Page 10 of Head Room

I smiled broadly at him and a drift of pink consciousness touched his cheeks at having killed his smile.

“Shelton said to find you, so you could tell me all about the cabin fire northeast of town.”

Close enough.

Richard didn’t question it.Not because he’s not smart enough to know that had to be an exaggeration, but because Richard wanted to talk about it.

He’d already learned a lot from Shelton, not all of it good from my point of view.But chewing over possibilities of a not-official case was not on the Shelton agenda.

Maybe Richard had another colleague or two in the department for such conversations, but I hadn’t encountered them.

“Have you been to the scene?”I asked him.

“Uh-huh.Couple times.When the fire call came in, I wasn’t on duty, but I’d been up there a few times and—”

“On calls?There were problems?”

Domestics, neighbor disputes could change the complexion of this fast.

“No, no.Nothing like that.My sister Sandra—”

I flipped through a mental list of Richard’s numerous relatives.I was almost certain that was the same sister who worked for the doctor in Montana who did forensic autopsies for Cottonwood County.

“—knew the sergeant’s wife, Irene.I mean Sergeant Jardos, not Sergeant Shelton.”I’d figured that since Shelton wasn’t married.“And sometimes, if we had a family gathering and she had something for Irene, she’d give it to me to drop by, because she knew I’d be in the area sooner or later.”

“What kind of things?”

“Fabric, mostly, I think.Irene Jardos used to quilt and so does my sister.They said fabric can get heavy to mail, so they tried to avoid the expense.A couple times Irene gave me things to hand off to my sister.Wasn’t any rush, because they both have enough fabric to wrap around the whole Rocky Mountains a couple times.”

“Received a few quilts, have you?”

He grinned.“Yeah.They’re great, but how many does one guy need?It’s a good thing there are younger ones coming up needing quilts to take to school and such.

“Anyway,” he picked up with a return to seriousness, “I knew my sister would want to know anything there was to know about the fire, so I went.”

“What did you see?”

His left shoulder twitched in a truncated shrug of dismissal.Potentially contradicting that, the tinge of pink reappeared.

I put that aside for later consideration.

“The building was still burning.You could really feel the heat.”

“Right.Our reporter, Nola Choi, got some compelling footage for her first report on the fire.”

“Did she?”

His elaborate casualness triggered anah-hah, I didn’t voice.Though it was tempting, especially with the heightened color tinging his face again.

“She did.Were you out there the same time she was?”

“I guess I did see her.”He needed to work on his deadpan.

Or not, since it left open a window to him.

“Have a chance to talk to her?”My casualness was light-years more convincing than his.“You must have come across each other in the six months she’s been here.”

“We’ve talked a time or two.I mean,” he added hurriedly, “she asks questions, because I’m on duty, and I don’t answer because—”