28 Hearts of Sand Read Online Free PDF Page A

has a cat,” Gregor said.
    Patrick stepped back to let Gregor through the door. “I wouldn’t have thought Bennis was a cat person,” he said.
    “She isn’t,” Gregor said. “She found it under our porch. It looked half dead, so she brought it inside. It was pitiful.”
    Lillian was putting out a coffeepot and cups on the living room coffee table. She was all dressed up like a housewife in a ’50s sitcom.
    “You two should watch television,” she said. “You’d find out how you’re supposed to behave. I’ve never known a law enforcement officer in my life who knew how to behave.”
    “She watches CSI, ” Patrick said. “I try to talk her out of it.”
    “I left all that stuff on the wingback chair,” Lillian said. “I’m going to run out to the grocery store. You’d think once you people retired, you’d stay retired.”
    Gregor and Patrick waited while Lillian went through the door to another room and then reemerged in a good London Fog raincoat. She waggled her fingers at them and headed out the front door.
    Then Patrick looked at Gregor and shrugged.
    “You might as well sit down and have some coffee,” he said. “I don’t know how much use I’m going to be able to be to you. It’s been a long time.”
    Gregor sat down on the love seat. Patrick sat down on the couch. They both looked at the stack of papers and notebooks and journals on the wingback chair. Then Patrick picked up the coffeepot and started pouring.
    “So,” he said, “I take it this is official. You’ve been hired to look into this.”
    “I’ve been hired as a consultant by the Alwych Police Department, yes,” Gregor said, “to help them look into what really does seem to be the deliberate and planned murder of Chapin Waring. The deliberate and planned murder of a ghost, was what the police chief told me when he called. Then I got a call from the Bureau’s New York office, asking me to be their liaison, or something. I insisted that Alwych had to know up front. Nobody was happy, but everybody’s going forward at the moment.”
    “Well, you can’t really blame the New York office,” Patrick said, handing Gregor his full cup. “It was one of the most famous cases they’ve had since the sixties, and the best anybody will say about it is that they botched it. That I botched it. You do know that was the reason I retired?”
    “I’d heard something about it.”
    “Elizabeth may have been sick then,” Patrick said. “I always forget that you spent the last year on the job more than a little distracted. Even though part of me says that there wasn’t anything we could have done that we didn’t do. You don’t come into a bank robbery case thinking that the bank robbers are a couple of rich kids who happen to be bored.”
    “Is that what you think happened? Chapin Waring and this other person—”
    “Martin Veer.”
    “Martin Veer. They were bored?”
    “Well, Gregor, what else would it have been? We looked into them at the time it all blew up in our faces, but there wasn’t any indication that either of them needed money. And then, you know, the whole thing was just bizarre.”
    “The whole thing?”
    Patrick nodded vigorously. “The Bureau got called in on the bank robberies on the third one. Not that we weren’t investigating the first two, because we were, but the third one was what started the special investigation. Before that, it looked to us like normal bank robberies. Except it didn’t.”
    “This isn’t making sense,” Gregor said.
    “There were two bank robberies in two different towns in Connecticut, Fairfield and Greenwich. Two perpetrators, both dressed head to toe in black like they were in some commando ops movie. They went in. They waved guns around. They got the money and put it into their own bags. That was interesting right there, because we were just starting to use those paint things that blow up and turn all the money blue, and they knew enough to protect themselves from it. Anyway,