Angelina Bonaparte Mysteries Box Set Nanci Rathbun (i love reading books txt) 📖

carrying a bulky black bag went into the building. My brain processed them as the crime scene team. I turned my attention back to Wukowski. He was silent, watching me. “Sorry? I missed that,” I told him.

“I asked why you were here to see the lawyer.”

“I’m working for him on behalf of a client.”

“Client’s name and address?”

“I’m not sure I can tell you that until I talk with Attorney Petrovitch.”

“He wasn’t in the office?”

“I didn’t see him, if he was there. But once I saw the body, I didn’t go further.”

“The lawyer may be dead, too.” He said it with no emotion whatsoever. Deadpan, pardon the expression.

“Perhaps, but I don’t know that yet.”

He turned off the recorder and sighed. “Angie, we’re treating this as a homicide. That puts limits on personal privacy.”

“I’m not trying to obstruct the investigation, Wukowski, but I have a duty to the attorney who hired me. Let me try to get in touch with him.”

“Fair enough.” His voice softened. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. A bit shaken. I’ve never seen a dead body outside of a funeral home, let alone someone with her head blown off. It spooked me.”

“Yeah. Homicide does that to a person.” He raised his shirt cuff and checked his watch, then turned the recorder back on. “It’s ten. I’ll be here at least another hour. I want to see you and your client at headquarters at twelve-thirty sharp. That should give you time to locate Petrovitch and talk to the client.”

“Will do,” I agreed.

He turned the recorder off again and placed it in his pocket. Leaning closer, he said, “This homicide may be unrelated to your business with Petrovitch, but be careful, Angie.”

By now, a small crowd had gathered on the street. There was nothing to see except the police vehicles, but rubberneckers are a breed apart. I pulled out and edged my way down the block as the TV news van approached.

***

At the office, I ran up the stairs and dropped my stuff on my desk. My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t unlock my desk drawer. The keys jangled in my hands.

Susan got up and came around her desk. “Angie, what’s wrong?”

“Do you have a contact number for Petrovitch, outside of his office number?”

Susan checked her PDA. “Nope. What’s up? I thought you had a meeting with him. Did he stand you up?”

“In a manner of speaking. I found his secretary dead on the floor in front of his desk. He wasn’t there. No sign of him yet.”

“Holy…” Susan covered her mouth with her hand.

“Yeah. And Wukowski got the case.”

“Did he blow a gasket?”

“No, he was surprisingly calm.” Wukowski has this terrible anxiety about women in dangerous professions. It was understandable, given that his partner, Liz White, was tortured and killed during an undercover drug investigation almost three years ago. They never got the perps. I remembered the news footage of Wukowski, then unknown to me, in dress uniform, ramrod straight, stone-faced, hand to forehead as the rifle salute pierced the air at her funeral. He still has occasional nightmares about it.

We’d barely started to acknowledge our attraction for each other when I was injured in the Belloni case. He never came to the hospital, sent a card, or made a call. I thought it was over before it started, until he showed up at my door five days later. It took him that long, he told me, to decide if he could man up enough to handle my PI work.

There was no sense worrying about how this would affect us. Put one foot in front of the other, Aunt Terry would say. I telephoned Attorney Petrovitch. The call went to voicemail and I left a message that it was extremely urgent that he contact me. Then I went down the hall to the women’s bathroom. The mirror confirmed how I felt—pale and a bit shell-shocked. I wasn’t kidding when I told Wukowski that I’d never seen a dead body outside of a funeral home. My business is mostly tracking people and information. Even when I worked on the Belloni case, I never saw the victim’s body.

I remembered the prayer for the dead that I’d learned as a Catholic schoolgirl. What was the name on her desk? Oh, right, Dragana.

Eternal rest grant unto Dragana, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

This was the second time I recited that prayer for a murder victim. May it never happen again, I thought.

***

When I knocked on the door of Adriana’s apartment, it opened quickly and she wrapped her hand around my wrist and dragged me in, then shut and locked the door. Before I could speak, she put her index finger to her lips to shush me and motioned me to follow her into the bedroom. Once there, she shut the bedroom door and grabbed both my hands in hers.

“Angie,” she whispered, “there’s someone walking up and down the hallway. I heard it and it seemed strange that the same squeaky shoe would be going past. I looked out the peephole in the door. He was across the hall, with something like half of a set of binoculars up to the door. I got scared and ran into the bedroom.”

Hmm. A guy with a reverse peephole viewer, a device for seeing into a room from the outside of the door. This couldn’t be good. I didn’t want to scare Adriana, but she was right to be alarmed. “Do you think he saw you in here?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. The first few times I heard him, he didn’t stop. Then, when I heard the squeak-stop-squeak-stop pattern, I checked. He was turning toward my door. I ran into the bedroom.”

“You did the right thing,” I told her. “He might have nothing to do with you. But just in case, I’m calling a police detective I know.” This was