Alone (Detective D.D. Warren, #1)(43)

“Should I be thinking you?”

“D.D.—”

“Relax, Bobby. It's your girlfriend we're going after. Catherine Gagnon.”

Bobby frowned. The girlfriend comment had been dangled as bait, but he refused to bite. “I don't see it,” he said after a bit.

“ADA's office started looking into the widow yesterday. Rumor is, she had a lot to gain from her husband's death. Rumor is, she might have been shopping around for some hired help—or a misplaced fool's heart.”

“Copley thinks Catherine approached Tony Rocco about killing her husband?”

“Copley tried to schedule an interview with the good doctor yesterday afternoon. Rocco blew him off.”

Bobby nodded, holding his coffee mug between his hands and thinking hard. “If Tony Rocco was Catherine's ally, why would she kill him or find someone to kill him?”

D.D. shrugged. She wouldn't meet his eye. “Rocco obviously didn't kill Jimmy.”

“No,” Bobby agreed quietly, “he didn't.” He kept gazing at D.D., but her eyes were now locked on her plate.

“But maybe Catherine spoke to Rocco about doing it,” D.D. said after a moment. “And maybe she got word that the ADA was looking into it. That would give her motive to want Tony Rocco dead—so Rocco couldn't rat her out.”

“But the killer was most likely a male.”

“She has looks, she has money. Either one would get her help.”

“Help to eliminate the help,” Bobby pointed out dryly.

D.D. shrugged. “It's Copley's theory. Me, I'm still going with the jealous spouse. After all, if you were just killing someone to be expedient, would you really engage in postmortem weenie whacking?”

“That does seem more personal.”

“Plus there's the message to consider.”

“The message?”

“Yeah. Written on the back window. That's what got Dr. Rocco found; someone leaned closer to read the script.”

“And it says?”

“‘Boo.'”

“Boo?”

“Yeah, written in women's lipstick.”

“Women's lipstick?”

“Yep. And I'll bet you anything that on Catherine Gagnon this is a particularly killer shade of red.”




D .D. POLISHED UP her plate. Bobby grabbed the bill.

“Copley's gonna pay you a visit this afternoon,” D.D. mentioned.

“Is he flirting, or do you think it's true love?”

“He says that yesterday you and the missus were spotted playing together at the Gardner Museum.”

Bobby unfolded the bills from his money clip and started counting out ones.

“It's not good,” D.D. continued quietly, “to be seen with the dead man's wife. Makes people talk.”

He needed a ten. Didn't have one. Settled on two fives.

“She's trouble,” D.D. said.

Two singles should do it for the tip.

“He was going to divorce her, you know, and take full custody of the kid. Sometimes, there's a very fine line between being a destitute ex-wife and being a wealthy widow. Thursday night, Catherine Gagnon crossed that line. In this business, you have to wonder about that sort of thing.”

Bobby finally glanced up. “Do you really think she could've set it up? Engineered a fight, arranged for her husband to have a gun, then manipulated everything so that he got shot and she didn't?”

D.D. didn't say anything right away. When she finally spoke, he wished she hadn't. “Did you know her, Bobby? Had you had any contact with her before the call? Even a casual acquaintance, a friend of a friend?”

“No.”

D.D. sat back, but her face was still troubled, her eyes watching. Bobby stood up, fumbling to get his money clip back in his pocket and now biting back a curse.

“Bobby,” she said after a moment, and something in her voice stopped him. She had an expression on her face he'd never seen before. A certain grim curiosity. For a moment, it appeared she'd changed her mind, but then the question came out anyway, as if she simply had to know.

“When you took the shot . . . was it difficult, Bobby? Seeing a real person, did it make you hesitate?”

It would be easy to be offended, to give her a dirty look, then cut and run. But D.D. was a friend. A fellow cop from way back. And maybe, if he dug deep, Bobby understood her question even better than she did. It was the one thing every cop had to wonder. So much time spent in training, but when it came down to it, in the field, when it was your life, or worse, a fellow cop's on the line . . .

He gave it to her straight.

“Honest to God,” he said quietly, “I didn't feel a thing.”

D.D.'s gaze fell to the floor. She wouldn't look at him again. And he didn't bother to be surprised anymore. Three days after the shooting, he was finally learning that that's the way these things went.

Bobby nodded at her one last time, and headed out the door.





B OBBY HAD WALKED two blocks from the diner when the sleek, black Lincoln Town Car pulled alongside him. A darkened window purred down. Bobby took one look inside and cursed.

“Don't you have a hobby?” he asked Harris Reed, who was slowing down the sedan to match Bobby's walking speed. A string of irritated honks promptly sounded from the traffic behind him.