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I got up and turned off the coffee machine, pouring the last of the brew into my cup. I sat back down and sipped it, wondering why I bothered; there was no reason for me to be awake and alert. I had all the leisure time a man could want—I was suspended from work, and being stalked by somebody who thought he was turning himself into me. And if he somehow missed me, I was still under investigation for a murder I hadn’t committed. Considering how many I had gotten away with, that was probably very ironic. I tried a hollow, mocking laugh at myself, but it sounded too spooky in the sudden silence of the empty house. So I slurped coffee and concentrated on self-pity for a while. It came surprisingly easily; I really was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, and it was a simple matter for me to feel wounded, martyred, betrayed by the very system I had served so long and well. Luckily, my native wit trickled back in before I began to sing country songs, and I turned my thoughts toward finding a way out of my predicament. But in spite of the fact that I finished the coffee—my third cup of the morning, too—I couldn’t seem to kick my brain out of the glutinous sludge of misery it had fallen into. I was reasonably sure that Hood could not find anything and make it stick to me; there was nothing there to find. But I also knew that he was very anxious to solve Camilla’s murder—both so that he would look good to the department and the press and, just as importantly, so he could make Deborah look bad. And if I added in the uncomfortable fact that he was obviously aided and abetted by Sergeant Doakes and his toxic tunnel vision, I had to conclude that the outlook was far from rosy. I didn’t really believe they would manufacture evidence merely in order to frame me, but on the other hand—why wouldn’t they? It had happened before, even with an investigating officer who had a whole lot less on the line. The
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