Speak for the Dead Read Online Free PDF

something on the west side. Wager went toward them.
    Two uniformed officers glanced up. Wager identified himself to the corporal in charge. On the other side of the waist-high wall, two more officers dragged a grappling hook through a small, deep hole filled with scummy water and bordered by high weeds. Their shoes made sucking sounds as they moved.
    “Nothing?” asked Wager.
    “Not a goddamned thing. We’ll be through here in a few minutes.”
    The final third of the grounds, weedy and unkept, sloped west toward the rusty gate and Cheesman Park across the street. On the garden’s south edge, multi-windowed backs of mansions rose over a low hedge. Access could have been made there, but it was less likely; a person would have to cross private land, probably with a plastic bag in hand, past somebody’s guard dogs or silent alarm system, and then scramble through the hedge. “Your people have gone along the tree line down there?”
    “No trace of nothing.”
    Wager turned back toward the conservatory. In front of the main entrance, a group of senior citizens craned their necks. The lab people’s cardboard sign “ CRIME SCENE KEEP OUT ” closed the admission window, and Wager heard an old woman’s cracked voice ask over and over, “What? Why won’t they let us in? What?”
    Mr. Sumner, white hair now tamed, met him in the lobby. “We were supposed to open at nine, Inspector. We’re an hour and fifty-one minutes past that. How much longer is this going on?”
    “It shouldn’t be much more. Did the medical examiner get here yet?”
    “I really have no idea. The ambulance took the thing away, but there’s still someone in the conservatory.”
    “Is Dominick Mauro here yet?”
    Sumner gave a short, disgusted sigh and looked once more at the customers held outside the gate. “In Greenhouse One.”
    A lab man crouched to flip a fingerprint brush lightly at the outside handles of the emergency door.
    “Any luck?” asked Wager.
    “Plenty—and all bad. When you get this many prints, you know none of them mean a thing.”
    “Nothing inside?”
    “No. The alarm system for this door hasn’t been tampered with, and there’s no sign of forced entry anywhere. My guess is somebody used a key.”
    That was Wager’s guess, too. He turned in to the warm air of the first greenhouse; in the far corner, on folding chairs drawn up to a table with a large coffeepot and hot plate, sat three men. “Is Mr. Mauro here?”
    “I’m him.” The man closest to the pot stood. An inch or so taller than Wager and perhaps ten years older, Mauro had a thick round body that didn’t show signs of softening. His nose had long ago been broken and moved slightly away from center.
    “Detective Wager, homicide. Can I talk to you?”
    “Why not?” He shoved a chair with his foot. “Sit down.”
    The other two men were unsure whether to go or stay. Then, without saying anything aloud, they decided it was their coffee break and Wager was the intruder. They sat and pretended not to hear his questions.
    “Were you the last one to leave yesterday, Mr. Mauro?”
    “No. It was my day off.”
    “On a Tuesday?”
    “I worked last Sunday. Me and Sal change off weekends; whoever works Sunday gets next Tuesday off.”
    “Who locks up when you’re not here?”
    He bobbed his head at the two men in overalls. “Leon or Joe. They’re the senior gardeners.”
    “They have keys, then?”
    “Not their own. They use the emergency master—it’s over there, locked in the keyboard.”
    A small steel cabinet with a glass door hung just inside the entry. It was secured by a combination padlock.
    “It’s that first key,” added Mauro.
    “They use the master to lock up the conservatory, then lock it in this greenhouse when they go home?”
    “That’s it.”
    “How many people know the combination to that padlock?”
    “Only them, I guess. I don’t know it, anyway.”
    “Can I talk to you two a minute?”
    The elder of the two—lean, with