Almost Dead Read Online Free PDF

why…I mean, you’re with homicide, I thought. Why did you come so soon?” Before he could answer, she understood. “Oh, I get it. This has to do with my mother, doesn’t it?”
    “We’d like to find her.”
    She shivered when she thought about Marla Amhurst Cahill as a free woman. Though Cissy didn’t want to jump to conclusions, it seemed damned coincidental that her grandmother had fallen down the stairs within a few days of Marla’s escape.
    Her mother, if nothing else, was clever. Sly. But it would have been just plain stupid to return here. The police had been staked out on the street near the gates…. Or had they? Her grandmother had complained about them yesterday, but where were they tonight?
    A cold feeling settled in the pit of her stomach.
    “So, what took you so long to get here? I figured that someone was staking out the house. Gran had said a couple of detectives were parked on the street.”
    “There was a car,” he admitted. “But the officers got called away.”
    “Called away?”
    “A reported shooting just down the street.”
    “At the same time that my grandmother fell down the stairs?” she asked, disbelieving. A coincidence? Her grandmother dies soon after Marla escapes, and while it’s all happening, the officers assigned to watch the house are suddenly jerked away? “Did they catch the shooter?”
    Paterno’s long face didn’t give up a clue. “Not yet.”
    “You mean, it just happened?”
    “About an hour ago.”
    “An hour.” Her heart knocked as the coincidences kept stacking up. “Gran hasn’t been dead long. She was…was,” Cissy’s voice cracked. “She was still warm when I searched for a pulse….”
    “How did you get in?”
    “I have my own key,” Cissy explained dully. It was difficult to process.
    Paterno looked at B.J. “Why don’t you wait in the car? Where it’s dry and warm. We might have a few more questions and in the meantime the house is going to be considered a crime scene.”
    “She fell down the stairs. Where’s the crime?” But Cissy already understood what he was suggesting, and the thought, that her mother might somehow be involved, turned her stomach. This couldn’t be happening. And yet here she was, standing on rubber legs, feeling almost as if she were having an out-of-body experience.
    “Was anyone else home with her?” Paterno asked, ushering her from the front porch.
    Feeling the rain run down her neck, Cissy made her way back to the car. “No…I mean, I don’t think so.” As they reached the Acura, B.J. whimpered in her arms, and she whispered into his little ear, “It’s okay, honey. Ssshhh.”
    Paterno opened the driver’s side door, and the pent-up aroma of tomatoes, oregano, and garlic greeted her. She slid the seat back, then, with her child on her lap, sat behind the wheel while Paterno climbed into the passenger side of the car, one foot crushing the lid of the pizza box.
    Too late he shifted his shoe. “Sorry.”
    “Doesn’t matter.” Right now, nothing much did. She felt numb inside. Aside from her baby, she didn’t really care about anything.
    Fortunately, B.J. was thrilled with his position and was “driving” the car, both his little hands on the steering wheel.
    Sitting with his feet straddling the dented pizza box, Paterno retrieved a pen and small notebook from his coat pocket. “You were bringing dinner to your grandmother?”
    She nodded. “I usually visit her on Sundays, because she’s alone. I always come with something to eat, something fun, I think, fix it for her, then we watch some television show, you know, Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune with Coco and—” She stopped short, her head snapping up. “Where’s the dog?”
    “What?”
    “Gran’s usually alone except for Coco. Her little white mutt of some kind that she absolutely adores. I didn’t see the dog in the house, and that’s really weird. Grandma takes that dog every where. They’re practically inseparable.” She scanned