"Jean Lorrah - Blood Will Tell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lorrah Jean)

words. While I cannot become your personal writing tutor, Jacqueline Lichtenberg and I operate
WorldCrafters Guild, a professional writing school, at http://www.simegen.com. It's free -- please come
and have a look.

I am grateful for the encouragement my readers have given me over the years, and sincerely hope those
of you familiar with my work will enjoy this new adventure. If you've never read anything else I've
written, welcome! I hope you'll find something new and exciting in Blood Will Tell. To old friends,
welcome back! I hope you also find something new here, along with whatever has brought you back for
more.

Jean Lorrah

Murray, Kentucky

Chapter One - A Corpse on the Campus
Having come of age in the AIDS decade of the 1990's, Brandy Mather reached the millennium and the
age of twenty-eight as a virgin. She was not unique among girls who grew up in West Kentucky. In high
school she learned several ways to bring a human male to climax without intercourse. In college, she
came very close to marrying the first man she met who knew how to reciprocate.

In college she also discovered criminal psychology, which led her first to the Police Academy, then back
to her hometown of Murphy, Kentucky. Brandy was the first female police officer to move from traffic
patrol into the crime division. There were no further divisions; even though Murphy was the county seat
of Callahan County and boasted a regional university numbering 8000 students, the city was not large
enough to require separate juvenile, vice, or homicide squads. It was all in a cop's day's work.

Brandy had just been promoted to plainclothes work -- mostly because the department felt it wise to
have a woman handle the increasing reports of spouse and child abuse as well as rape. That late summer
the case that was to change her life occurred. It was a Friday, and Brandy looked forward to having the
weekend off.

It had been one of those long, frustrating weeks when leads didn't pan out, stakeouts merely wasted
hours, and the local citizenry chose to shoplift, throw eggs at each other's cars and houses, shoot out
store windows in the middle of the night, and slash tires. Ex- husbands threatened former wives, visitors
forged checks, and the police spent endless hours tracking delinquent husbands to serve flagrant
non-support warrants. No satisfying saving of lives or solving of challenging cases. The paperwork thus
generated only served to increase stress levels.

By 7:38pm Brandy had finished her final report. "Go home and hug your kids," she told her colleague,
Churchill Jones, with whom she shared the tiny detectives' office with its single computer. "Write the rest
up in the morning. If you try to do it now you'll be here till midnight." Church was a perfectionist about his
written work.

"You okay?" he asked. "Maybe you should see your mom tonight."

Brandy winced. Close to his own parents, Church couldn't fathom the gap between herself and her
mother, grown even wider since her father's death. Thank God her mom was dating again; Brandy no
longer her sole emotional support.

"I'll be all right," she responded. "The VCR's been taping movies all week. I'm going to be a couch