Here She Lies by Katia Lief Read Free Book Online Page B

beneath a bruised morning sky that promised rain, Detective Gabe Lazare put down his tall blue glass of iced tea so it sat lopsided on an uneven piece of slate. I’d noticed he didn’t skip pleasantries before getting down to business and I was grateful for the gentle transition from a harsh awakening. Julie and I had been up for hours, battening down the hatches, after Carla’s call about the mysterious lurking van. I’d learned how the windows locked (we agreed to keep ourselves sealed up tight every night), where flashlights and candles were stowed in case of a power out-age (deliberate or otherwise), and Julie was just explaining how the alarm system worked when Detective Lazare called and asked to come over. Asking was his polite method of telling us he was on his way.
    “Delicious iced tea.” Lazare nodded in Julie’s direction.
    “You can thank my sister. She’s the chef, not me.” “Tea isn’t cooking,” I said, “but I’m glad you like it.”
    The baby monitor was in my lap and I jumped at every fizz of sound. I kept expecting Lexy to wake up; her morning nap had gone nearly two hours now. Instead what I heard was sounds of Bobby, finally awake, his footsteps echoing down the hall, presumably to the bathroom. He had been released sometime in the night and was deeply asleep in the Pinecone Room when we woke up at dawn to the ringing phone.
    “Your neighbor’s partial license plate turned out to be pretty useful.” Lazare leaned over to reach into his leather briefcase for a piece of paper, which he handed to Julie first. When she in turn gave it to me, I saw that it was a grainy fax of a photograph—a mug shot—of a fiftyish man with a buzz cut and skin weathered beyond his years. He was squinting as if he normally wore glasses. “His name’s Thomas Soiffer. Owner of a white van, Massachusetts plates, resides outside Springfield. E-Z Pass had him driving west on I-90
    across Massachusetts yesterday morning.”
    “And?” Julie.
    “Why was he here?” Me.
    “What we know about Mr. Soiffer is mostly on paper. He’s a plumber by trade, but he has a criminal record. Not what you’d call the finest of citizens. Did some time for assaulting his girlfriend—nearly killed her.”
    “And he used his E-Z Pass to drive here and sit outside my house before killing someone?” Julie said.
    “Not the brightest bulb.”
    Lazare’s eyes paused a moment on Julie and I could just see his detective mind calculating a diplomatic bridge between our layman’s comfort zone, where the most obvious assumptions ruled the borders like trigger-happy armed guards, and his professional instincts to carefully navigate the unknown.
    “Well, Forensics found some other blood along with Zara’s, but we don’t know if it belonged to Soiffer or someone else,” he said. “If we had a murder weapon or a DNA sample on file for him, it would make this a lot simpler. But we don’t. So now it’s all about legwork.
    We’re trying to find him.”
    Just then Lexy issued a fairly dramatic sigh and I sat forward, ready to get up and go to her. But the sigh melted back into the monitor’s static silence; she had gone back to sleep.
    “Does that name—Thomas Soiffer—ring any bells with either of you?” Detective Lazare asked.
    Julie and I agreed that neither of us had ever seen the man in the picture nor had we heard his name. It was a stranger’s name, though one we would now never forget. A stranger with a criminal record, a dangerous man, hanging around outside Julie’s house yesterday morning, only hours before a murder.
    “So far none of the local plumbers and electricians and so forth recognize the name either,” Lazare said.
    “We’ve put the word out and we’ll see if we hear anything in the next few days.”
    “Detective,” I said, deciding to risk a theoretical leap, “do you think someone might have thought Zara was one of us ? Since she resembled us, I mean.”
    “Anything’s possible.” Lazare