Death and Taxes Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t think a guy in that condition could get them out of his baskets and through the tires, but he did. Got them partway locked, and then it seemed like he didn’t realize they were still open. He pushed himself up and staggered into the street.”
    That confirmed what we’d figured, but it broke no new ground. And if I knew Leonard, it wasn’t what his pockets were full of. “And?”
    “And then, Sierra said, a patrol officer came.”
    “Pereira?”
    “Now that’s the odd thing that makes me wonder if Sierra really saw anything. He says a dark-haired officer in uniform. Came up to the bike, but didn’t see Drem.”
    “Looked at the bike and left?” I asked, amazed.
    Leonard shrugged again. “Like I said, it’s not worth much. Probably nothing. I’ll catch him again tomorrow.”
    “Could have been his own private screening,” I said. “Whatever Sierra saw, it was not a patrol officer eyeballing the scene and wandering off into the dark.” No Berkeley patrol officer would have left the scene—I knew that, I believed it. But just in case, I was glad to have Leonard following up.
    I walked back to my car and headed for the station. I thought Howard and his crew might be there celebrating his sting. They weren’t. I’d hoped Raksen, the lab tech, might have seen something telling on Drem’s bike. But it was way too soon for the compulsively thorough Raksen to say anything. What I wasn’t expecting was Pereira.
    I walked in from the parking lot through the squad room. Seeing me, Pereira jumped up and raced toward me, her face flushed. “Philip Drem,” she said. “Do you know who he is?”
    “An IRS agent.”
    “Not just any Treasury agent, Smith. Philip Drem is the Al Capone of the auditors. When word that he’s been hospitalized hits, half of Berkeley will be sighing in relief.”

CHAPTER 4
    W HEN A YOUNG, HEALTHY-LOOKING man stumbles into the street and collapses, it makes me wonder. When he’s one of the most hated employees of the nation’s most-loathed bureaucracy, I get suspicious. And when I hear a cockamamy tale about a patrol officer ignoring his fallen body, eyeing his bicycle, and wandering off into the night …
    I had the feeling that this case was going to blow any minute. But before the eruption came, there was not a thing I could do to contain the disaster.
    I pulled my car into Howard’s driveway, wishing Pereira’d had some conclusive word on Drem’s condition. Drem was still alive, barely. I kept picturing him lying in the road with that terrified look. The face I saw wasn’t the “Al Capone of the auditors.” It belonged to someone who’d nonchalantly climbed on his bike, turned downhill, and ridden straight into the angel of death.
    But there was nothing I could do now. My skin felt clammy from exhaustion, and it quivered from stress that wouldn’t dissipate before I was called to the next crime scene. It certainly wouldn’t ease up enough so I could sleep tonight. I’d spend the night thrashing around. I’d probably kick over Howard’s tax door-table, knock his tax forms all over the bedroom, and break my foot in the bargain.
    And to make matters worse, I was starved. I’d bought a quart of Chocolate Chocolate Shower ice cream yesterday. What were the chances of any of it still being in the freezer? Yesterday (Thursday) had been the beginning of spring break for Howard’s tenants (two students, one prof, and one TA, all of whom would have dropped out before taking a class that met on Friday). They’d all packed and departed for beaches, friends’ houses, or places where they could do even less than they managed here. I would have bet my car that my Chocolate Chocolate Shower had left inside of one of them.
    But at least they were gone. And the brown-shingled other woman was empty of the increasingly “tolerant” tenants Howard was forced to accept in order to pay the rent. The only ones who were willing to join his indolent assemblage of lessees, their