Pop Goes the Weasel Read Free

said. “Where the hell did they go to? We need to find the clothes.”
    “Somebody in the neighborhood probably stripped them off her already,” said the young uniform. There was a lot of disturbance around the body. Several footprints in the dirt. “That’s how it goes around here. Nobody seems to care.”
    “We’re here,” I said to him. “ We care. We’re here for all the Jane Does.”

Chapter 3
    GEOFFREY SHAFER was so happy he almost couldn’t hide it from his family. He had to keep from laughing out loud as he kissed his wife, Lucy, on the cheek. He caught a whiff of her Chanel No. 5 perfume, then tasted the brittle dryness of her lips as he kissed her again.
    They were standing around like statues in the elegant galley hall of the large Georgian house in Kalorama. The children had been summoned to say good-bye to him.
    His wife, the former Lucy Rhys-Cousins, was ash-blond, her sparkling green eyes even brighter than the Bulgari and Spark jewelry that she always wore. Slender, still a beauty of sorts at thirty-seven, Lucy had attended Newnham College at Cambridge for two years before they were married. She read useless poetry and literary novels, and spent most of her free time at equally pointless lunches, shopping with her expatriate girlfriends, going to polo matches, or sailing. Occasionally, Shafer sailed with her. He’d been a very good sailor once upon a time.
    Lucy had been considered a prize catch, and he supposed that she still would be, for some men. Well, they could have her skinny, bony ass and all the passionless sex they could stomach.
    Shafer hoisted up four-year-old twins Tricia and Erica, one in each arm. Two mirror images of their mother. He’d have sold the twins for the price of a postage stamp. He hugged the girls and laughed like the good papa he always pretended to be.
    Then he formally shook twelve-year-old Robert’s hand. The debate being waged in the house was over whether Robert should be sent back to England for boarding school, perhaps to Winchester, where his grandfather had gone. Shafer gave his son a crisp military salute. Once upon a time, Colonel Geoffrey Shafer had been a soldier. Only Robert seemed to remember that part of his father’s life now.
    “I’m only going away to London for a few days, and this is work , not a holiday. I’m not planning to spend my nights at the Athenaeum or anything like that,” he told his family. He was smiling jovially, the way they expected him to be.
    “Try to have some fun while you’re away, Dad. Have some laughs. God knows, you deserve it,” Robert said, talking in the lower-octave man-to-man’s voice that he seemed to be adopting lately.
    “Bye, Daddy! Bye, Daddy,” the twins chorused shrilly, making Shafer want to throw them against the walls.
    “Bye, Erica-san. Bye, Tricia-san.”
    “Remember Orc’s Nest,” Robert said with sudden urgency. “ Dragon and The Duelist. ” Orc’s Nest was a store that sold role-playing books and gaming equipment. It was located on Earlham, just off Cambridge Circus in London. Dragon and The Duelist were currently the two hot-shit British magazines covering role-playing games.
    Unfortunately for Robert, Shafer wasn’t actually going to London. He had a much better plan for the weekend. He was going to play his fantasy game right here in Washington.

Chapter 4
    HE SPED DUE EAST, rather than toward Washington’s Dulles Airport, feeling as if a tremendously burdensome weight had been lifted. God, he hated his perfect English family, and even more, their claustrophobic life here in America.
    Shafer’s own family back in England had been “perfect” as well. He had two older brothers, and they’d both been excellent students, model youths. His father had been a military attaché, and the family had traveled around the globe until he was twelve, when they’d returned to England and settled in Guildford, about half an hour outside London. Once there, Shafer began to expand on the