Blood Ties by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online

of man with a few blind spots. By the beginning of their second year together this description was starting to seem a little shopworn.
    The breakup came over a trip to the Florida Keys—lots of sunshine, lots of beachfront, lots of people with serious money. But at the last moment Ellen found herself working a triple homicide, a prostitute and her two children killed by her boyfriend. She couldn’t tear herself away.
    After that, Brad stopped calling. She had tried calling him a few times, but all he had to do was glance at the digital readout on his cell phone to know it was her. He just didn’t answer or respond to her messages. And she was damned it she was going to camp out on his doorstep.
    That had been four months ago.
    At first it had been simply a numbing shock. She couldn’t believe it. They had seemed to strike such a chord together. And then Ellen had begun to see all the reasons why it hadn’t worked—why, probably, it could never have worked.
    It was the job, and it wasn’t the job. She could have been a high school teacher or the Wolf of Wall Street, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. It was the commitment Brad couldn’t handle. If she had been more committed to him and to the relationship, if she had been prepared to get married and spend the rest of her life sending his suits to the cleaners, then he probably would have been satisfied. Brad was the center of his own life and he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t content to make him the center of hers.
    All right, that made it somewhat easier. She was a martyr to her job and he was a narcissistic prick. But she still missed him, particularly in the small hours of the morning, if something happened to wake her and she found herself alone. And she was still in mourning for him—as was evidenced by the fact that she had turned down dinner and maybe a little fumbling around with Ken the police photographer.
    It was past time for getting on with her life.
    Thus the question became what sort of man would not be a mistake.
    One point Ellen had settled with herself early on was that the last thing she needed was another cop sharing her electric blanket. She didn’t want a man who stared out at the world through such deeply cynical eyes. She didn’t know how Sam’s wife stood it.
    *   *   *
    By seven-thirty she had eaten her dinner—lamb chops because Gwendolyn liked chewing on the bones—and she had watched the evening news.
    Ellen was beginning to worry about Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn was seven years old, which was close to the average life expectancy of a ferret, and Ellen had the impression that she was beginning to slow down. Even a year ago her evening entertainment would have been forty-five minutes of turning the apartment into chaos, but now, after twenty minutes with her yarn ball, she was ready to call it a night. She was presently asleep on a sofa pillow.
    After the day’s events, the prospect of finding Gwendolyn dead in her cage one morning filled Ellen with dread.
    She decided she needed a distraction. Finally her eyes came to rest on the video disk that was lying on top of her purse on the coffee table.
    â€œOkay. What the hell. Sherlock Holmes every minute of the day.”
    It was only about ninety seconds long. Just a crowd of men standing behind the police tape, like tramps waiting for a free lunch. She watched it through and saw nothing to interest her, so she clicked it back to the beginning and watched it again. Then she watched it again.
    It wasn’t until the fourth time around that she saw him. He was tall and slender, better looking than the others, with a sharp-featured, intelligent face. Light brown hair, a tan Windbreaker, trousers that might have been dark green or brown.
    But his gaze was fixed on the camera lens. Nobody was fooling anybody. He knew he was being filmed, and he didn’t give a damn. You could read it in his eyes.
    Those