“I’ll drive,” Kayla said, and they strode toward her cruiser. “We got the call from Ned Appleby, the owner of the hardware store. You used to work there, right? In high school? So you know Ned.”
“Mr. Appleby.” The man had given Jericho a chance when no one else would, and he’d repay the favor by using the proper honorifics. “How’d he get involved? Do we have an ID on the victim?”
“Not firm yet, but we think it’s Lorraine Mackey. Body’s in her house, and the general description matches. Ned didn’t get too close to her, understandably.” She climbed into the driver’s seat, and Jericho took shotgun.
Lorraine Mackey. Damn, it was always harder when the victim was someone he’d seen living and breathing and walking around. Lorraine had been a known prostitute, an alcoholic and addict more likely to stumble than walk—Jericho had written her up for public inebriation twice in his short time in Mosely—but she’d at least been alive. And now someone had made her dead, on his watch.
“Dangerous line of work,” he said once he and Kayla were both buckled in. “Did she let johns into the house?”
“Yeah.” Kayla shook her head. “Hell, we practically chased her into doing it. We’d bust her for solicitation if she was working the streets, but we always figured whatever she did inside her own home was her own business.”
He was familiar with that way of thinking, but it was easier to recognize its destructiveness in someone else. “Kayla.” He waited until she looked over at him. “Let’s hold off until we find out what happened. We’ve got plenty of time to feel guilty about shit then, okay?”
“Okay,” she agreed reluctantly. “I thought I could get a head start. That’s all.”
“I appreciate your commitment to efficiency.”
“On the plus side,” she said as she pulled out of the parking spot, “Wade Granger doesn’t run whores. I’ve never known whether that was out of respect for his mother or simply a personal preference, but this might actually be a truly independent crime. No Wade, no feds. No complications.”
“That is a plus.”
They drove the rest of the way to Lorraine’s house in silence.
