The Night Searchers (A Sharon McCone Mystery) Read Online Free Page A

to the new one.” I had a mental image of the billowing smoke and all-consuming flames of the fire—a fire set by a disgruntled client of mine—that had destroyed our house on Church Street.
    “No, don’t worry about that.”
    “Well, then, where?”
    “A new safe house.”
    RI maintained various safe houses in the cities where it had offices: out-of-the way, innocuous-looking buildings in neighborhoods where people kept to themselves and had little contact with or interest in others. Inside each house, however, was a fully staffed security operation to protect at-risk clients. I’d stayed in one myself a while back, and had found the ever-watchful eyes of the guards and cameras oppressive in the extreme.
    The typical client was grateful for his or her safety, but often imperious and demanding, as highly placed persons tend to be: requests for exotic food and drink in the middle of the night; demands that linens and towels be changed more than once a day; sneaky outside phone calls that were strictly taboo; the incessant need for fresh flowers, perfume, hairstyling, and massages—all of these rasped on the nerves of the caregivers, who thought that the self-styled important personages should simply feel goddamned lucky to be alive. As a result, RI had a quick turnover of personnel at all locations.
    And now Hy was telling me that they had a new safe house. I couldn’t wait to see it.
    8:01 a.m.
    It turned out to be a hot sheet motel on the Great Highway near the zoo. The carpet in the unit that Hy steered me to was threadbare, the headboard painted red and carved with hearts and the names of many loving couples. There was even a mirror on the ceiling.
    “My God,” I said, “you bought this dump?”
    “This dump, as you call it, is one of the safest we have in the city, and the security is fully manned from our downtown office.” Hy was checking the locks on the windows.
    “What kind of clients do you plan to put here? Sleazy ones? Horny ones?”
    “You’d be surprised who’s going to stay here—and be plenty grateful for it.”
    He went around a little table with two chairs, removed a device from the phone jack, and tossed it to me. Then he sat down in one of the chairs, motioned me to the other. As I sat I touched the table, quickly withdrew my hand from a sticky spot.
    He grimaced. “We had to let the housekeeping staff go—not that they were big on cleanliness anyway, and our operatives aren’t much better. Before we start putting clients up here, I hope to get hold of some good maintenance people.”
    “About the clients…?”
    “Let’s just say they’ll all be in great fear.”
    “Of the cockroaches or the bedbugs?”
    “They’ll be fast friends with all kinds of varmints before they leave.”
    Hy’s phone rang. He answered, spoke tersely into it. A few seconds after he broke the connection, it rang again. I could tell little from his side of the conversations. After the phone rang a third and fourth time, he punched in a forwarding number and set it down.
    “The office’ll buzz me if it’s an important call.” RI’s offices around the world were staffed 24-7, and all reported hourly to the San Francisco headquarters.
    “About what? What’s so damned important?”
    “What were you doing at that vacant lot?”
    “Working a case. What were you doing there?”
    “The same.”
    “And now we’re going to sit here and discuss confidentiality till we’re both out of our minds.”
    “The hell with confidentiality.”
    That surprised me. “Never thought I’d hear you say that.”
    “I’m sick of all these rules: need-to-know basis and so forth. I didn’t make them up in the first place—Dan and Gage did. But Dan’s dead, Gage is God knows where, and now I’m running the show. Confidentiality has its place, but not between you and me, especially since we seem to be working the same case.”
    The people he spoke of—Dan Kessell and Gage Renshaw—had founded Renshaw & Kessell