I'll Be Seeing You by Mary Higgins Clark Read Free Book Online Page B

at the far wall. During lunch break all the guys chose a car to relax in, where they’d eat and read the paper or doze. The only management rule wasto make sure you didn’t smear ketchup on the upholstery. Ever since some dope burned the leather armrest of a Mercedes, no one was allowed to smoke, even in cars where the ashtray was filled with butts. The point was, nobody saw anything funny about always taking a break in the same car or the same couple of cars. Bernie felt happy sitting in Meghan’s Mustang. It had a hint of the perfume she always wore.

    Meghan’s desk was in the bull pen on the 30th floor. Swiftly she read the assignment sheet. At eleven o’clock she was to be at the arraignment of an indicted inside stock trader.
    Her phone rang. It was Tom Weicker. “Meg, can you come in right away?”
    There were two men in Weicker’s private office. Meghan recognized one of them, Jamal Nader, a softspoken black detective whom she’d run into a number of times in court. They greeted each other warmly. Weicker introduced the other man as Lt. Story.
    â€œLt. Story is in charge of the homicide you covered the other night. I gave him the fax you received.”
    Nader shook his head. “That dead girl really is a look-alike for you, Meghan.”
    â€œHas she been identified?” Meghan asked.
    â€œNo.” Nader hesitated. “But she seems to have known you.”
    â€œKnown me?” Meghan stared at him. “How do you figure that?”
    â€œWhen they brought her into the morgue Thursday night they went through her clothing and found nothing. They sent everything to the district attorney’s office to be stored as evidence. One of our guys went over it again. The lining of the jacket pocket had a deep fold. He found a sheet of paper torn from a Drumdoe Inn notepad. It had your name and direct phone number at WPCD written on it.”
    â€œMy name!”
    Lt. Story reached into his pocket. The piece of paper was encased in plastic. He held it up. “Your first name and the number.”
    Meghan and the two detectives were standing at Tom Weicker’s desk. Meghan gripped the desktop as she stared at the bold letters, the slanted printing of the numbers. She felt her lips go dry.
    â€œMiss Collins, do you recognize that handwriting?” Story asked sharply.
    She nodded. “Yes.”
    â€œWho . . . ?”
    She turned her head, not wanting to see that familiar writing anymore. “My father wrote that,” she whispered.
14
    O n Monday morning, Phillip Carter reached the office at eight o’clock. As usual he was the first to arrive. The staff was small, consisting of Jackie, his fifty-year-old secretary, the mother of teenagers; Milly, the grandmotherly part-time bookkeeper; and Victor Orsini.
    Carter had his own computer adjacent to his desk. In it he kept files that only he could access, files that listed his personal data. His friends joked about his love for going to land auctions, but they would have been astonished at the amount of rural property he had quietly amassed over the years. Unfortunately for him, much of the land he had acquired cheaply had been lost in his divorce settlement. The property he bought at sky-high prices he acquired after the divorce.
    As he inserted the key in the computer he reflectedthat when Jackie and Milly learned that Edwin Collins’ presumed death was being challenged, they would not lack for noon-hour gossip.
    His essential sense of privacy recoiled at the notion that he would ever be the subject of one of the avid discussions Jackie and Milly shared as they lunched on salads that seemed to him to consist mostly of alfalfa sprouts.
    The subject of Ed Collins’ office worried him. It had seemed the decent thing to leave it as it was until the official pronouncement of his death, but now it was just as well Meghan had said she wanted to pack up her father’s personal effects. One way or the