Labyrinth (Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page B

what you’re talking about on some of those points of yours. The rest is nothing but coincidence and bad luck. Kammerling hired me for the London job. I just got back and was trying to check in. I didn’t even know he was missing. And what was that about the guy who assaulted me? I haven’t had any contact with him.”
    “You didn’t know Todd Simondson came out on parole last week?”
    “Why would I? The parole board doesn’t have to call me in—it was a plea bargain. Time served, we’re done.”
    “So you did not know he died two days ago, either?”
    That startled me and I spilled a bit of coffee on the counter as I twitched in surprise. “What? No. Of what?” I didn’t like the sound of that. . . .
    “Most mysterious circumstances ...”
    “That’s not a cause.”
    He shrugged.
    “Don’t say you suspect me....”
    “It fits.”
    “Not unless you believe in bilocation. Two days ago, I was on a nonstop flight from London to New York, and then on the connection from JFK to Sea-Tac. I spent fourteen hours in transit and I have boarding passes that prove it.”
    “Do you?”
    “Yes!” I stomped into the living room and dug my passport and airline folder from my bag and brought them back to him. I shoved the lot into his hand. “Unless you think I have a secret identity and had someone else fly under my name while I snuck back into the country and murdered the poor bastard. But I’m sure the security cameras at Sea-Tac have tape from the Customs area that you could check if you don’t choose to believe me.”
    He studied the papers, his aura drawing in but getting no less orange and frustrated. He huffed and handed the pages back to me.
    “Thank you for not arresting me.” Maybe I was a little snippy as I said it, but damn. . . . “So what happened to Simondson? And don’t stonewall—you owe me.”
    “Looked like a hit-and-run,” he admitted. “Maybe a beating.”
    “ ‘Looked like’? Was it or wasn’t it?”
    “No one knows. No witnesses. The body was already in rigor when found.”
    That struck me odd: Solis wasn’t the sort to reduce a victim to a mere corpse and dismiss it. “Where did this happen?” I peered at him, looking for a change in his energy that might give me a clue what he thought. Or what he was fishing for.
    “He was discovered at the old brewery buildings in Georgetown—the demolished end.”
    I noticed Solis didn’t claim the death itself had happened on the same site, but all I said was, “Hardly seems like his sort of neighborhood.” The man had been white collar all the way; even the fraud I caught him at that led to his murderous rage was genteel stuff.
    Georgetown—a former independent city of farmers and brewers that had been eaten up by the combined appetites of Boeing and the City of Seattle—was mostly industrial with a few isolated houses and clusters of shops among the warehouses, light manufacturing, and so on. It lay sandwiched between I-5 as it cut below the cliff of Beacon Hill on the east, and the mucky, muddy waters of the Duwamish river a few blocks away on the west. Cases I’d had down there had been connected to industrial accidents, theft, and that sort of thing. The area had made a stab at bohemian trendiness a while back when most of the old brewery and cold storage buildings had been converted into offices and studio space for artists, but that attempt had centered on the streets near the old brewery and hadn’t penetrated much farther. The brewery area housed a lot of funk in a few square blocks, not to mention a metal club named Nine-pound Hammer. It wasn’t the kind of business neighborhood in which I’d expect to find a former estate embezzler with anger management problems hanging out.
    The bare dozen blocks of houses still standing in Georgetown were mostly farther south, right across the road from the airfield—single-family structures from the first third of the twentieth century being renovated by hopeful yuppies who were