Cast of Shadows - v4 Read Online Free

accomplice.”
    That was probably true. Police suspected the bombing had been instigated by the infamous Byron Bonavita, and they might have blown their best chance yet of capturing him. An investigation of the dead conspirator had been little help so far. “Maybe. Maybe not. I won’t lie. There are a lot of insane, angry people and it’s going to happen again sometime. Somewhere. But you want to worry, worry about me when I’m driving up the Tri-State Tollway. I’m much more likely to get myself killed in merging traffic than I am in some explosion here at the office.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know. We already had that talk in driver’s ed. A state trooper came and he had gory slides of car wrecks and everything. It was gross.”
    “Besides, if you’re so certain something’s going to happen to the clinic, why are
you
here today?”
    “Money.” Anna Kat turned her head sideways and dropped her hand, palm-up, on the desk. She wiggled her fingers. “Besides, I’m too young and pretty to die. Stick with me at all times, Dad, and you’ll be perfectly safe.”
    God, Davis thought. How often since the day she was born had he silently expressed the same notion in reverse? If he could only be with her all the time, nothing could happen to her. To them. He pulled his wallet out of the desk and placed two twenty-dollar bills in her hand.
    “Speaking of young and pretty, I saw Dr. Burton in the hall,” she said.
    “Did you say hello?”
    “I did,” she said, then, “Mom hates her.”
    Davis froze his hand above the drawer as he was about to return the wallet there. “What are you talking about?”
    “She says she doesn’t like having someone that pretty around you all day. She says Dr. Burton’s just your type.” Her voice was singsongy in the last few syllables, in imitation of her mother.
    “She said that to
you
?”
    AK shook her head. “To Aunt Patty. She was kidding. I think. Sort of. Little bit.”
    “That’s crazy.”
    “We don’t use that word, Dad. Remember?”
    Davis frowned. Yes, he knew better. Jackie’s family had a history of mental illness and a tradition of suicide going back four generations that they knew about. She could be eccentric at times (a trait that he had found alluring once), and Davis and AK monitored her odd behavior for signs of true irrationality. Occasionally, father or daughter would worry when they caught Jackie talking to herself, or when she began one of her obsessive weeks of top-to-bottom housecleaning, but the other would usually counsel patience. The advice always proved to be sound when Jackie returned to normal.
    And, AK might remind him, Davis had been through a stretch of odd behavior himself: an embarrassingly clichéd midlife crisis in which he purchased an impractical performance car and even took seven weeks of skydiving lessons, although he quit before his first solo jump. Davis never cheated on Jackie, never even considered it, but over several late nights at the office he confided his concerns about Jackie’s health to Joan Burton, and that established an intimacy between them that his wife could no doubt sense. He wasn’t sleeping with Joan but they were keeping a different kind of secret.
    “It would help Mom if you were around the house more. Heck, maybe I’d like it, too.” She stretched across his desk and punched him collegially in the arm. “Especially the weekends. Of course, I’m going to be working Saturdays soon, but you could still hang with Mom. Work with her in the garden.”
    Davis’s hours at work had long been a point of contention with the Moore women. In one of her less subtle moments, Anna Kat had framed for him a
New Yorker
cartoon that labeled one of the caricatures a “Stay at Work Dad.”
    Typically, Davis didn’t commit. “You looking forward to your job?”
    “It’s just the Gap,” she said. “I spend half my time there, anyway. And now that Tina works there it’ll be like regular Saturdays, only with an employee