The Art of Deception Read Online Free Page B

down. He went back to the fish. This time, he hacked the head off with a single blow, then the tail. Then he minced the body, entrails and all, into pieces and swept it down the drain and the seagulls attacked the surface of the water with a frenzy.
    “Remember, Mr. Walker, we have not connected Mr. Nealto any suspicious act. This is the first I’ve heard of Mr. Neal. Are we clear on this?” Matthews worried where a younger brother might take this. He’d lost the family boat, the family business. What had she been thinking, implicating Neal? She hoped she might steer her way back out. “Women disappear, Mr. Walker. Tens of thousands every year. Some just up and walk away, from their families, their husbands, their boy-friends—their brothers. That’s right. Most show back up, a few days, a few weeks later. I’d like to think we can pretty much put Mary-Ann in that last category.”
    He dragged a salmon in front of him with the knife’s sharpened tip. “If it is Mary-Ann,” he said matter-of-factly, “then all the more reason you’d better talk to Neal. Anna’s afraid of heights.”
    “Acrophobic?”
    “Whatever.”
    She made note of the phobia on the page of her notepad.
    As it rained harder, she again almost pulled up the jacket’s hood but decided against it once more. Rain drizzled down both their faces. His eyes hardened, making him seem much older than his twenty years.
    “So what do we do next?” he asked.
    “You tell us if Mary-Ann shows back up.” She passed him a business card that carried the office number and wrote La-Moia’s extension on the back. “I’m concerned I may have given you the wrong impression, Mr. Walker. About this being MaryAnn. I apologize for that. I don’t want you doing something stupid—harming Mr. Neal in some way. All for nothing.”
    “People get what they give in this world. It’s no concern of yours.”
    “Sure it is. It’s every concern of mine.” She added, “Could you give me a phone number? Residential. Something other than work.”
    “I told you, after Neal got into her head … I don’t have a phone.”
    “An address?”
    “I’m kind of between places right now, okay?”
    “This is pretty miserable weather, this time of year.”
    “There’s ways around it.”
    “So this is where I reach you,” she said, looking around. “What’s your work schedule right now?”
    He ignored the question. “I asked what’s next, in terms of if I don’t happen to call you, if Anna doesn’t happen to show back up.”
    “We’re attempting to identify the body.”
    “And I should be part of that.”
    She heard herself say, “We could arrange for you to view the body, but there’s absolutely no requirement for you to do so at this time. Mr. Neal could do it, if you’d prefer.”
    Walker read meaning into her statement. “That help you get him? Watching him look at her? Something like that?”
    “I’m not going to speculate on where the lead detective might take this. I am not the lead detective.”
    “You are as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
    Matthews wished she could start again.
    He said, “If Neal looks at that body, then I want to be there. I got any kind of rights like that, me being her brother and all?”
    “None whatsoever,” she said, unsure herself. “It’s all up to the lead detective.”
    “Yeah? Well, you tell him I want to be there.”
    “I’ll pass it along.”
    “You do that,” he said, hoisting the next fish on the tip of the knife to its place of evisceration. “You help me, I’ll help you.”

6 Bowing to Buddha
    Lou Boldt had an ordinary look that few would expect in a cop. Fewer would expect the traits that accounted for a homicide clearance rate that shattered every SPD record: an enduring patience and an empathy with the victim that had gained such legendary proportions that the man made the law enforcement lecture circuit a second source of income. His heightened sense of hearing not only kindled a love of