7 - Rogue: Ike Schwartz Mystery 7 by Frederick Ramsay Read Free Book Online Page B

paced. His second ration of toast somehow became stuck in the toaster and began to smoke. He pulled the plug and pried the charred slices of wheat bread from it, tossed the smoking ruins in the disposal, ran water into the sink until the mess disappeared from view, and then dumped the remains of his coffee cup in after it. Breakfast had been a disaster.
    Ike was a compartmentalized thinker, or so he claimed. Those who knew him well thought he was anything but. Somehow, they said, he could hold several thoughts, possible outcomes, or probabilities in place at the same time even if one of them conflicted or contradicted another. True or not, he desperately needed to think this through. One thing seemed clear: irrespective of the motivation behind it, someone had deliberately sent Ruth crashing into a pole. That someone needed to be caught and taken care of, and soon. The problem he struggled with at the moment centered on the why of it—the motive. If the act had been aimed at him, a different set of factors and possibilities came into play. If the target was really Ruth, then he’d start somewhere else. But in either case, the task remained the same: find the bastard.
    So, do first things first. Who wanted to hurt him but not directly? He’d been through the experience of having a woman he loved shot out from under him, so to speak, and he understood how it might work. His late wife Eloise had been a pawn in such a game. But that happened in a different time and place—a time when he was embroiled in covert work. The instigators of that particular piece of work had wanted him out of the loop but not dead. Killing him would have made what they intended transparent. They wanted him angry and nonfunctional, not dead. The situation differed here. He no longer mucked about in the shadowy backstreets and dim corners of international intelligence. He hadn’t for years. He was a country cop. Hurting him indirectly meant nothing. If he stopped being a cop, another would step up and take his place. With the election close, it could happen anyway. He’d not incurred many enemies in his tenure as sheriff, none he could think of who’d vowed some sort of revenge for being incarcerated. Well, there was one, but only one for sure, George Lebrun. But he still sat on death row somewhere and his family, while dysfunctional, was not the sort to take on George’s dirty work, and certainly not if it involved the commission of a capital crime.
    For the moment then, he ruled himself out as an indirect object of attack. That didn’t mean he should forget the cop car maneuver. It added a new and important dimension to the act and said something about the perpetrator. Whoever hit Ruth had most likely been in law enforcement at the street level at one time or another. When he culled through the list of possible suspects he hoped to develop, he would use that as one discriminator.
    His stomach began to growl and he felt the need to move, to do something. He decided he would find a restaurant and have breakfast. Some place where they brewed drinkable, hot coffee and didn’t burn the toast.
    ***
    Ike spent the remainder of the day talking to various contacts he had in the several agencies he’d worked with in the past. Ruth’s boss at the Department of Education promised to send him copies of any e-mails that were either threatening or suspicious that she might have received in the past two months during her tenure as chair of the textbook committee. He had a long and tearful chat with Agnes Ewalt, Ruth’s secretary at Callend. She alternately tried to cheer him up and had to be cheered. She didn’t know of any threats, nasty electronic or snail mail, but she would look.
    She did tell him that she found Doctor Fiske, her temporary new boss, to be a disagreeable man, and wished she’d accepted Ruth’s offer to accompany her to Washington. That brought on another spate of tears, guilt, and hiccups. She said she’d cull through all of the