Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) by Pamela Fagan Hutchins Read Free Book Online Page B

police’s suicide finding. He was speaking loudly in Spanish this time, and Ramirez raised his voice in return, then turned back to Nick. “We will have to get back to you about the computer.” Then he spoke to everyone in the room. “Any questions for Nick and Katie, gentlemen?”
    The four other dour-faced men said nothing, and Ramirez concluded the meeting. What the hell was going on here? I was pretty sure it wasn’t my pants that were stinking up this case.
    As we stood up in the stifling silence, Ramirez kissed me goodbye. A mere five minutes after it had begun, and with nothing accomplished as far as I could tell—unless you count me being creeped out even more about this case than before—our meeting ended on a resounding minor chord.
    Damn.

Chapter Five
    Nick and I swung by the Petro-Mex compound straight from grabbing a quick bite of lunch at the BBQ Hut, a ramshackle building across from the boarded-up shell of Fortuna’s, which was once a popular restaurant run by an ex-boyfriend of mine who now lived in a maximum security prison in Puerto Rico. I hadn’t always made the best of choices in my personal life, but I’d changed all that with Nick. Or I had changed a lot of it, anyway. Oh, hell’s bells, I was still an occasional mess and I knew it, but I was trying, and I was proud of him and how Stingray Investigations was growing. I relished working our first official case together.
    In order to speak to Elena Monroe, we had to clear the security gauntlet again. Would I feel more or less safe living behind this type of protection? I suspected it would make me paranoid. Certainly it explained some of the us-them division between the refinery’s residents and the rest of the islanders.
    The houses inside the gates stood in perfect rows, like little toy soldiers with green berets. Each one wore the occupant’s name like a lapel insignia, although the only thing indicating rank was architecture. Privates lived in modular homes, captains in concrete, and the superior officers boasted individualized concrete and stucco dwellings.
    Elena Monroe lived in a modular home on the far side of the compound. As we drove through the neighborhood, I gaped at my surroundings. I had lived on-island for two years and had never seen the interior of the Petro-Mex community. On St. Marcos, people lived indoor/outdoor. Most of our homes did not have air conditioning, and heaters were unnecessary. We all spent as much time on our patios, decks, and balconies as we did inside. Not so, at Petro-Mex. Not a soul entered my field of vision.
    When we parked in front of Elena’s house and got out of the car, industrial noise pummeled our ears. Although the refinery was almost a mile away, it sounded like we were in the middle of an avalanche. They should hand out earplugs at the guard gate. We walked to the door together and I almost reached out to hold Nick’s hand, but it didn’t seem professional. Patting his butt, then, was out of the question. Rats.
    A tiny woman opened the door before Nick could ring the doorbell, the scent of Calvin Klein Obsession preceding her. She looked twenty-one, maybe twenty-three years old, tops. Her lustrous hair hung in a sheet of black steel to her waist, which was tiny between a double-D rack and a bootylicious bana. Whoa.
    But it was her eyes that arrested me. She had the sultriest brown eyes I had ever seen. I’d expected puffy flesh, dark circles, spiderwebs of redness, but if I didn’t know she’d lost her husband a few days before, I would never have believed it.
    I decided to hold Nick’s hand after all.
    “Meester Kovaucks?” she asked.
    Was it just me, or did the two of them exchange a “let’s pretend we don’t already know each other” look? My eyes turned greener.
    “Hello, Mrs. Monroe. Yes, I’m Nick Kovacs and this is Katie.”
    “I’m his wife,” I interjected. Oh criminy, where did that come from? And then it hit me: I was being a jealous bitch, and this woman was a