Holland Taylor Trilogy by David Housewright

haven’t spoken recently,” I replied carefully.
    Marion nodded her head and smiled. “I understand,” she said.
    That made one of us.
    I was going to ask a question—as soon as I could think of a good one—but the office door beat me to it. It flew open, followed by the sound of a half dozen voices and a woman I recognized as the former anchor of a local TV news program whose ratings and career went south a few years back.
    â€œExcuse me, Marion,” she announced. “You wanted to see C. C.’s closing remarks for tonight’s debate as soon as I finished writing them.”
    Marion took the sheet of paper the woman offered and read it quickly. “This is too long. She only has two minutes.”
    â€œC. C. can read this in two minutes.”
    â€œShe’s not supposed to read it. She’s supposed to be speaking from the heart. Excuse me, Mr. Taylor,” Marion said and hustled out of the office into the hubbub beyond, the former anchor following closely behind. After a moment I followed them to the door and looked out. C. C. Monroe was reading from the paper, Marion and the anchor timing her with wrist-watches. I closed the door and returned to my chair.
    â€œAnnie, Annie, Annie,” I repeated softly as I searched the ceiling. “What are you up to?”

    None of us had been particularly pleased when Anne Scalasi came to the Homicide unit; each of us had different reasons why. One guy didn’t like it because she was a woman—well, actually, a couple of guys. Another detective took umbrage that she was an outsider, that she was coming from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension; he thought promotions should come from inside the department. Me? I wondered—aloud, I’m afraid—how anyone without street experience could be worth a damn in a murder investigation. I think I also said something derogatory about Angela Lansbury, but memory fails.
    The day she arrived, even before she had time to set photos of the husband and kids on her desk, Tommy Thompson had dropped a file in front of her. It was the Micka case. “See what you can do with that,” Thompson told her.
    â€œSure,” she’d answered. Most of the detectives snickered behind their hands. I was pissed. Elizabeth Micka was a floater we’d discovered in the Mississippi six months earlier; we couldn’t clear the case and it annoyed me no end.
    The facts were these: Elizabeth Micka was twenty-four years old. Her body was discovered on the St. Paul side of the Mississippi River by a couple of kids playing hooky from school. She was wearing a bra, cutoff jeans and two cement blocks attached to her body with wire. The ME claimed she had died of strangulation.
    Elizabeth had last been seen cutting grass by neighbors late on a Saturday afternoon—she was housesitting for her parents, who were on a six-week vacation in Europe; one couple remembered she waved at them from the inside of the attached garage when she put the lawn mower away. We searched the house four times, videotaped every inch. There was no sign of forced entry, no struggle. We found the white shirt her neighbors remembered she’d been wearing. It was draped over a chair in her bedroom. And we found about one hundred grains of sand behind her bedroom door.
    Anne had studied these facts and all the others we had gathered, including transcripts of every conversation we had with the nearly two hundred people we interviewed. She studied them for three days. Then she announced, “It’s the lifeguard.”
    â€œWhat lifeguard?” I asked.
    â€œThe lifeguard you interviewed.”
    â€œI didn’t question any lifeguard,” I insisted.
    Anne checked her notes. “Seventeen-year-old neighbor, lives five houses down, works as a lifeguard in the summer at Lake Josephine, likes to pump iron.”
    I recall being angry. “What’s his motive?”
    â€œElizabeth used to baby-sit