Cam - 03 - The Moonpool Read Free

late.”
    “So she wasn’t working any kind of whodunnit?”
    “Nope. The lawyer and his girlfriend—I think she’s a lawyer, too—apparently were regulars. Allie said they arrived on schedule, shacked up, and stayed shacked.”
    “So this didn’t require Ms. Gardner to go creeping in bad neighborhoods or anything like that?”
    “Negative. She sounded mostly bored.”
    “And she doesn’t do drugs or bet the ponies, anything like that?”
    “Allie? Hell, no. Good cop, solid citizen. No way. Definitely not the substance-abuse type. One glass of wine, she got silly. Two and she went night-night. Drugs would have rendered her comatose.”
    “You understand I have to ask, right?” he said apologetically.
    “Absolutely. Shit. This is awful. But she never worked anything really dangerous for us. Her own ex ran off with some biker bimbo while she was riding patrol in the sheriff’s office, so when she came to work for me, she specialized in helping women who were facing the same problem. She liked her cases interesting, but this one definitely wasn’t.”
    “Is now,” Price observed. “Can you help us with next of kin?”
    I had to think for a moment. “Lemme see,” I said. “I think she said she had one old-maid sister who works in the Defense Department overseas school system. She’s in Turkey or Greece, don’t remember which. I can look her up for you.”
    “In that case, could you possibly come down here, make the formal ID for us?”
    “Well, yeah, sure,” I said, the full enormity of the news finally hitting me. Wilmington was about a four-, four-and-a-half-hour drive from Triboro. “Tomorrow okay?”
    “Tomorrow’s fine, Lieutenant,” Price said. “We’re downtown, 115 Red Cross Street, five streets west of Market Street, which you’ll come in on. I’ll position a parking pass at the front desk.” He gave me his phone extension, voiced the pro forma regrets again, and hung up.
    Well, fuck me
, I thought. I told the dogs to stand down and tried to get my mental arms around the news that Allie was gone. She had been one of the original members of our merry little band of snoops when I first started H&S. I wondered why homicide had it, and then remembered: It was an unexplained death.
    Running a private investigations firm hadn’t originally been my idea. I’d come off of two decades with the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office under something of a cloud following the cat dancers vigilante case. Sergeant Horace Stackpole, one of the guys who’d worked for me in the Major Criminal Apprehension Team, or MCAT for short, had taken retirement a few months after I had. He and I had gotten togetherone night to have a drink, and then I had to listen to him bitch about the boring nature of the work he was doing at the time, which was running small-scale investigations for the district court in Triboro.
    The honorable Robes and their swarm of courthouse lawyers had a seemingly unending requirement for people who could retrieve information and documents, develop reluctant witnesses, and execute other odd jobs quickly. Ex-cops knew how to do all of that, and they also had the networks to get at people and information even quicker than the active police bureaucracy could, or would, depending on which judge was asking. Anyway, a third guy joined us and suggested that I form a company, hire only ex-cops, and then we could work as much or as little as we wanted to. I’d suggested that Horace start the company, but, as he pointed out, I was the one who no longer really had to work.
    So I did, and Hide and Seek Investigations, LLC, stood up a month later, with a condition of employment being that you had to be an ex-cop who had retired in good standing with your department. We’d started with six, with the other five doing most of the work while I dealt with really significant management issues, such as sorting the mail. Our first office had been on the second floor of a bail bondsman company in downtown