The Alpine Menace

Chapter One

The last time I saw my cousin Ronnie, he was half of a sack race at a
family picnic. He was a clumsy kid, and the leg that was tied to my
brother, Ben, managed to trip them both, so that they finished dead last.
I never imagined that the next time I saw Ronnie he'd be in the King
County Jail on a homicide charge.
The Ronnie Mallett I remembered from the gathering at Seattle's Woodland
Park was nine or ten, an undersized, unremarkable boy except for his
cheerful disposition. I'd been entering my junior year at the University
of Washington and felt the natural superiority that comes from age and the
use of good grammar. Maybe that's the thing I remembered best about
Ronnie: He said ain't
a lot.
"I ain't guilty, Emma," Ronnie said now, his thin face wearing an earnest
expression that didn't quite suit him. "Hey, why would I kill Carol? I was
nuts about her."
Carol Stokes was his girlfriend, a thirty-four-year-old woman who had been
found strangled in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment in
Seattle's Greenwood district. Obviously, I was supposed to say something
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