Copp On Fire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp, Private Eye Series) Read Online Free PDF

me turn onto my side. I retched a couple of times but nothing came up. The nausea began fading, though, and I became aware of blood in my hair.
    I sat up and put a hand to the wound, couldn't feel any brain tissue spilling out, decided I'd live. Someone grabbed my hand and slapped a cuff on it.
    Forta growled, "Take that off!—take it off!"—and the cuff magically slipped away.
    I muttered, "What the hell is going down, Ken?" and tried to get to my feet but couldn't even find my feet.
    Forta said, "Sit still, Joe. For God's sake, just sit there and behave yourself until the medics get here."
    I said, "No, no, you don't understand," but then neither did I. It was all jumbled and weird, and it became even more so. I think probably I was slipping in and out of consciousness, because I don't remember seeing the paramedics until we were inside the ambulance, then I saw them again at the trauma center as I was being wheeled into the surgery.
    It all came back, in there, as the doctor and two nurses were doing things to my head. I saw Ken Forta standing just outside the door with a worried face and the two deputies leaning lazily against a wall and looking bored. I called over, "Ken! Is the girl okay?"
           He just smiled at me, and a nurse shushed me, and the doc went on doing things to my scalp.
           I yelled, " Goddammit , Ken! Is she okay?"
           The nurse again tried to intervene but the doctor told her, "It's okay, we're finished. Let the officer come in." He told Forta , "Superficial, he'll mend. He's all yours."
           I wondered what he meant by that, but I should have known by the look on Forta's face.
           The uniforms came into the room while Forta recited my rights to me.
           I said, "What the hell is this?"
           He said, "Sorry, Joe. It's a collar. Suspicion of homicide."
           "Aw no," I said. "She was alive and well when my lights went out. I had nothing to do with it."
           He told me, "I believe you, Joe, even though I don't know what you're talking about." He bent down to whisper, "Shut up, dammit , until you've got your lawyer."
           Then the uniforms pulled me off the table and cuffed me.
           It became very real, then. It was not a nightmare. It was entirely real, and I was under arrest for murder.
    The charge was conspiracy to murder. The list of victims was long, and growing hourly.
           But Bernard Wiseman and Melissa Franklin were not on that list.
     
     
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER SIX
     
    Edgar's charges were several pages long. He was challenging the medical identification of Wiseman and he was trying to tie me to a criminal conspiracy.
    According to Edgar's theory of the case, Wiseman had enlisted my services in an effort to identify certain business enemies and then to eliminate them.
    Quite a few had been eliminated.
    I was surprised to learn that five had died in the NuCal bombing—the two indigents that I mentioned earlier plus another three John Does of whom bits and pieces were discovered inside the building.
    Another two John Does died in the limo.
    Four more connected persons had died during the next twenty-four hours—three women and a man, all of whose names meant nothing whatever to me. I'd just taken their pictures during my surveillance of NuCal . Each had been shot once in the head, execution style. The man was carrying one of my business cards.
    The arson investigators had determined that the bomb had detonated in a back room of NuCal . They described that back room as a "film lab." Two of the head-shot women had been employees of NuCal , which supposedly dealt only in costume design, but one of those victims also worked as a respected freelance film editor.
    Edgar's theory had me implicated right up to just short of planting the bombs and pulling the triggers. He even made mention of my past experience with explosives when I was at LAPD, suggesting I could have made the bombs.
    He