed goes unpunished.
    Kevin had done his usual ridiculously bad job of parallel-parking, and Crawford forgetting, I guess, that he wasn’t responding to a homicide, had parked the wrong way on the wrong side of the street, facing east when he should have been facing west. Neither of them should have been parked on the street overnight but didn’t use the sense God had given them to remember to pull into the driveway. When I reminded the two of them at breakfast that morning that they had broken a long-standing village parking rule, they both proclaimed their ignorance of village ordinance. I responded by throwing the citation, which had been found attached to my full garbage cans, between Kevin’s bowl of oatmeal and Crawford’s toast.
    “You two can decide if you want to split this fifty-fifty or some other way.” I grabbed a coffee mug from the cabinet and poured myself a cup. “I don’t care. But I’m not paying it.” I took a sip of coffee and noticed that we were a roommate short. “Where’s Queen?”
    Kevin shrugged. “Not sure. I think she’s doing PI stuff. It’s too early for Hooters to be open.”
    Crawford leaned into Kevin. “You’ve met her?”
    “Of course. She’s a lovely girl.”
    Dry spell or not, Crawford’s insistence on meeting Queen was wearing thin. I told him to stick a sock in it.
    “You’re kind of mean,” Kevin said, as if this thought had dawned on him for the first time.
    “She is, right?” Crawford asked, shoving a piece of toast into his mouth and washing it down with coffee.
    “Listen, you two. I’ve seen two people die in the space of a week and I’m not in the mood to listen to your opinions of me.” I looked at Kevin. “Without me, I might remind you, you’re homeless.” I turned to Crawford but couldn’t think of anything to say. Because without me, he would probably have a very calm and serene life.
    Crawford got up to pour himself a cup of