Shell Games Read Online Free PDF Page B

regretting having said a word. He pictured Kline’s long pale head, the deep-set eyes, and returned Ruter’s stare. Abruptly, Ruter pressed his palms onto the table and stood.
    “All right, Lieutenant, we’re done here today.”
    Marquez left the detectives sitting there and when he got out-side Petersen was arranging stuff in the back of her truck. She’d been in touch with the team, but nothing had changed with Li. He hadn’t moved today. They picked up lunch and Marquez told her he’d head south now to hook up with the Li surveillance. Petersen would watch Noyo and check further up the coast for Huega’s boat.
    After he’d left Petersen and was driving back to the Bay Area, coming through slow traffic in Santa Rosa, Marquez took a call from Italy.
    “I tried you earlier,” Katherine said, her voice low and husky.
    “I was in a meeting.”
    Separated after seven years of marriage, he didn’t go two hours of any day without thinking about her and his stepdaughter, Maria. They’d been apart now long enough to have some distance. Katherine’s friend, the marriage counselor who’d suggested it, had insisted that separation helped couples talk things through and break “patterns of conflict.” Katherine and Maria had moved back into the house she’d owned since before they’d married. Every other weekend or so, they’d come up to his house and stay the night as though they were guests. Sometimes they’d come for dinner during the week and then leave, and all of it felt completely unnat-ural and ate at him. It didn’t seem to him that the separation had allowed them to get any nearer to sorting their problems out, and if anything, it had created a new distance in him. Hurt pride, perhaps. The counselor’s idea that they talk on the phone or meet for coffee seemed more a slow breaking away than anything else.
    He knew Katherine was throwing herself at expanding her business. She had a coffee bar on Filbert Street in San Francisco that both the tourist magazines and the locals liked. She was close to opening another one in a little space south of Market on Spear Street. He still hadn’t seen the new place. An Italian manufacturer of espresso machines had paid for a hotel stay in Rome and she was over there for five days. He didn’t doubt what the manufacturer wanted, all she’d had to come up with was the airline ticket. And he knew Katherine was trying to build a life that was financially secure and gave Maria a fair shot at a good college. Fish and Game paid one of the lowest salaries in law enforcement. You had to do a lot of interviewing and work hard to find a lower salary. You could do it, but only if you found a small enough city or went to work for one of the bankrupt Sierra counties and though Kath might say all day long that money never figured in, it did. It affected quality of life and it affected Maria’s chances.
    He glanced at the dashboard clock, realized it was after midnight for her. She was in her hotel room with the windows wide open looking out over a piazza on a warm night.
    “I’ve got this big bed, but no you,” she said.
    He didn’t know how to answer, unsure whether she even meant it. They hadn’t slept together in three months. He changed lanes without commenting. It looked like a fender-bender slowing traffic, two young guys scuffling on the highway shoulder.
    “How’s my Maria?” she asked. “Have you seen her?”
    “No, we’ve been talking on the phone. She had a sleepover with Alice last night.”
    “Is she eating?”
    “She says she is.” He added, “She’s going to a movie tonight with her friends.”
    “She shouldn’t be doing that on a school night.”
    “One night won’t kill her grades.”
    “Have you been home at all?”
    “No.”
    Call waiting interrupted her response and then she wanted to hang up, telling him first that Maria was losing too much weight, that there was a problem that needed to be dealt with, now. He rolled to the incoming call.