No Comfort for the Lost Read Free Page B

received the news yesterday rather than almost three years ago. “Once.”
    “I am so sorry. I did not realize . . . ,” she stammered.
    He stepped around her, bound for the door. When she did not immediately make a move to follow, he glanced over his shoulder. “I thought you were coming.”
    She rummaged through her reticule, left money on the table, and hastened to his side. “You will not be sorry.”
    “I sure hope not, Mrs. Davies,” he said, frowning. “I sure hope not.”

CHAPTER 4
    “I’ll not be believin’ she’s dead.” Tom Davies was defiant. “You’re wrong.”
    Mrs. Davies, seated on a chair across the table from her brother-in-law, slid Nick an uneasy glance. If she suspected he already disliked the man, she was right; Tom Davies was a hotheaded Irishman.
    Standing in the shadowed corner of the man’s rented room, Nick shifted his weight to the other foot and waited. Davies would eventually calm down enough to be interviewed. Until then, he’d let Mrs. Davies offer condolences, because Nick never did anymore. The consequences from the one time he’d assumed a suspect’s innocence when he was a green police officer had eliminated any temptation to make the same mistake twice.
    “The detective is not wrong, Tom. I’m sorry.”
    Davies scowled. He was good-looking in a rough-around-the-edges sort of way, well muscled for a clerk with a desk job. Though it was probably good-paying work, Davies couldn’t claim to own many furnishings—just a table, a few chairs, and an oil stove in the opposite corner, a small chest of drawers, a trunk. A folding partition screened off the farthest corner. Dust covered every surface, and a slick of grime blackened the baseboards. If Li Sha had lived here, she hadn’t been cleaning Davies’ room or leaving feminine touches behind.
    The room’s two dirty windows were closed tight. Tom Davies lived south of Market, near Tar Flat, which meant breathing the stench from the Donahues’ gasworks. Distilling coal into gas produced sludge, and the sludge was piling up thick to the east of the works, exuding stink into the air. Some folks thought the fumes cured lung ailments. Nick was pretty sure the fumes would eventually kill a body.
    He shifted his weight again and noticed a stain on the tattered rag rug. It might be from spilled coffee or something else. However, Davies’ lodgings were more than a mile from the wharf where Li Sha had been found. If she’d been killed here, that was a long way to haul a body without any means of transportation.
    “But I know you’re wrong about it bein’ her,” Davies insisted, and stood. “So thanks for finally comin’ to visit, Celia, but you can leave now.”
    “Sit down, Mr. Davies,” said Nick. To his surprise, the man complied. “Mrs. Davies, tell him once more.”
    “Tom, the Chinese girl who was found in the bay is indeed Li Sha. I saw her body only a couple of hours ago.”
    Davies’ shoulders sagged. “You’re wrong,” he repeated, but the fight had gone out of him.
    Nick stepped farther into the room. He’d commit Davies’ responses to memory. With a suspect this jumpy, pulling out his notebook might make the man less willing to talk. “Were you with Li Sha two nights ago?” he asked.
    “I wasn’t.” Davies’ gaze leaped between them. “Wait. Why are you askin’ me that? You think I’d kill her?”
    “No,” Mrs. Davies denied it, stretching fingers across the scarred wood surface to touch his hand. “Of course not.”
    “But
he
does!” Davies accused, pointing at Nick. The man’s biceps tensed within his white shirtsleeves. When they’d arrived at the boardinghouse, Davies had just come home from his clerking job and was down to his vest, black neckcloth untied, dark jacket hung on a hook by the door. There was an ink stain on his left cuff, but no old blood that Nick could see. Davies might have two or three shirts, though. “And you think it, too. Don’t you, Celia?”
    She