His Partner's Wife by Janice Kay Johnson Read Free Book Online

retired to his home office.
    Family obviously wasn't checked at the door to this room
with warm woodwork, white walls and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Childish
drawings filled a bulletin board, and some action figures lay on the hardwood
floor in positions that suggested they had died rather like their grandfather.
A one-legged Barbie lay among them.
    John nudged at the doll with his foot. "My son is
bloodthirsty," he remarked ruefully.
    "Aren't most little boys? I know my nephew is."
    He sat rather heavily in his leather office chair, his
tiredness suddenly visible. "Having known the reality, my mother isn't
very comfortable with that fact."
    "How could she be?" Natalie said with quick
sympathy. "It must have been horrible to lose her husband that way, and to
have to raise three kids by herself."
    He made a rough sound. "I only wish she could have let
us forget, just now and again, how Dad died."
    Startled, Natalie asked, "What do you mean?"
    John rotated his head as though his neck was stiff. Sounding
impatient with himself, he said almost brusquely, "Never mind. It's
nothing. History." He sighed. "Natalie, we identified the dead
guy."
    In an instant forgetting his unusual sharpness toward his mother,
she locked her hands together. Her voice came out breathless with the anxiety
that suddenly gripped her. "Really? So fast?"
    "Geoff and I both recognized him. We had to hunt
through mug shots to come up with a name, but we'd been in on his arrest four
years ago. Stuart was the arresting officer."
    Natalie sat silent for a moment, absorbing the news that her
husband had once arrested the man who yesterday had died in her house, in
Stuart's den.
    "What did he do?" she finally asked tentatively.
"Was it burglary?"
    "His name was Ronald Floyd. He was a midlevel drug
dealer."
    A drug dealer? She groped for understanding. "But why
would he have been in my house? Did he think Stuart was still alive and he was,
well, looking for revenge or something?"
    John reached out and covered her knotted hands with his for
a brief, reassuring moment. "I doubt it. This guy has been arrested half a
dozen times before. Yeah, he got put away this time for a decent prison term,
but it wasn't because Stuart had hunted him down. We got a tip. A whole crowd
of us was waiting when Floyd docked at the marina with a boat hold full of
coke. The fact that Stuart cuffed and booked him was just chance."
    Perhaps it was lack of sleep that made her feel so stupid.
"Then … what do you think?"
    He shook his head. "I've got to tell you, I don't know
what to think. The fact that there's a connection between Stuart and the dead
man makes me curious. I don't believe in coincidences, and it would be one hell
of a coincidence if our guy, fresh out of prison for dealing, had just happened
to decide to break into your house of all others. And, oh yeah, instead of
walking back out, happy, with your TV and stereo, he instead gets himself
killed in your husband's office."
    During this speech, her anxiety had sharpened into a knife
blade of fear. She dampened her lips. "Then he must have been looking for
something."
    "That's one possibility," John agreed.
    "But what?"
    To her dismay, he shook his head again. "I wish I knew,
Natalie. Any ideas would be appreciated. Stuart didn't brag about collecting
anything valuable, did he? Stamps, coins? He didn't tell the whole world that
he had his life savings stored as gold bullion in his house?"
    She was shaking her head the whole time he talked. "He
played golf. He liked old car shows. He did tear stamps off envelopes if he
thought they were curiosities—there are a bunch of German ones somewhere
because he had a cousin in Munich, but he didn't know anything about stamps. Or
coins or…" She couldn't even think of what else he might reasonably have
collected. "And his life savings, which weren't all that much, were in a
mutual fund and a twelvemonth CD."
    So casually she knew he'd been waiting to slip the question
in, John asked,