Unspeakable Read Free

where the man with the cigarette still stood, his shoulder propped casually against the door frame. Something about his steady, penetrating look gave her goose bumps.
    She glanced away.
    A flurry of feathers erupted as the man at the sink tossed some guts into the water and the seagulls scrambled. A giant brown pelican flapped over to snatch away the prize, then perched on the dock as he gobbled it down.
    Elaina glanced around, taking mental notes. The teenagers had disappeared but the crabber still lurked nearby, his arms folded over his chest and his trap at his feet while his attention remained fixed on the body bag. Elaina memorized his face, then scanned the rest of the area for suspects. Some perps liked to hang around and observe the aftermath of what they’d done. Elaina counted nine spectators at the moment, including a shirtless, sun-baked twenty-something with blond dreadlocks. He had his arm draped over a young woman’s shoulders, and they watched the end of the pier with morbid fascination.
    Elaina checked her watch. She cursed under her breath. Breck and his men stood huddled on the dock, shooting the nonexistent breeze. Elaina felt her temperature rising as the minutes ticked by and the sun glared down.
    A large brown bird alighted at the end of the pier and wobbled over on spindly legs to check out the body bag, jabbing at the plastic with a sickle-shaped beak.
    Elaina shot past the men and waved her arms. “Shoo! Shoo!” she yelled, and the bird took off.
    She whirled around. “
Where
is the body-removal team?”
    Breck frowned at her. “The who?”
    “The body-removal team! She’s baking in there, along with whatever evidence we might recover.”
    Breck’s hands went to his hips. “We’re waiting on our ambulance. They got hung up with some sorta accident down at the beach.”
    Elaina took a deep breath. She felt dozens of eyes boring into her as she straightened her shoulders and tried to calm down.
    “When will it be here?” she asked.
    “When it gets here. Maynard.” Breck jerked his head toward one of the uniforms.
    “Yessir.”
    “Go take Miss McCord over to the station house to cool her jets.”
    They left her waiting for more than four hours.
    Elaina refused to acknowledge the snub. Instead, she retrieved her briefcase from her car, along with her cell phone. She spread her files out across the conference room table and worked diligently, as if she’d gottenup this morning with every intention of spending her Friday afternoon in some backwater police station. By five-thirty, though, her patience was gone. She was hungry and tired. And sticky, too, as the room had no air-conditioning— only a portable fan that circulated the same warm air, over and over. She was about to get up to search for a vending machine when the door popped open. Officer Maynard again.
    “Miss McCord? The chief’ll see you now.”
    Finally, an audience with His Highness. Elaina collected her manila file folders and shoved them into her briefcase.
    “Right this way, ma’am.”
    Maynard was shorter than she was, probably five-nine. But he had a trim build and rigid posture that reminded her of the Marines she’d crossed paths with during her twenty-two weeks at Quantico. He led her through the wood-paneled police station and past a sixtyish woman seated at a metal desk beside one of the offices. She was talking on the phone and writing on a pad, a stack of pink message slips piled at her elbow.
    Maynard opened the door to the inner sanctum of Breck’s office, and Elaina stepped inside. The room smelled faintly of cigars, and the chief sat in a padded leather chair behind a faux wood desk. Arranged in a semicircle around the desk were plastic chairs occupied by people she’d seen earlier at the marina, with the exception of a bald man who held a cowboy hat in his hand. The star pinned to his chest told Elaina he was a Texas Ranger.
    “Dr. Frank Cisernos,” the white-haired man from the dock said, standing