Extenuating Circumstances Read Online Free Page A

vacation this week, but she should be back next Monday."
    "All right," I said. "Just don't lose track of them, Doc, okay?"
    Kingston pulled open the drawer of his desk and laid them gently inside, as if he was burying a pet.
 
 
    5
    It was close to four when I finished with Kingston. I caught a cab on Monmouth and had the cabbie drive me back to Riverside Drive. As we turned onto the street I spotted a rusting blue-and-white Cincinnati police cruiser parked beneath the graceful French Quarter house. At first I thought that Trumaine must have talked Janey Lessing into calling the cops, although why she'd called the Cincinnati cops rather than the Covington department was a mystery. But as I paid the cabbie I saw Trumaine come out the front door with a plainclothes detective beside him. Even at a distance I recognized the detective -his name was Art Finch and he was on the CPD homicide squad.
    "Christ," I said to myself.
    When Trumaine spotted me on the sidewalk, he began waving his arms wildly, as if the fine, delicate house behind him had suddenly caught fire in the July sun. Despite Trumaine's arm-waving, I took my time climbing the stairs. I don't run toward tragedies unless I can do something to prevent them. And in this case it looked like I was too late to do anything at all.
    Finch nodded at me as I came up onto the terrace. He was a big man with a stolid, brick-red face and sunstreaked reddish-blond hair. By habit and temperament, his expression was always sullen. Len Trumaine's face told all.
    "They found Ira's car," he said in a stricken voice. "My God, my God."
    I turned to Finch. "Where?"
    "In Queensgate, in the Terminal lot."
    "Was he inside?"
    Finch shook his head, no. "Lots of blood, though."
    Trumaine literally shrank back out of the burning sunlight into the shade of the veranda. "I think I'm going to be sick," he said hoarsely. "I don't believe this is happening." His head fell heavily to his chest.
    I walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. His polo shirt was slick to the touch, and the flesh underneath it felt like bagged ice. "Try to get hold of yourself," I said softly. "Janey's going to need you."
    Trumaine jerked his head up as if I'd slapped him, bumping the back of his skull against the stucco wall of the house. His face contracted with pain and he said, "Ow," before he could check himself. It was just the sort of indignity that had been visited upon the poor, overweight son-of-a-bitch all his life. He knew it, and he knew that I knew it, with a fat man's cruel sense of injured vanity. He reached back to rub his head, his lips trembling.
    "Goddamnit," he said.
    "Go on in the house. Clean up."
    "I'll be all right," he said, fighting to control his voice.
    He started through the door, then turned back to me. "Janey's out with Meg. She doesn't know."
    "Are you anxious to tell her?"
    He shook his head violently.
    "Then look after yourself for a while," I told him.
    Once Trumaine had gone inside, I asked Finch for the details.
    "The car had been parked there for a couple of days," he said. "Somebody at the Terminal got curious and took a look inside. Then they called us. We found a bunch of credit cards piled up on the front seat and this man Lessing's wallet. There was dried blood all over the front seat, on the roof of the car, and in the back too."
    "You haven't found a body?"
    "Not yet." He glanced at the front door of the house. "We're going to need that guy to make an identification on the personal stuff. You think he can handle it?"
    "Better him than the wife."
    "Okay. I'll go down to the car and radio in. You get him and meet me down there. And don't take too long. People are dying in this heat."
 
 
    I found Trumaine in the living room, with a bottle of scotch in his hand and a blasted look on his face. I didn't have the heart to tell him that this was just the beginning. That he'd strayed into a piece of machinery that could eat him alive -and Janey Lessing too. The pitiless,