Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) Read Online Free Page B

building and flashed a friendly smile at the familiar face of the uniformed officer behind the high booking desk.
    5:58. She’d made it with two minutes to spare.
    Across the drafty entrance hall, four blue-clad officers waited for the elevator and a couple of them teased her about cutting it close.
    Lotty laughed, loosened her coat and pulled back the scarf. Her long chestnut hair gleamed in the overhead light and the delicate scent of her floral shampoo mingled with the men’s after-shave and the smell of gun oil and leather. She was not beautiful. Her nose was much too big for her small face and she still struggled with acne, but her body was sweetly shaped, her smile came easily, she was younger than the other civilian clerks who worked in this building, and she had always been as friendly as a two-month-old puppy.
    This was her fourth year on the job, and she still loved it. Loved the horseplay and us-against-them feeling of solidarity, the excitement of helping an ongoing investigation even if her part was mostly simple number-crunching: license checks, arrest records, the serial numbers on stolen goods.
    As the elevator doors opened, an older uniformed officer emerged. “Hey, Lotty,” he said. “You gonna have time to check out somebody for me tonight?”
    “If it’s as slow as last night, sure, Wally,” she answered. “Might be after ten though.”
    “That’s okay.”
    They went into the small room behind the main desk where her terminal was located; and while Lotty hung her coat and scarf on a nearby hook and put her purse and supper in the drawer of her desk, Officer Wally Abronski scribbled two names on her pad.
    “This is the kid that my daughter’s started seeing and this is his old man. I just want to make sure he’s okay, you know?”
    “No problem,” she assured him, settling into her chair.
    She cleared the computer screen, typed in the four digits of her personal security code number and reached for the first arrest worksheet of the night. The digital clock above her desk registered 18:00:59 and she mentally translated it into civilian time: fifty-nine seconds past six P.M.
    Lotty’s fingers danced upon the keyboard and no premonitions troubled her thoughts. As she entered arrests and ran mechanical checks distanced from the dark deeds she recorded by a subconscious awareness that she sat in a warm, well-lighted building peopled by police officers who would, in theory, lay down their lives for her life, Lotty Fischer felt blissfully safe and protected.
     

 
    CHAPTER 5
     
    [Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]
     
    At the academy, they tell us every life’s got equal value.
    Sounds nice but like so many nice-sounding things, it ain’t necessarily so. A rich man’s murder gets more attention than a poor man’s, white gets more than black unless the newspapers and TV get into it, and when a cop gets himself killed—even if the cop’s an old fart like Michael Cluett—the investigation takes precedence over every routine homicide already in the works. Labs process physical evidence quicker, FBI checks go faster, and the man’s body gets posted and released to the undertaker in hours.
    Before leaving my office to direct the search of the mucky bottom beneath the footbridge across Sheepshead Bay, I’d already gotten a phone call from the M.E.’s office with their preliminaries. An inch-by-inch examination of the bridge gave us nothing; but I knew that by tomorrow morning—tomorrow evening at the latest—I’d find on my desk all the printouts of any computer records the FBI had on that palm-size Browning semi-automatic we pulled from the inlet. Nothing much to tell the family yet. At least I wouldn’t have to stonewall questions about when the undertaker could claim the body.
    It was just past sunset—or what would’ve been sunset if the sun’d ever made it through the frigid gray sky—as Hy Davidowitz and I got out of our unmarked car and walked down to the two-family house off