Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page B

provided very few leads for us to follow up on. Once we get the forensics report, we hope to have more to work with.”
    “And when will that be?” Sadie asked.
    “After the holiday. Perhaps not until next week. I’ll check on how much longer we’ll need to wait so I’ll have more specific information for you when you get into town.”
    Pete nudged her shoulder, and she turned to him with a questioning look.
    “Ask him if he knows Cornell Bateman,” Pete whispered, waving toward the phone.
    Sadie scowled at Pete throwing off her groove, but she did as he asked. “Um, Detective Lopez, do you know Cornell Bateman?”
    “Corney?” Detective Lopez said with a laugh. “I absolutely do. How do you know him?”
    Since Sadie had no idea who Cornell Bateman was, she handed the phone to Pete, who had a five-minute discussion with Detective Lopez about the mutual friend that Pete had attended the academy with nearly thirty years ago. He now worked vice out of Oakland.
    Sadie was slightly annoyed by the good-ol’-boys discussion at first, but by the time they stopped talking about Corney, she hoped she’d get the chance to meet him sometime. He sounded like a great guy. Somehow Pete transitioned the conversation to questions about the case—more detailed questions than Sadie had thought to ask, things like procedure, document forensics, and Wendy’s history with the department.
    By the time they’d finished the call Detective Lopez had agreed to talk to his superior about the possibility of Pete coming into the station and talking through the case file with them after he and Sadie arrived in San Francisco. Sadie tried to hide her envy—police had never been that excited when she was involving herself in a case.
    Pete hung up and handed her the phone, grinning with satisfaction.
    “Are you sure you were really ready to retire?” Sadie asked cautiously. It had only been a couple of months since he’d turned in his badge, but talking the lingo seemed to have lit a fire inside him.
    He came closer to her, putting his arms loosely around her waist. “You know I’ve missed it,” he said, sounding meek and a little vulnerable.
    Sadie nodded; she did know. She also knew that he’d put in some applications for different part-time positions within the department that would keep him involved, but not quite so obligated. She supposed she simply hadn’t realized what a big part of him was still a cop. “Detective Lopez sounds pretty open to having you look around.”
    “Does that bother you?” Pete asked.
    “No,” Sadie said. “But it does sound as though you’re taking the case, so to speak. You think it was a homicide?”
    “The San Fran PD doesn’t seem to think so—there were no obvious signs of trauma to the body. But we know that at least two crimes were committed by someone—the theft of the missing items from her apartment and the desecration of a human body.” Sadie suppressed a shudder at the clinical language, and Pete stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If it bothers you to—”
    “No, it doesn’t bother me,” she said, determined not to shy away from things. “It’s just that . . . with all the other cases I’ve worked on, it was someone else, you know? They didn’t belong to me. It’s just shocking when I let myself think that this was Wendy. My sister.”
    Pete paused, then spoke with a bit of hesitation. “You said you wanted to know more about her.”
    Sadie nodded. “I guess that’s where my focus is—learning about her life. Thinking so much about her death is harder for me to do—heck, thinking about her life is hard for me. She discarded all of us so long ago.”
    Pete nodded his understanding. “What if I work with Lopez on the cop side of things—the death part. Then you can focus on the life she lived and the people she knew.”
    Sadie cocked her head to the side, considering. It did feel more comfortable to emphasize Wendy’s history, but she didn’t want to be left