What Time Devours Read Online Free Page A

sure. I wouldn’t forget.” Those eyes . “Why?” he asked.
    “You keep your garbage by the kitchen door?”
    “Yes.”
    “And it gets collected when?”
    “Wednesday morning, from the front.”
    “The crime scene guys turned up a piece of paper—actually, a yellow Post-it note—in a bush a few yards from the body. It could just be garbage, but it seems unlikely that it’s been lying out there for almost a week, particularly since we had that rain over the weekend.”
    “What did it say?”
    “It just had your name and address written on it in pencil. Have you thrown anything like that out recently?”
    “No. I already know where I live.”
    “Right,” said Polinski. “That’s what I figured. When we know who she is we’ll be trying to match the handwriting, but for now we’re working on the assumption that the note was hers.”
    “Which means . . . ?”
    “That she was coming to see you. You sure you didn’t know her?”
    Thomas stared blankly at the wall and she had to prompt him before he said, again, “I’m sure.”
    It was only after he hung up that he began to wonder if that was true.

CHAPTER 6
    It was hardly surprising that Escolme was staying at the Drake. Thomas took the Red Line to Chicago and State and walked down to where the Magnificent Mile began. The hotel itself—muted Deco elegance outside and red-carpeted opulence inside—always reminded Thomas of some fine old English theater, some place built by Henry Irving where you might find a young John Gielgud having a quick smoke by the stage door. It wasn’t squeaky clean like most of the glass-and-chrome high-rises, and its prestige lay in a certain gilded shabbiness that spoke, in so far as Chicago could, of venerable age. Thomas liked it, but he felt like an impostor.
    He walked quickly under the paneled ceilings and overwrought chandeliers, dodging vast floral arrangements set up like defensive gun casements, till he found the reception desk where he brandished Escolme’s room number as if he were claiming sanctuary. The uniformed black man pointed the way to brass-doored elevators flanked by potted palms.
    Thomas was wearing faded jeans and a flannel shirt with a leather jacket, and when he caught a woman in a Chanel suit looking at him skeptically, he gave her a defiant look that set her fiddling with her purse.
    The defiance was bravado. Places like this always left him tucking his shirt in and standing up straight as if he were trying—vainly, of course—to blend in, or worse, to impress someone. He felt a flush of irritation that Escolme had insisted they meet here, as if the agent were rubbing his former mentor’s nose in his success.
    But that didn’t feel right either. Escolme had been a good kid. Quirky, perhaps, a bit neurotic, but neither arrogant nor mean spirited.
    The elevator door opened and Thomas stepped out, checked the room numbers, and moved down a hallway till he reached 304. The door was a rich heavy timber that might have been teak—more the door of a family home than a hotel room—and was fitted with a similarly heavy brass knocker.
    He knocked and waited.
    When nothing happened, he knocked again.
    Suddenly the door flew open and Thomas saw David Escolme for the first time in a decade.
    It was a momentary meeting. Having flung the door open, Escolme peered at Thomas for a moment, then turned his back on him, muttering, and went quickly back into the room, leaving the door open. Thomas stepped uneasily inside and, for a moment, watched his host as he riffled vaguely through books on his desk, then hurled them to the floor with a shout of rage. Whatever he had heard in David Escolme’s voice over the phone had intensified exponentially.
    The agent seemed to have forgotten him. He was pacing, his lips moving constantly, stopping periodically to rub his temples with both hands, a picture of frustration and despair. He was wearing what were probably his work clothes, including wingtips, but had discarded