Murder Comes by Mail by A. H. Gabhart Page B

whose phone hadn’t rung all weekend as she slit open the envelopes on the weekend’s accumulation of mail. The office mail varied little from week to week, so Betty Jean had no problem discussing her own lack of romance and quizzing Michael about his weekend as she scanned the letters and forms and sorted them into piles according to importance. Opening the mail and romantic fantasies were a Monday morning ritual.
    “Wasn’t the moon just perfect Saturday night?” Betty Jean sighed, glanced at the letter in her hand, and placed it in one of her piles. “Did you and Karen do something?”
    “I told you Karen and I aren’t dating anymore. I went fishing till dusk. Then watched some dumb movie on television. Guess I missed out on the moon.”
    “You are hopeless.” Betty Jean picked up a manila envelope. “What did Karen preach about Sunday? Or did you even go to church?”
    “I went to church. Karen preached on the Good Samaritan.”
    “Wonder where she got that idea?” Betty Jean looked up at him as she ran her long, thin letter opener under the flap of the brown envelope. “Maybe from some guy she knows yanking a stranger back from the edge of a bridge?”
    “Her sermon had nothing to do with me.”
    “Come on, Michael. It’s not a bad thing to inspire—” Betty Jean shrieked and dropped the papers she had pulled out of the envelope. She jumped up from the desk, banging her chair into the file cabinet behind her.
    Michael looked up from the on-call schedule he was filling out. “What’s the matter?”
    All the color drained out of Betty Jean’s face and her lips quivered. She stared at her desk as if vipers had spilled out of the envelope and were slithering toward her. She threw a wild look at Michael and pointed toward the papers.
    Michael had never seen Betty Jean speechless. He might have savored the moment except for the thunder sounding louder in his ears. Even before he picked up the paper off her desk, he knew the storm had hit.
    A young girl stared up out of a crime-scene-style photograph. A trickle of blood traced a line from a blue-black hole in her forehead down onto her small upturned nose. Brown eyes that had stared death in the face were wide and fixed. Brown hair with blonde streaks lay around her face like a carefully arranged halo. Her dark red lipstick was smudged where fingers had pushed her lips into an unnatural smile. She was young, not more than sixteen, and very dead.
    “Is it a joke?” Betty Jean found her voice. She took another peek at the photos and shuddered.
    “No joke.” Michael had seen his share of corpses, people dead from both natural and unnatural causes.
    While he’d been in the city, he and his partner were sometimes the first policemen on the scene when a body was found or a crime reported. The hardest ones were kids like this who overdosed on drugs or got caught in a street shooting or let the wrong guy pick them up.
    Pete, hardened from years as a Columbus beat cop, had called them throwaways. “Use them once and throw them away. No credit for returns.”
    Michael stared at the picture in his hand. He wanted to drop it. To walk out of the office and up the street where the Hidden Springs citizens would be going about their routines. Where things like this didn’t happen.
    “Who is she?” Betty Jean whispered.
    “I don’t know.” The second page was a view of the whole body, laid out with her arms folded across her middle and her legs looking too white below black shorts. She was barefoot and her toenails painted a bright shade of turquoise stuck up in the air in a sad celebration of life. A teddy bear looked out from her pink T-shirt under the words Somebody needs a hug .
    The picture shook in front of his eyes, and he willed his hand to stop trembling.
    “Why did they send them to us?” Betty Jean asked.
    “And who sent them?” Michael added, although the thunder sounding in his head had already answered both those questions. Still, maybe that