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He chuckled and it was a real laugh from him, not the ones he could turn on and off for undercover work. I valued the sound of it. “I haven’t met Brice yet, he any good?”
“Good enough that I was okay with Zerbrowski calling him when I couldn’t leave the dinner.”
“Ouch, turning down your in-town partner in crime busting must have been even harder.”
“Yeah, but they’re not ass-deep in alligators.” Then I thought about the tracks and added, “Bullets aren’t flying and there’s no active danger, just a dead body and tracks. Brice or Kirkland can handle that.”
“We’re allowed to have a life, Anita.”
“Weird that we both have one now.”
“Yeah, putting you on speaker, so I can look at the pictures.”
I didn’t have to ask if we could be overheard; if he thought speaker was a good idea, we had privacy. “Full disclosure, I’m in one of our SUVs with Nicky, Ethan, and Kaazim.”
“Anyone who went to Ireland with us can hear us talk shop.” They all three had, but it was still high praise from Edward about non-cops, or anyone.
“Is this near water?”
“I thought the same thing, that maybe some idiot had gotten an alligator as a pet, then let it go once it got too big.”
“People have done that with things even more dangerous than alligators,” Edward said.
“I know, but if it is an alligator, Edward, then it’s huge. That might go unremarked in Florida, but not here in Missouri. People would have video on their phones before it got big enough to do this.”
“I won’t suggest crocodile; they would be less robust to your colder weather than alligators.”
“I thought maybe a Komodo dragon on the list of illegal pets released into the wild, but they don’t have the bite radius to do this,” I said.
“No, they don’t,” he said.
I realized suddenly, “You don’t know what this is either, do you?”
“All the things I can think of that could bite a large adult male in half are even less likely than what we’ve already mentioned.”
“Yeah, if people haven’t noticed a super alligator, they sure as hell wouldn’t miss a fully grown hippopotamus.”
“Your local zoo would have reported it missing,” he said.
“So it’s something preternatural,” I said.
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“Did you just quote Sherlock Holmes to me?”
I could hear the smile in his voice when he said, “We’re reading them as a family.”
“Like reading them aloud to each other, or book club?” I asked.
“Aloud.”
“We’re between books to read to each other; I hadn’t thought about trying Sherlock Holmes.”
“We got the idea from Nathaniel telling Peter and Becca that you read out loud to each other,” he said.
“And here I thought we’d only ever share shooting tips with each other,” I said.
“Becca overhead some of the dance moms complaining that men don’t really have best friends the way women do, but she set them straight that her dad had a BFF. She came home indignant that the dance moms were so sexist.”
