Kansas City Secrets Read Online Free Page A

steering wheel in an effort to squeeze out the images of bits and pieces of fallen comrades in a remote desert village. He fought off the more troubling memory of prying a pistol out of a good man’s dead hand.
    He should be in a bar someplace getting drunk, or at Mount Washington Cemetery, allowing himself to weep over the grave of Army Captain James Stecher. Max and his team had rescued Jimmy from the insurgents’ camp where he and two other NCOs been held hostage and tortured for seven days, but a part of Jimmy had never truly made it home. Eight years ago today, he’d put his gun in his mouth and ended the nightmares and survivor’s guilt that had haunted him since their homecoming.
    Max had found the body, left the Army and gone back to school to become a cop all within a year. Getting bad guys off the streets went a ways toward making his world right again. Following up on some remote, random possibility of a lead on the anniversary of Jimmy’s senseless suicide did not.
    â€œWhoa, brother.” The voice of his partner, Trent Dixon, sitting in the passenger seat across from him, thankfully interrupted his dark thoughts. “We’re not on a high-speed chase here. Slow it down before some uniform pulls us over.”
    Max rolled his eyes behind his wraparound sunglasses but lifted his foot. A little. He snickered around the unlit cigar clenched between his teeth. “Tell me again why we’re drivin’ out to visit this whack job Rosie March? She’s hardly a reliable witness. Murder suspects generally aren’t.”
    Tall, Dark and Hard to Rile chuckled. “Because her brother—a convicted killer with motive for killing Richard Bratcher—is our best lead to solving Bratcher’s murder, and he’s not talking to us. But he is talking to his sister. At least, she’s the only person who visits him regularly. Maybe we can get her to tell us what he knows. Besides, you know one of the best ways to investigate a cold case like this one is to reinterview anyone associated with the original investigation. Rosemary March had motive for wanting her abusive boyfriend dead and has no alibi for the time of the murder. She’d be any smart detective’s first call on this investigation. It’s called doing our job.”
    Max shook his head at the annoyingly sensible explanation. “I had to ask.”
    Trent laughed outright. “Maybe you’d better let me do the talking when we get to the March house. Somehow, I doubt that calling her a
whack job
will encourage her to share any inside information she or her brother might have on our case.”
    â€œI get it. I’m the eyes and the muscle, and you’re the pretty boy front man.” Max plucked the cigar from his lips as he pulled off the highway on the eastern edge of Kansas City. “I’m not in the mood to make nice with some shriveled old prune of a woman, anyway.”
    â€œRosemary March is thirty-three years old. We’ve got her driver’s license photo in our records, and it looks as normal as any DMV pic can. What logic are you basing this I’d-rather-date-my-sister description on?”
    Max could quote the file on their person of interest, too. “Over the years she’s called in as many false alarms to 9-1-1 as she has legit actionable offenses, which makes her a flake in my book. Trespassing. Vandalism. Harassing phone calls. Either she’s got a thing for cops, she has some kind of paranoia complex or it’s the only way she can get any attention. Whatever her deal is, I’m not in the mood to play games today.”
    â€œSome of those calls were legit,” Trent pointed out. “What about the abusive fiancé?”
    â€œOur murder victim?”
    â€œYeah. Those complaints against Bratcher were substantiated. Even though someone scrubbed the photos and domestic violence complaints from his file after his death, the medical reports of