The Taken Read Online Free Page B

business during pumpkin season. Hazel remembered going there with her father in the fifties and coming home with bushels of tart, mottled apples. Not supermarket fruits designed for long journeys, but misshapen, delicious real apples.
    The woman sitting in front of them – Pat Barlow – might have been a relation. She looked about as pale and shiny as a supermarket apple right now. She was on the other side of the slightly warped table that sat in the middle of the room, in her worn quilted coat, her black hair done up messily on top of her head. She had a smoker’s complexion: watery eyes, greying, pellucid skin. One hand curled loosely around a Styrofoam cup of coffee, her gaze lost in the dark liquid it held. Hazel sat down across the table from her, lowering herself slowly into the chair and hooking the cane over its arm. All eyes had settled on her when she walked into the station house and a couple of her people had come forward almost reverently to shake her hand. No one commented on her being half in uniform, for which she was grateful, but Barlow had cast her a strange look when she came into the room. Wingate brought another chair to the table and sat beside her. “Can you tell DI Micallef what you told me, Miss Barlow?” The woman nodded. “Take your time.”
    Hazel already knew what this woman had told Wingate, but when there was suspicion about a witness, a twice-told story usually shook loose its inconsistencies. Barlow brought the coffee to her mouth, sipped it, and grimaced. “I took a couple out this afternoon. They wanted to go for pike.”
    “You and –” Hazel checked Wingate’s notes, which were openon the table between them. “– Calvin Jellinek own Charter Anglers, is that correct?”
    “Yes.”
    “And what were the names of your clients yesterday?”
    “Dean Bellocque and Jill Perry-something.”
    The second name was Paritas. The woman spelled her name “Gil.” The other name checked out in Wingate’s notes. “Okay, go on.”
    “We were about two kilometres out, on a shelf in like ten metres of water. I saw a school of something in the finder, probably bass, hugging the edge of the shelf, four or five metres down. We’d fished two beds and got nothing, so I told them this was their best chance to catch today.”
    “You knew these people?”
    “Never seen ’em before.”
    “So you fished the shelf.”
    “Yeah. And we caught a couple little ones. We threw them back.” She swirled her cup and looked into it like she was expecting to see a tiny school of something to go by in its surface. “I had an eight o’clock and I told them we had to go back, but they wanted ten more minutes. That’s when they hooked it.”
    “Hooked what?” said Hazel.
    Barlow sent a worried look across the table to Wingate, and he gave her a faint nod. “A body,” said Barlow, her voice almost inaudible.
    “Keep going.”
    “One of them – Gil – says,
Jesus Christ
, and I look at her rod, and it’s bent double, you know, like she’s hooked a monster. But there’s no action on the line – it’s a dead weight. I take therod from her and let the line out because I figure she’s caught on a log, but it’s hooked hard. I whip the line a little to unsnag it, ’cuz it’s in there good, but then, when I try to reel in, I feel the log come off the bottom and I start drawing it in. And then I can see the log there under the water, the shape of it, and it’s coming up. I figure I can save my rig and not have to redo it for the four o’clock. Then Gil starts screaming. And we see it.”
    Hazel was writing in her own pad now. “You see what, exactly?”
    “A body. Tangled in some kind of net and completely naked. I’m surprised it didn’t snap the line. I dropped the whole rod and it went over the edge and the whole thing went back down. I about almost puked.”
    “How did you know it was a body if you dropped the rod right away?”
    “I saw it.”
    “Tell me what you saw,” Hazel