What the Dead Know Read Free Page A

made this morning unique in what his sergeant liked to call the annals of Infante, which the boss invariably pronounced with a long a sound. If Infante didn’t know a woman well enough to remember her name, what could he possibly have done to earn this martyred glare? He usually needed three or four months to inspire this kind of rage in a woman.
    â€œThat your phone?” the woman repeated, her voice as tight and dangerous as her expression.
    â€œYeah,” he said, relieved to be starting with an easy question. “Absolutely.”
    It occurred to him that he should try to find the phone, perhapseven answer it, but the ringing had stopped. He waited for the landline to kick in behind the cell, then remembered he was not in his own bedroom. He fished around on the floor with his left arm, his right one still pinned beneath the woman, and found his trousers on the floor, the phone clipped to the belt. Even as he grabbed it, the phone vibrated in his hand and emitted a shrill chirp, another disgruntled scold.
    â€œJust the office,” he said, glancing at the number.
    â€œAn emergency?” the woman asked, and if he had been more on his game, he would have lied and said yes, absolutely, that’s what it was, then gotten into his clothes and escaped.
    Still sleep-fogged, he said, “There are no emergencies in my department.”
    â€œI thought you were a cop .” He could hear the anger curdling at the edges of her words, the pent-up resentment.
    â€œDetective.”
    â€œSame thing, right?”
    â€œPretty much.”
    â€œSo don’t cops have emergencies?”
    â€œAll the time.” And this would count as one. “But in my line of work—” He stopped short of identifying himself as a murder police, fearful that she would find it too interesting and want to see him again, cultivate a relationship. There were a lot of cop groupies out there, a fact for which he was normally thankful. “The type of people I work with—they’re very patient.”
    â€œYou got, like, a desk job?”
    â€œYou could say that.” He had a desk. He had a job. Sometimes he did his job at his desk. “Debbie.” He tried not to sound too proud of himself for pulling the name up. “You could say that, Debbie .”
    His eyes flicked around the room, searching for a clock but also taking in his surroundings. A bedroom, of course, and a reasonably nice one, with arty posters of flowers and what his ex-wife, the more recent one, always called a color scheme, which was supposed to be a good thing, but it never sounded right to Infante. A scheme was a plot, aplan to get away with something. But then a color scheme was part of a trap, too, if you thought about it, the one that began with a too-expensive ring, revolving credit at Shofer’s, and a mortgage payment, then ended—twice in his experience so far—in a Baltimore County courtroom, with the woman taking all the stuff and leaving all the debt. The scheme here was pale yellow and green, not in the least objectionable, but it made him feel vaguely nauseous. As he sorted his clothes from hers, he began noticing other odd details about the room, things that didn’t quite track. The built-in desk beneath the casement window, the boxy minifridge draped with a cloth, a small microwave on top of that, the pennant above the desk, extolling the Towson Wildcats… Fuck me, he thought. Fuck me.
    â€œSo,” he said. “What’s your major?”
    The girl—a real girl, a true girl, a probably-under-twenty-one girl, not that anything over sixteen was off the legal menu, but Infante had some standards—gave him an icy look and crawled over him, wrapping the yellow-and-green top sheet around her. With much conspicuous effort, she pulled a fluffy robe from a hook and arrayed it over herself, allowing the sheet to fall only after belting the robe. Still, he got a quick look and remembered