His Partner's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

was
as much an antique, a 385, maybe a 485. Forget Pentium. No telephone line to
it, which meant no internet access. No CD drive. In fact, the floppy drives
were for the outmoded bigger disks. The keyboard was covered, the monitor
screen a little dusty.
    Using a handkerchief, John carefully opened drawers. The top
one held nothing but paper clips, pencils that needed sharpening, a staple
remover, markers and packing tape. The big drawer was set up with hanging
files, all labeled: 1986 tax return. Ditto '87, '88, and so on through the year
before last. MasterCard statements. Appliance warranties. Household receipts.
    On the face of it, nothing of any interest to anyone but the
IRS doing a back audit. And, damn, was Stuart ready. No midnight scrabbling for torn receipts for him. It was almost a shame the IRS had never, to the best
of John's knowledge, chosen to audit Reed.
    The closet held boxes and plastic-wrapped clothes on
hangers. A cracked leather aviator jacket, ski pants and parka, a high school
letterman's jacket. Some of the boxes were labeled: check stubs, photo albums,
records. His turntable had probably given up the ghost, but he wouldn't have
given up the records. A faint musty odor lingered in here.
    Baxter muttered a profanity. "Did Reed ever throw
anything away?"
    "Not so's I can tell." John eased the closet door
shut again. "Nothing unusual in here, though. We all have crap like
this."
    "We'd better look in those boxes." He grunted
agreement, however much he disliked the idea. Mining every detail was their
job, but usually what he learned about people's lives was of academic interest.
He made a mental jigsaw puzzle, slotting pieces in until every one fit. This
time was different. Stuart Reed had been not just a fellow cop but John's
partner and friend. Even more, he hated the idea of intruding on Natalie's
privacy. "Tomorrow," he said.
    They tried the remaining houses on the street. One was still
dark; at the two places where someone came to the door, shakes of the head were
their answers. They'd been gone all day. Neither knew Natalie or, quite
frankly, would have noticed a truck in her driveway if they had been home.
    "I say we go back to the station and look for that
face," John said at last. "Even odds we have his picture in our
books."
    "No point in waiting for fingerprint ID," his
partner agreed. "Tomorrow is soon enough to look hard at the house."
    Mug shots were arranged into books by theme: drug arrests,
rape, B and E, and so on. That way, if a store owner was held up, say, he
didn't have to gaze at the face of every rapist or marijuana grower who had
ever been arrested. He could concentrate on likely perps. This worked fine
normally. In this case, however, the face could have been familiar for dozens
of reasons.
    John's money was on drugs.
    The next hour and a half was punctuated only by the slap of
a cover closing, the abrupt departure of one man or the other for another cup
of coffee, and a couple of trips down memory lane.
    "Ha!" Baxter crowed once. "Remember our
friend Jerry Canfield? Sending him to the pen in Walla Walla was one of the greater
pleasures of this job."
    It was Geoff Baxter who found their victim.
"Bingo," he said softly. "I knew we'd met."
    John rotated his shoulders and waited until his partner
shoved the book across the table. From the rows of mug shots, the sullen face
jumped out at him.
    "He was better looking alive," Baxter said.
    "Who isn't? No, don't answer that."
    Ronald Floyd had a lengthy rap sheet, starting with
possession of cocaine when he was seventeen in Tacoma. Thirty-four the day he
died, Floyd had stuck to his chosen career of dealing drugs and slowly risen on
the ladder. The part that always amazed John was how little time a guy like
Floyd ever served despite multiple arrests. The system was overwhelmed; he'd
walked a couple of times because prosecutors had shrugged and decided he wasn't
worth the bother. John knew how the arresting officers had felt; after all,