From:Cover of Snow
By
  Jenny
Milchman


 

You  are different from many of the cops I have interviewed. Please tell us about  yourself. 
I never wanted to be a cop. How many guys do you know who want  to be the same thing as their father? Well, maybe some do, guys who look up to  the old man, want to be just like him. I wish I were one of them, but I’m not.  Nobody looked up to my father, so how was I supposed to? I was all set to go to  law school, but then I met Nora. And something in her called me home. I didn’t  want the two of us to keep on living our big city life, her helping to put me  through law school, and then me working seventy hours a week in an office and  never even seeing her. It wasn’t exactly a conscious decision on my part to
return to Wedeskyull, or join the force where my dad served his twenty before he  died. Like I said, something called me home.
 
How did you become involved in this case? 
Here’s where things get weird. I’m not involved in this case.  Because I’m dead. The case is what happened to me—and Nora, though she isn’t a cop, is the only person who has a chance to solve it, because she’s the only one who’s willing to face the truth.

Tell us about this case.  
Something bad happened on January 16th , bad enough that I don’t think I ever really looked up after that again. The following week passed in a way I didn’t know time could go. Just—unnoticed. I must’ve eaten, I must’ve drank, dressed, breathed. But I don’t remember doing any of it. I can’t imagine what Nora thought. I felt like was wrapped up in blankets. I couldn’t figure out why everyone kept talking to me. Didn’t they know I was already gone?
 
I’m not sure if Nora’s going to be able to figure out what happened on the 16th. She’s still stumbling around a lot farther in the past than that, trying to learn a secret I was never able to tell her. If she can’t find out about what happened to me when I was eleven, she’ll never be able to figure out this more recent crime.
 
No one besides me knows the whole truth. And I’m dead.
 
Was there ever a time during this case that you doubted those that you normally trust?
I trust Nora more than I’ve ever trusted anyone else in my life. But the rest of them? I don’t trust a single one. And neither should you.

How dangerous was it to solve this case?
If I hadn’t died, I think they would’ve killed me.

Did working on this case affect you emotionally?
This case was all about emotion. See, I did something really bad when I was eleven years old. Something unforgivable. My own parents never forgave me for it—my mother anyway—so you know it must be as bad as anything  could get. But I was able to get past it the way cops survive any bad day on the job. You take what happened and you put it in a box. You padlock that box and then you forget the combination. Any cop worth his salt has a hundred boxes like that. A thousand.
 
So that’s what I did. And I was surviving okay. I had a good  life, in fact. I loved my wife, even if I couldn’t give her the one thing she wanted most. I was better on the job than I ever would’ve been doing something else.
 
And then something happened, on that January day, and it didn’t  matter if I’d forgotten the combination, someone took a big ole hacksaw and split open the box. And what was inside killed me.

How did this case affect your personal life?
My personal life? My life you mean. My whole life. I lost it. 

I appreciate you being with us today. I have one more question. (He leaves) Please come back. What was in the box? 
  


Jenny Milchman is a suspense novelist from New Jersey whose short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s Department of First Stories, Adirondack Mysteries II, and in an e-published  volume called Lunch Reads. Jenny is the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, and the chair of International Thriller Writers’ Debut Authors Program. Her first novel, Cover of Snow, is published by Ballantine and
available everywhere books are sold. When Cover of Snow comes out, Jenny  is embarking on a six month tour with her family, town-to-town,  bookstore-to-bookstore, library-to-library, and other venues that readers will  enjoy. Please check her website http://jennymilchman.com/tour/for places to come meet Jenny—and her cop. 
 
 

 From the book Cold Feet
                 By   Karen Pullen
 
 
We are honored to have with us today Stella Lavendar from the State Bureau of  Investigation in North Carolina. Stella, tell us about yourself. 
I’m a professional shopper, for drugs. In the market for coke, crack, smack, pot, ice, and pills. If you’re selling, I’m buying, and recording each transaction on video or voice. Later you’ll be visited by an arresting team, and you’d better lawyer up, agree to a plea deal, or join us–we can always use a cooperative informant. My employer is the state of North Carolina, the State Bureau of Investigation.  I joined the SBI out of college, after I graduated with a BS in criminal justice, four years ago. I always wanted to be a cop, because of what happened to my mother. 
 
What happened to your mother?
When I was five, she went into a gas station to pay and intercepted a robbery.  An
attendant was murdered and mom was abducted, never found. I became obsessed with
cold cases and the criminal justice system. For years I kept notebooks of murders and investigations and trials.  I’ve promised my grandmother Fern that I’d find out what happened to my mother, some day. 

After your mother died, who raised you? 
Fern. She is an artist, miserably poor, but she has a lot–I mean a lot–of boyfriends who take her out to dinner, do chores around her falling-down farmhouse, treat her to mini-vacations in charming B&Bs. She is light-hearted, amusing, and sexy. 
 
How did you become involved in this case? 
Fern and I went to a wedding. We sat with the other guests on  the lawn of this fake Scottish castle bed & breakfast, just waiting and waiting for the bride to walk down the aisle.  After observing a kerfuffle between a bridesmaid and the innkeeper, I followed them inside to the bride’s bedroom. She was dead, her body contorted, and I suspected
poison. The investigating detective asked for my help because many of the people involved in the wedding were related to the local police. Once I had my boss’s permission, I was free to work on the case, though I had to continue  doing my night job buying drugs.

Tell us about this case.  
The timing was curious.  Did someone get cold feet and want to prevent the wedding? We were interested in the groom, of course. He swore that Justine was an angel and
couldn’t possibly have had any enemies. Well, Justine may have been a lovely person but a number of people were not happy with her. One guest had lost his  job after a brief affair with her. The groom’s ex-girlfriend obsessively stalked him and crashed the wedding. An angry couple blamed their daughter’s disabilities on Justine, as the midwife present at the baby’s birth. And then it turned out that Justine’s past was very different from what one would assume. She’d kept it secret, or had she? Who knew? 
 
Was there ever a time during this case that you doubted those that you normally trust?
My grandmother Fern’s motives are mixed where men are concerned. When her new boyfriend turned out to be a drug dealer, she wasn’t sure whether to believe me when I told her he was dangerous. I could only tell her so much, because any involvement was unsafe for her and me.
 
How dangerous was it to solve this case?
In my final encounter with Justine’s murderer, I nearly lost my own life while saving a witness. Furthermore, since I was concurrently working as a drug agent, physical danger was a continued possibility.  After selling me a kilo of coke, a paranoid dealer evaded arrest and came looking for me. Good times.

Did working on this case affect you emotionally?
On many levels. It was my first homicide case and I wanted to solve it to prove myself. It brought back memories of my mother’s presumed death, and wanting to bring solace to Fern. The danger to Fern – my only living relative – was real. Finally, the whole issue of marriage continued to churn around in my psyche.  Neither my mother nor Fern married, but I had just been dumped by my fiancé Hogan in the midst of planning my own wedding. To make matters worse, I had to work on this case with Hogan, who is a fine SBI researcher.

How did this case affect your personal life?
I sleep with my dog Merle while my grandmother has all the fun, though I developed a major crush on the investigating detective who is married and therefore off-limits.  Working with Hogan, a serial cheater who hadn’t quite given me up, was challenging. It was an effort to remain professional.

Will you ever become a full-time homicide investigator? 
Yes, tomorrow would be my preference, but my SBI boss wants me to keep buying drugs.  He says I’m good at it because I don’t look like a cop.  Yay for me.
 
What do you do in your spare time?
During this case, I had none, because I had to fit the murder investigation around my regular assignment as a drug agent.  I try to visit Fern a few times a week to make sure her house hasn’t fallen down yet, and go for a slow jog with my dog Merle. Guess that sounds boring, but after my workday, boring is just the ticket.
 
Thank you for being with us today. Good luck with the …drug buying. Be sure and give Merle a treat for letting you visit with us.

 
 
Karen Pullen left a perfectly good job at an engineering consulting firm for more creative endeavors as an innkeeper and a fiction writer. Her B&B has been open for 12 years, and her fiction has been published in Every Day Fiction, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Spinetingler. She earned an MFA from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine on beautiful Casco Bay. She lives in Pittsboro NC. Cold
Feet is her first novel. She blogs at her website, www.karenpullen.com  where you can
also find details on a contest to win a weekend at Rosemary House B&B (imagine spending a weekend in a cute artsy town and two nights in a charming historic B&B, an airjet tub for two, flickering fireplace, eggs Benedict and strawberry-topped Belgian waffles for breakfast).  Cold Feet will be published in January 2013. It’s currently available for pre-order at bookstores and online retail outlets, and should be on the street in early February.