Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

was not prepared to have that particular argument without being sure what we were arguing about, so I brought it back to specifics and filled her in on what Jellyfish had told Gaines.
    She waited me out. Then she said, “Have you thought about the obvious? Those new gangs in Birmingham? They’ve been trying to come in ever since you took out the Mann brothers. There’s that new kid—what’s the name I keep hearing, Dredge?”
    “Dodge.”
    “Right, he sounds like he has his shit together. It was him who took out Letisha, right? That’s what they say, anyway. And she worked for Gaines, so maybe Jelly approached them, and this is their next move.”
    “No. The Letisha thing was just gang stuff, territory. They wouldn’t have the savvy for something like this. And that wouldn’t explain Maria. She was good. Good enough to fool me. This is someone else.”
    She stepped past me and looked into the room, nodding. “Okay, then you’re officially fucked.”
    “We both are.” I waited to see how she took that. She didn’t, so I carried on. “See, if there’s someone on our side leaking information to the cops, they must also know that someone on your side is giving information to Gaines. Even if they don’t know it’s you, how hard would it be to follow it back?”
    “I’ve covered my tracks.” Her words were confident, rehearsed, but her eyes said something else. “There’s nothing that leads to me.”
    “You sure? You’d have to be pretty confident of that to walk away. I mean, this mess here? This isn’t your problem. Maybe I get it cleaned up, maybe I don’t. Maybe I get caught. There’s nothing to tie it to you, except your ex-husband, and everyone knows he’s a scumbag, right?” I pretended not to notice her smile. “No, this mess isn’t your problem. Your problem is the leak that led to it. This is just collateral damage. You need that leak found, which means you need me to help you. What if the cops find me with two bodies? Worse, what if Maria comes back to tidy up and finds me alone? I won’t be around to fix your mess for you. Then what? Best case? The cops find out about you, and you have to face them. Worst case? Someone on the other side finds out, maybe the people who’ve done this, maybe somebody else, and they come looking for you.”
    “That’s not worst case, to be honest. Not right now.”
    “Oh?”
    “Commissioner Perry has his election coming up. He’s not delivered on any of his promises from the last campaign—we don’t have the budgets or manpower—so he’ll need to pull something big out of his hat to distract people. Something that gets him on the front page.”
    I knew Perry. I’d helped him out of a jam once. He was another in the long list of people who had taken money from Gaines. “He won’t want to make a big deal out of police corruption. It could blow up in his face.”
    “This is politics. If he can spin it, he can use it. He can run as the man who finally exposed a corrupt Detective Chief Inspector, maybe use it to make a case against Gaines, too. I don’t want to give him any ideas.”
    “So, basically, you’re saying I’m right?”
    She sighed. “Don’t push it. Okay, where do we start?”
    “You tell me—you’re the cop. Work this backward. Can we make it look like two accidental deaths in a fire, torch the place?”
    The truth was I’d already thought most of this through. Cop training never really goes away, and once you’ve worked enough crime scenes, you have a sense of how to reverse engineer them. But I wanted to make her take the lead, to distract her from thinking too much about the implications of what we were doing.
    She looked around and shook her head, pointing at the carpet and then the bodies. “Wouldn’t work. If two bodies are found after the fire, it will have to start out as suspicious circumstances. Even if it’s just being done as a formality, there’s enough here for them to figure out something’s wrong. Then