The Myron Bolitar Series 7-Book Bundle Read Online Free PDF Page B

from every conceivable height and angle.
    What if. She pondered it yet again.
    In her typically self-centered way, she had seen the “what if-ing” only in terms of herself, not Myron. Now she wondered about him, about what his life had really been like since the world crumbled down upon him—not all at once—but in small, decaying bits. Four years. She had not seen him in four years. She had shoved Myron into some back closet in her mind and locked the door. She’d thought (hoped?) that would be the end of it, thatthe door could stand up to a little pressure without opening. But seeing him today, seeing the kind, handsome face high above those broad shoulders, seeing the still why-me stare in his eyes—the door had blown off its hinges like something in a gas explosion.
    Jessica had been overwhelmed by her feelings. She wanted to be with him so badly that she knew she had to get out right away.
    Makes sense
, she thought,
if you’re a total fuck-up
.
    Jessica glanced out the window. She was waiting for Paul’s arrival. Bergen County police Lieutenant Paul Duncan—Uncle Paul to her, since infancy—was two years away from retirement. He had been her father’s closest friend, the executor of Adam Culver’s will. They had both worked in law enforcement—Paul as a cop, Adam as the county medical examiner—for more than twenty-five years.
    Paul was coming to finalize the details for her father’s memorial service. No funeral for Adam Culver. He wouldn’t hear of it. But Jessica wanted to talk to Paul about another matter. Alone. She did not like what was going on.
    “Hi, honey.”
    She turned to the voice. “Hi, Mom.”
    Her mother came up through the basement. She was wearing an apron, her fingers fiddling with the large wooden cross around her neck. “I put his chair in storage,” she explained in a forced matter-of-fact tone. “Just cluttering space up here.”
    For the first time Jessica realized that her father’s chair—the one her mother must have been referring to—was gone from the kitchen table. The simple unpadded four-legged chair her father had sat in for as long as Jessica could remember, the one closest to the refrigerator, so close that her father could turn around, open thedoor, and stretch for the milk on the top shelf without getting up, had been taken away, stored in some cob-webbed corner of the basement.
    But not so Kathy’s.
    Jessie’s gaze touched down on the chair to her immediate right. Kathy’s chair. It was still here. Her mother had not touched it. Her father, well, he was dead. But Kathy—who knew? Kathy could, in theory, walk through the back door right this very minute, banging it against the wall as she always did, smile brightly, and join them for dinner. The dead were dead. When you lived with a medical examiner, you understood just how useless the dead were. Dead and buried. The soul, well, that was another matter. Jessie’s mom was a devout Catholic, attending mass every morning, and during crises like these her religious tenacity paid off—like someone who spent time in a gym finally finding a use for their new muscles. She could believe without question in a divine and joyous afterlife. Such a comfort. Jessica wished she could do the same, but over the years her religious fervor had become a strict couch potato.
    Except, of course, Kathy might not be dead. Ergo the chair—Mom’s lantern kept lit to guide her youngest back home.
    Jessica awoke most mornings bolting upright in her bed, thinking about—no, inventing new possibilities for—her younger sister. Was Kathy lying dead in a pit somewhere? Buried under brush in the woods? A skeleton gnawed on by animals and inhabited by maggots? Was Kathy’s corpse stuck in some cement foundation? Was it weighed down in the bottom of some river like the little undersea man in the living-room aquarium? Had she died painlessly? Had she been tortured? Had her body been chopped into small bits, burned, broken down with acid