Blood Bond Read Free

Californians.” Odell had followed a woman to California half a dozen years earlier, but the girlfriend got homesick and hightailed it back to the Lake of the Ozarks. Odell liked California enough to stick around, though he had never completely adapted to the culture.
    Joe took a last look and shook his head. The guy’s legs were tangled together awkwardly as though he’d gone down trying to dance, white guy style, bobbing from side to side and waving his hands in the air, maybe stumbling on his date’s shoe.
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CHAPTER TWO
    INSIDE, THE HOUSE WAS too cold, the air conditioner humming. In Montair, thirty miles East of San Francisco, scorching September days were followed by beautiful, cool evenings, and Joe wondered why the Englers hadn’t opened up the windows and let the breeze in. Maybe the rich lost their taste for unfiltered air.
    He heard voices farther inside the house, and passed through the mosaic-tiled entry and the two-story living room to find a knot of people in what might have looked more like an office if there were any books on the shelves besides the old cloth-bound volumes stacked next to vases and framed photos. Joe would bet money that a designer had arranged those books, and that no one in this house had ever turned their pages.
    Bertrise sat on the edge of an overstuffed armchair, tapping a pen against a slim notebook open to a blank page. A woman of imposing posture and stature, she managed to look regal even when seated. Tonight she was wearing a long, silky jacket the color of a honeydew melon, buttoned to reveal just a fraction of her smooth brown cleavage. Platform sandals—Bertrise never wore flats, even though she was almost six feet tall. Her hair was swept into a short, sculpted style.
    A handful of attractive, shaken-looking men and women clustered around a fireplace with a huge marble mantel. Bertrise barely glanced at Joe, her steely gaze fixed on the two women facing her on a cream love seat. One, a striking blonde, patted the arm of the other as she sobbed softly. Something about the gesture seemed proprietary, and Joe figured this was the lady of the house.
    Joe cleared his throat and got a curt nod from Bertrise in return. “This is it?” he asked. “Anyone else?”
    Bertrise inclined her head toward the kitchen. “Caterer,” she murmured softly, her eyes never leaving the women on the couch. It was unsettling to watch Bertrise work people; she said little, and revealed even less. While on the job, all but the faintest trace of her Jamaican accent disappeared from her voice. She was tireless; Joe had never seen a witness or suspect outlast her in an interview. Joe had wondered from time to time whether people gave up their stories just so Bertrise would stop staring at them.
    Of course, she was the single mother of two teen girls; that had undoubtedly built up her endurance.
    The most junior detective in the department, Bertrise had been forced to take some time off when her husband left her and again when her girls ran wild and got into some trouble a number of years earlier, which hadn’t pleased her past bosses. The posting to Montair was an effort to start fresh and untarnish her image, and she took her job very seriously. She had been promoted only six months earlier; her interview skills were one of the things that made Joe push hard on her behalf.
    Joe made his way down another hall, this one tiled and appointed with cabinets and sinks and rows of glistening upside-down stemware. Butlers’ pantries: yet another suckhole of money and space.
    In the kitchen, the caterer worked at the sink, her back to Joe. She was scrubbing at a crusted oven rack, black grime and suds wetting her turned-back shirt cuffs. Too-curly dirty blond hair was secured haphazardly by a tortoiseshell clip, but much of it had come undone, looping its way past her shoulders.
    A Bosch dishwasher purred softly and water ran in the sink, and the woman herself