The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation Read Online Free

my
comprehension, but I certainly wasn’t going to complain.
    “Aye,” she said as she reached out and
switched on the overhead light. “So tell me why you’re awake,
then.”
    “Because I couldn’t sleep?” I offered,
squinting against the sudden infusion of brightness.
    “Aye, don’t be a smart ass now. You know what
I meant.”
    “Would you believe I was trying to get some
work done?”
    “No.” She shook her head.
    “Getting a drink of water?”
    “Rowan.” She cocked her head and shot
me a frown as she paused—effectively impaling me with her I’m serious look. “I’m half asleep,
but I’m not blind. You’ve coffee on, and you’ve been playing
solitaire on your computer. Quit screwing with me,
then.”
    “Okay,” I answered with a defeated sigh. “I’m
waiting for Ben to call.”
    As absurd as it sounded, it was the
truth.
    It may be the middle of the night, but I knew
beyond a shadow of a doubt that the telephone was going to ring,
and Detective Benjamin Storm was going to be at the other end. For
me, very simply, this was a foregone conclusion.
    What’s more, it was not because he happened
to be my best friend and that he just felt like talking at an odd
hour. It was going to be something I didn’t want to hear but
probably already knew. In any case, I knew it would be something
that I had no choice but to deal with.
    Felicity closed her eyes and let her head
tilt forward, dropping her forehead into her hand.
    “Nightmare?” she asked softly as she began
massaging her brow. She was intimately familiar with the forms my
precognitive intuition would sometimes take.
    “Headache.”
    “Humph,” she grunted, then asked hopefully,
“Did you take anything just in case?”
    “Not that kind of headache,” I replied.
    “You’re certain, then?”
    Her question was answered by the grating peal
of the telephone vibrating against the walls of the small room
before I could even utter the “yes” that now lodged itself in my
throat.
    My wife looked up at me with sadness in her
jade-green eyes and then gave a slight nod to the coffeepot. “Aye,
I’ll go put on some clothes. Best pour me a cup of that as
well.”
    I started to protest. “I don’t think…”
    “… That I should go?” she shot back,
filling in my sentence and cutting me off. “Are you planning to
stay out of it?”
    I sighed and fidgeted at the sudden tension.
She already knew what my answer would be.
    “Aye, I thought so. We’re not discussing
this, Rowan,” she continued with a stern shake of her head. “If you
go, I go. End of story. Now answer the phone, then.” She was
already turning around the corner of the doorway on her way back to
the bedroom as she issued the last command.
    I knew better than to press my luck,
especially on this subject. We’d beaten it beyond recognition
already, and we were both too stubborn to give in. I took a step
forward, picked the phone out of its cradle on the fourth ring, and
then placed it to my ear.
    “Yeah, Ben. I’m here” was all I said.
    “Awww, Jeezus H. Christ, Row… Jeeeez…
Goddammit…” He launched immediately into a string of curses, his
voice a peculiar mix of relief, anger, and disgust.
    Whenever my friend started a sentence this
way, I knew that what followed probably wasn’t going to be good. Of
course, I’d known that before the phone ever rang, but there was
always that small inkling of hope that I might be wrong. Judging
from the baseness of Ben’s first words, I knew that this would not
be the occasion.
    “Porter?” I inserted my question into the
lull that trailed along in the wake of his outburst.
    “Yeah,” he returned, his voice slightly
calmer. “But that was a given, I guess.”
    In an instant, the “probably” became an
absolutely, and the “wasn’t going to be good” was nothing less than
a cold fact.
    “Uh-huh. Truth is I’m surprised he waited
this long,” I replied. “It’s been more than two weeks since he
killed that woman