The Sniper's Wife Read Free

courthouse, cut around the block, and parked in the lot behind the municipal building.
    Upstairs, Sammie Martens paused by the window at the end of the central hallway just outside the ladies’ room, holding a pitcher of water intended for the office coffee machine. She saw Willy get out of his car, cross the parking lot, and vanish from view as he entered the building.
    She waited to greet him, knowing he’d come straight up, as usual. She preferred seeing him first in private, if possible, especially if they hadn’t spent the previous night together. It helped prepare her for whatever mood he might be in. Dark to middling was the standard she’d grown used to before they’d become intimate, although nowadays, she was happy to note, there was the occasional suggestion that he was lightening up.
    She listened in vain for his footsteps coming up the stairs, eventually resting the pitcher on the windowsill. It seemed he’d run into someone in the lobby.
    She glanced out the window again, attracted by a sudden movement below, and saw Willy running back to his car, fumbling for his keys.
    Surprised, she returned to the office, placed the water beside the coffeemaker, and addressed the older man sitting behind one of the four corner desks.
    “Joe, did we just have a call come in? My pager didn’t go off.”
    Joe Gunther looked up from what he’d been reading and gave her a thoughtful look before answering. “Not that I know of.”
    “I just saw Willy go running back out of the building to his car.”
    Her boss sat back in his chair and pursed his lips. “Maybe he forgot something at home.”
    She wasn’t convinced. “Maybe. It didn’t look like that. I saw him drive up like usual and waited for him at the top of the stairs for almost five minutes. He never made it.”
    Sam was suddenly struck by her own odd choice of words.
    Gunther was used to Willy’s ways. In the past, it had usually paid to give him a little leeway, and sometimes much more than a little. Whether Willy was the son Joe had never had or merely possessed by a spirit Joe found perversely irresistible, the bottom line remained that Willy Kunkle was one of the most instinctive police officers Joe had ever worked with, and therefore worth a little more than the usual slack.
    “Give him half an hour, Sam. That’ll allow for a round trip home and then some. After that, we can start shaking the bushes. If he’s on to something, the first thing he’ll want is to be left alone.”
    Sammie Martens went back to making coffee, unsatisfied and faintly apprehensive.
    Exactly one-half hour later, she glanced at Gunther again, who merely caught her eye and nodded without comment. Sammie picked up the phone and called Willy’s house.
    There was no answer.
    Frustrated, she rose and headed for the door. “I’m going downstairs—see if I can find out what set him off.”
    She turned into the radio dispatch area on the first floor and rapped on the bulletproof glass separating the dispatchers from the public. A woman half rose in her seat to peer over the console between them. “Hey, Sam.” Her voice was made metallic by the two-way intercom. “What’s happenin’?”
    “I’m looking for Willy. You see him this morning?”
    The woman’s expression registered surprise, then confusion. “He didn’t tell you guys?” She gestured to the side. “Come around to the door.”
    Sammie moved down the hallway to a locked door that opened almost as soon as she reached it. The dispatcher took her through the patrol officer’s room to an empty office normally used by the PD’s parking enforcement division, calling through the door of her own office as she did so, “Wayne, cover for me a sec, will you?”
    “It was kinda funny,” she explained to Sammie. “We got a call from a New York City detective asking if we could send an officer to locate someone named William Kunkle, who supposedly lived in Brattleboro. I started laughing and told him no one went out of