10-41 David
an excerpt

So, okay, I’ve thought of something we might could do.”
“What?”
“Ever been on a stake out?”
“Really? David, a real, honest to goodness stake out?”
“Easy, now. They’re not as exciting in real life as they are on television.”
“And how many stake outs have you been on?”
She caught me. “Counting today? Just one.”
“Mhmm. So that makes you the expert?” Her smugness oozed across the line.
“You want to come with me, or not?”
“Of course I want to come. When are you picking me up?”
“Can you be ready to go in thirty minutes?”
“See you then,” she said and then hung up.
Did a stake out count as a second date?
I packed a few necessities in a backpack including a pair of binoculars, a tape player, bottles of water, a pen and notepad, and my digital camera. On the way out I grabbed a couple of wrapped granola bars. You never knew.
When I arrived at her house, Mel came bouncing down the stairs. She was wearing black jeans, a black sweatshirt, and was carrying some kind of dark baseball cap. I shook my head in disbelief.
“Is all that necessary?”
She frowned a little and looked down at herself. “You don’t like it?
“Oh, you look fine if you’re thinking about joining the Goths or beginning a life of crime.”
“I thought I should, you know, be ready to blend in.”
“We’ve got about six more hours of daylight, Mel.”
“Oh yeah.” She looked a little deflated. “Do I need to go back in and change?”
“Nah. We’ll be all right.”
She got in the car and we pulled away from the house. Her perfumed hair made its presence known. I breathed it in. The wreck never had such a pretty passenger.
“So where are we going?” my partner asked.
“I found Tim Reynolds’ address. His grandmother’s address, anyway. They live down on River Round Drive.”
“Hey,” she all but yelled. “That’s close to where Starr was killed!” She grabbed my shoulder. “He lives close to where she died. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“That’s just circumstantial,” I told her calmly. “It doesn’t prove anything.”
She let go of my shoulder, but she sat board stiff in the seat next to me. I searched my mind for something that might make her feel better.
“Dad is working today.” I began. “He said that he’d look in to some stuff for me.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“It’s about Tank.” Oops. It hit me that Dad was going to look into how Tank’s knife had gone missing. I wasn’t sure how she’d take it. It was too late to stop, now.
“Dad says that Tank claimed the knife was taken away from him the last time he was arrested and put in jail. That was just a couple of weeks ago. The log in paper says that they took it, but Dad’s going to find out if there’s proof that he got it back.”
“He had to get it back. The knife was found in his tree stand. He said it was his.”
“Yes,” I tried to brace her for potentially bad news. “But that tree stand is out in the open, on a public road, and anybody could have put it up there.”
“Only if they knew it was there,” she argued. “How many people actually know it’s there. Did you?”
“Well, no.”
“And how long have you been running that path?”
“For a few months,” I answered. She made a good point. I hadn’t thought of it from that angle.
“Okay then. So unless you can tell me who else knows about the tree stand, then I say Tim is guilty.”
“They haven’t got the results back about the blood, though,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, but they will.” She sounded like her mind was made up. I preferred to wait for the evidence.
We drove down River Round Drive and I pointed out the house. Two blocks past the house I made a u-turn and when we were one block away, I pulled over between two driveways and parked.
“Now what?”
“Now we wait.”
“For what?”
“We’ll know it when we see it.” I said. I really didn’t know what we were looking for, but I figured that sounded about right. So we sat there.