A Clean Kill Read Online Free Page A

me for expecting some bobbing and weaving.”
    The waitress brought my coffee. As she put it down, Dr. Adderson said, “You’re excused. Now what can I do for you?”
    “Tell me about Mrs. Baneberry. I need to hear everything you know about the food poisoning and herdeath. But first, let me just go ahead and ask you: Does it make any sense at all for a healthy, forty-six-year-old woman who has sought hospital treatment to die of simple food poisoning?”
    “Salmonella poisoning.”
    “Okay,” I said, “does it make any sense for Kate Baneberry to have died of salmonella poisoning under those circumstances?”
    Dr. Laurel Adderson took a delicate sip of tea from a china cup and said, “No, Mr. McInnes. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Three
    At its Southernmost tip, Alabama drops down next to the Florida Panhandle and splits into two short prongs or legs. The water between those prongs is Mobile Bay, and the City of Mobile sits at the apex, or the crotch, of that split. Some—referring to the city’s sea-faring history and its location—claim that Mobile is the place, literally the birth canal, through which much of the deep South was born. Others—who are less impressed with the city’s Mardi Gras societies and unyielding social climate—say its founders prophetically placed Mobile exactly where an asshole should be.
    I loved the old place, or I wouldn’t have located my practice there. But, at the end of the day, even I headed south to live on a more tranquil part of the bay, a place where slipping bare feet into worn boat shoes is considered dressing for dinner.
    Highway 98—the road I had taken into Daphne—runs down the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay through Daphne and Fairhope to below Point Clear, where it cuts across the right foot of Alabama and crosses into Pensacola.
    I followed the rain-washed highway as far as Point Clear, where I turned onto the familiar crunch of my gravel driveway a few minutes past seven. Inside the beach house, I placed a call to my mother to see if she and Sam had returned from their Thanksgiving cruise. It was something one of them had dreamed up to avoid another holiday spitting contest between my father and me. I got their machine and left a message. Next I punched in Sheri Baneberry’s home number with the intention of reporting on my meeting with Dr. Adderson. I talked to another tape recorder and hung up.
    Finally, I tried Susan Fitzsimmons’s new number in Chicago.
    Susan and I had a complicated relationship. Fall of the previous year, I had manipulated Susan into helping me find my brother’s killer, who took exception to our efforts, stabbed Susan, and shot me. Obviously, we both survived. Six months later, she and I became
involved—
the post-college euphemism for affection and sex—during my efforts to help a young friend of Susan’s who had witnessed a murder. Our relationship had lasted almost six months.
    But Susan missed what she wryly called “the safety of Chicago.”
    As she had become increasingly involved in my life, Susan had come to believe that I was attracted—“almost driven,” in her words—to dangerous people. I, on the other hand, wondered why so many dangerous clients and situations seemed to be attracted to me.
    Susan said I was in denial.
    I said, probably so.
    She then suggested that maybe I had spent my life seeking out life-and-death battles to prove my worth to an overbearing and unforgiving father.
    I suggested that maybe she’d been watching too much
Oprah
.
    Now she had moved to Chicago, and her phone had rung fifteen times. Maybe she hadn’t found time to buy a machine or hire a service. Maybe it was easier to avoid calling me if I couldn’t leave a message. Maybe the world didn’t revolve around me, and Susan was just out having a life.
    Fifteen minutes later, I was microwaving leftover chili when my phone rang. I walked into the living room, grabbed the mobile receiver, and said hello.
    “Tom? This is Laurel