An Evil Shadow by A. J. Davidson Read Free Book Online

agencies. According to him, they
have their own language, their own beliefs and rituals, and their own taboos.
    If the professor was expecting an argument from Val,
he was disappointed. Though he had overlooked one thing, Val reckoned. They
also have their dogma. Too damned much of it.

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    CHAPTER FOUR

 
 
    It was after midnight when Val left Eadie’s bar,
having squandered half a day brooding over a ten-year-old case. The outside air
was still hot and full of ozone, thanks to an electrical storm winding itself
up over the delta. The narrow streets of the quarter were thronged with
revelers. He hailed a cab to drive him home.
    Home was a preservation-listed, timber-framed house
off Magazine. Left to Marcus and Val equally by their mother in her will, it
was the one thing that their father had never managed to lose on the ponies at
the Fairgrounds’ track. A bedroom short of being worth serious money, it was
one of very few on the street not earning its keep as a guesthouse. Six months
after their mother had died, Val had bought out Marcus’s half. It had really
burned him up to have to shell out yet another half its value to Angie on their
separation, but he would do it a third time if it meant keeping the house.
    Slumped in the back seat of the cab, his head
spinning, Val made a conscious effort to expunge the Duval investigation from
his mind. What was it to him that Marie Duval had not shown the slightest
flicker of remorse and ended up spending just six months in a juvenile
detention center? He had done all that was asked of him. So what if the
assholes at the DA’s office couldn’t appreciate that Valerie Duval’s homicide
had murder written all over it? Maybe if they had seen into the daughter’s
eyes, as he had done for a split second before falling from the tree, they
wouldn’t have been so quick to accept Wells’s deal. If he never heard her name
again, it would be too soon,

 
 
    Val didn’t go into work the following morning; not
because of the jackhammer remodeling the inside of his head, but because he was
expecting Angie. He woke an hour later than usual and struggled into the
kitchen to make a pitcher of iced tea to rehydrate his insides. He drank one
glass, then poured himself another and took it back to bed. It was gone ten
when he heard her key turn in the lock.
    Angie walked straight through the living room and into
the bedroom, waving a hand in front of her face.
    “This place smells like a distillery.”
    Dressed in a simple wrap-around dress and wearing
almost zero make-up, she still managed after all this time to take Val’s breath
away and he wondered yet again what it was she had seen that persuaded her to
invest six years of her life in him. Time that had added a new depth to her
beauty. Burnished gold hair which she wore long and straight; eyes that
sparkled like fireworks; NBA legs; great posture — all had appreciated with
age. Angie possessed a radiant vigor that is commonplace in kids of nineteen,
but rarely found in a woman in her late thirties.
    Val was not blind to her imperfections, though, and
she had plenty. He knew what a bitch she could be when it suited her. She could
be manipulative and self-centered. A dedicated pursuer of social-advancement,
who scorned her own blue-collar background. The break-up of their marriage did
not come as a bolt out of the blue. They both knew within the first year that
neither was giving the other what they had hoped for. Angie’s affair with
Marcus started three months before Val made his decision to leave the PD. When
at last the marriage ended, they felt no need to apportion blame; instead, they
agreed to do all they could to preserve the good memories and remain friends.
They made plans to meet from time to time and talk as friends do. It was during
the second of these encounters, three months after they had split up, that they
surrendered to a mutual hunger and had gone to bed.
    Val was