Inherit the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’d been looking into, and they set me up.
    So what?
    Perry blinked. This was the last response he had expected. He tried to keep his voice gentle, an unnatural act that he committed only in the presence of those he loved. I’m a cop. My uncles were both cops. It’s the family business. I’m good at it. I care about the force. I have to stay and fight so I can find out who really took the money.
    Noreen’s face was locked against his entreaties. If you stay and fight, there’s a good chance you’ll lose, she had said.
    I know that. I’ve given this a lot of thought, Norrie. I have friends on the force. We’ll get the evidence.
    She shifted ground. He had rarely known her to be so adamant. Have you given any thought to your family? To Nicky?
    That’s who I’m doing it for, honey. I don’t want her to be ashamed of her father.
    She’s too young to understand, Perry. If you fight this—if there’s a hearing—all she’ll understand is that every morning when she goes to school, the other kids will ask her why her dad was on the news last night. Do you really want to put her through that?
    Perry was stunned. Not by the argument, although his wife had a point. What broke his determination—and, let’s be frank, his courage—was the look in Noreen’s beautiful dark eyes.
    His wife didn’t believe him, either.

    Perry had hit the Hamptons at last, but the traffic had not eased, an accident or roadwork, or both. Maybe this was the reason Julia Drusilla hardly ever saw her daughter: driving from Manhattan to the eastern-most tip of Long Island could take an eternity, and Julia was no spring chicken.
    Passing an ice-cream parlor with a brace of youngsters outside, he thought again of his own precious Nicky. He knew he had no business criticizing Julia Drusilla; he was angry, really, at himself. Nicky was fifteen, and it was his own fault that he hardly ever saw her. True, he could blame her mother, and like a lot of divorced fathers, he often did. But Perry himself was the one who kept missing those rare weekends because of some case. Besides, even if Noreen used their daughter as a pawn, Perry was the one who let her get away with it. For a while their lawyers had argued, but that had been starting to cost serious money. At some point, he had stopped fighting and given in, letting Noreen control his access to his own flesh and blood.
    Had Julia let her husband pull something similar?
    Because for all that Perry might have been reviewing his own life in the front of his mind, out back, as he liked to think of it, the caseitself had never quite left. Forget the parallels. Forget the divorce angle. Line up the facts. The fortune comes to light, and Angel, the heiress, disappears. Julia seems pretty sure that her daughter was unaware of the money, so it’s not likely that she’s gone into seclusion at the local convent to pray for guidance about how to spend it. Three choices: Angel hasn’t vanished at all and is shacked up with a boyfriend and ignoring her mother’s calls; she vanished voluntarily, for a reason having nothing to do with the money; or she vanished involuntarily, in which case a crime has been committed.
    Uncle Jackie used to say at such moments that all you need is a three-sided coin.
    If Angel had gone off on her own, then Perry would find her and tell her that her mother needed to see her urgently but not why. Let the girl make up her own mind what to do. If she was with her boyfriend, or her girlfriend, same deal. But if somebody disappeared her—say, to prevent her from signing the papers—well, then, he should turn the case over.
    In theory.
    A cacophony of horns up ahead shook him from his reverie, the obvious reason for all the traffic. Some fool in a delivery truck had tried to beat the light and wound up in the intersection, and now nothing could move in any direction. While others honked and cursed, Perry, who always had a backup plan, turned right at what looked to others like a dead