Hot Trick (A Detective Shelley Caldwell Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page B

imagine talking about the supernatural, stuff no one else believed in—stuff I hadn’t believed in myself until I’d been forced to.
    “C’mon, Norelli,” I wheedled, “let me in.”
    He thought about it for a moment before relenting. “All right. But everything goes through me.”
    Everything he knew about. I wasn’t going to give him more than I had to, not if it meant protecting Silke. I’d become an expert at that.
    “Deal?” he asked.
    “Deal. So how did we get the tip on the victim?” I asked, wondering if he’d tell me about Casey Brogan.
    Had the supposed banshee caught Norelli and given him the story after I’d driven off?
    “Phone call. A man. He was driving past this intersection and saw the car head straight for those trees.”
    “A man. No name?”
    “He identified himself as Mr. Concerned Citizen.”
    Norelli said it like I should know better. And really I did. But it never hurt to ask anyway. I always asked. Part of my M.O. A detective was closer to being a researcher than a street cop. Asking questions was what we did. Sometimes, when we got lucky, we even got the answers we were looking for.
    “So what do we got?” Norelli asked the crime scene investigator.
    “Fiber. Hair. The usual.”
    “Any prints?”
    “All over the place. Looks like three sets.”
    “What are our chances of running them fast?” I asked.
    Norelli gave me one of his special looks. “Tell me she’s related to the mayor or an alderman.”
    I knew better about that too. If the case wasn’t what we called a heater—the victim being connected—it could take weeks, even months, to get results. It wasn’t like television. CSI gave viewers the wrong impression of the way a case was handled.
    I said, “We have to ID her first.”
    “Julie Martin, Wrigleyville address.”
    “It’s a start,” Norelli said. “She wearing a ring?”
    “Wedding and engagement. A big rock.”
    “I wonder what the husband was doing while the wife was out getting herself killed,” Norelli muttered.
    I didn’t comment. I doubted the husband was involved. Not unless he was somehow connected to Sebastian Cole. The idea that Cole had escaped a trunk in the river and the Martin woman hadn’t escaped a trunk if a different kind seemed too sweet a coincidence, and I didn’t believe in coincidences.
    One of the uniformed officers approached. “Hey, Norelli, I ran the plates. Registered to one Joseph Martin. Here’s the address.” He handed the detective a slip of paper.
    Norelli nodded. “I’ll follow up, inform him of his wife’s death.” When the uniform didn’t move off, he asked “Something else?”
    “It’s just weird is all.”
    “What exactly.”
    “That the victim drowned in the river. In a trunk.”
    Norelli spread his hands, as if waiting for the punch line.
    My gut roiled. Here it came.
    “You know that Sebastian guy?” the uniform said. “The escape artist?”
    “What about him?”
    “He pulled an escape tonight. From a trunk—the luggage kind, but a trunk—in the Chicago River.”
    “You don’t say.”
    “Honest. I heard about it on the radio.”
    “Huh. An escape and a drowning, both in the river and on the same night.”
    “Weird coincidence,” the officer said.
    “Yeah, probably,” I said, “but it wouldn’t hurt to check it out.”
    Okay, so I needed to tell Norelli that Silke worked for Sebastian without seeming like I’d set out to trick him. Norelli might be an idiot at times, but he wasn’t stupid. I decided diving right in and laying my cards on the table while the information was hot was better than letting the truth leak out later. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to hide the truth just in case I needed to be evasive later.
    “Hey, Norelli, another weird coincidence…” I took a big breath and added, “I was at Sebastian’s escape event tonight.”
    Norelli frowned. “So you saw this Sebastian in person.”
    “Actually, I met him.”
    He gave me another of those