Body Work by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online Page B

paintbrush—and that she had turned twenty-eight this past fall. I learned that she had died from the massive bleeding caused by two bullets entering her chest, and that she had been shot at a range of about fifteen feet—the distance from the back door of the club to the alley, where the shooters had waited.
    While I was talking to Terry, one of his team came over with a report about Chad and his friends. No one could provide a last name for any of them, but Finchley took their descriptions and put out an alert. They hadn’t been in the club tonight, but that didn’t mean Chad hadn’t been lying in wait for Nadia.
    When Terry asked me what I knew about Chad and his friends, I only shrugged. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him about the heated exchange I’d heard between Chad and Nadia the previous night. Maybe it was Nadia’s vulnerability, or the fact that I’d cradled her in my arms as she died. Or the discomfort I’d felt when she accused me of spying on her. She thought someone was after her, and I’d thought she might be paranoid. Now she was dead. I didn’t feel like discussing it with the police.
    I told Finchley most of the rest of what I knew, including finding the glass in the Body Artist’s paintbrush. He demanded that I retrieve it from the Cheviot labs, but he also revealed that he’d been able to pry the Body Artist’s name out of her.
    “Karen Buckley. Not a very jazzy name for a stripper. Maybe that’s why she wouldn’t let anyone around here know it,” Finchley added.
    “She’s not a stripper,” I said. “She’s an artist, and a fine one.”
    “A woman who takes off her clothes on a stage for men to drool over is a stripper, in my book.”
    “Bobby’s right,” I said. “You’ve been breathing the rare air on South Michigan way too long. You need to buy yourself a new book. What about this guy Rodney? You find anything out about him?”
    “What guy Rodney?” Finchley demanded.
    “Didn’t anyone here mention him? Big guy with a gut, looks like an off-duty cop, with a big old nine-millimeter under his jacket. It looked like an HK when he shoved his armpit in my face.”
    “And why did he do that, Vic?” Finchley said. “You weren’t in his face, by any chance, were you?”
    “I was telling him to stop sticking his hand into my cousin’s pants when she’s waiting tables. Does that constitute being in his face to you? And whether it does or not, does that mean he gets to wave a gun at me?”
    Finchley pressed his lips together. He’s a good cop, and a good detective, but he’s close to a police sergeant I used to date. He still holds it against me that Conrad Rawlings got shot while he was involved with me. The human heart, or thyroid gland, or whatever it is that controls our emotions, is too tangled for me to understand. Conrad survived, but our affair didn’t, and I’ve never been sure which the Finch blames me for more—the breakup or the shooting.
    Finchley sent an underling to fetch Olympia to the small stage, where the police were conducting interrogations. She looked briefly frightened, or maybe angry, when he asked her about Rodney, but then gave him her brightest smile and said, “I’m sure I know who Vic means. He’s a regular, he loves Karen’s show, but—are you sure his name is Rodney, Vic? I thought it might be Roger, or Sydney.”
    I gasped at the brazenness of her lies, but before I could speak, Finchley was asking if she had had any complaints from her staff or from other customers.
    “I gave one of Vic’s cousins a job here, and Vic is a mite overprotective, maybe jumps too fast to conclusions. If Petra can’t handle a little good-natured kidding with the customers, then I’m afraid she shouldn’t work in a club.”
    “Is that why you comp his drinks, Olympia?” I asked. “To encourage the good-natured kidding? And why you offered Petra a bonus if she’d overlook His Gropiness?”
    Olympia’s eyes seemed to glitter, but that might