Lippman, Laura Read Online Free Page A

found the telltale bit of yolk at the corner of his mouth. “Breakfast meeting,” he said. “I was working an informant that might know something about McGowan.”
    “You lie like that automatically?” The sergeant’s voice was not unkind. “Or are you just trying to keep in practice until your next marriage?”
     
CHAPTER 3
     
    The young doctor took a long time picking his pastry, pointing first to a cruller, then switching to a Danish, only to return to the cruller. Standing behind him, Kay Sullivan could feel his anticipatory delight, but also the guiltlessness of the decision. After all, he was no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven, lean as a greyhound, and running on the adrenaline of residency. He was years away from worrying about what he put into his mouth—assuming that ever happened. Some people didn’t, especially men, and this one liked his food. The cruller was clearly the highlight of his morning, a reward at the end of a long night. His pleasure was so palpable that Kay felt almost as if she had chosen a pastry for herself, and was therefore less deprived when she settled for her usual black coffee with two packets of Splenda.
    She took the coffee to a corner table and settled in with her emergency paperback, this one from her purse. Kay stashed paperbacks in every nook and cranny of her life—purse, office, car, kitchen, bathroom. Five years ago, when the pain of the divorce was fresh and bright, the books had started as a way to distract herself from the fact that she had no life. But over time Kay came to realize that she preferred her books to other people’s company. Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being. At home she had to be hyperconscious not to use books to retreat from her own children. She would put her book aside, trying to watch whatever television program Grace and Seth had chosen, all the while casting longing glances at the volume so near to hand. Here at work, where she could have joined any number of colleagues for breaks and lunches, she almost always sat by herself, reading. Coworkers called her the
anti
social worker behind her back—or so they thought. For all Kay’s seeming immersion in her books, she missed very little.
    This morning, for example, she had picked up the details of the Jane Doe story within minutes of arriving and unlocking her office. The general consensus was that the woman was a faker, spouting nonsense out of desperation, but she did have a minor head injury, which could affect memory in various ways. There would be a psych examination, too, but Kay had transferred out of that department more than a year earlier, so it wasn’t her concern. The woman’s injuries were fresh, consistent with the accident, and she was not claiming homelessness, joblessness, or abuse by a partner—Kay’s specialties. Of course, she also was refusing to say whether she had medical insurance, but that remained an administrative and billing problem for now. If she turned out to be uninsured, which Kay would put at even odds in this economy, it might fall to Kay to sort out the payment solution, try to figure out if they could bill her through a state or federal program.
    But for now Jane Doe was someone else’s problem, and Kay was safe in the world of Charlotte Brontë.
Jane Eyre
, her book club’s selection this month. Kay didn’t really much care for her book club, a neighborhood affair that she had joined when her marriage was on its last legs, but it provided a polite social cover for her constant reading. “Book club,” she could say, holding up whatever paperback she was reading, “and I’m behind as always.” The book club itself spent far more time on gossip and food than on the book at hand, but that was okay with Kay, too. She seldom had any desire to discuss what she read. Talking about the characters in a book she had enjoyed felt like gossiping about friends.
    A gaggle of young doctors, so much younger than they knew,