Killing Orders by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online Page A

sounds as though I should.”
    “And did anyone else at the priory? Talk to her, I mean.”
    Not as far as he knew, but he’d ask around and get back to me. He wanted to know if I had learned anything useful yet. I told him I’d be talking to Hatfield that afternoon, and we hung up with mutual promises to stay in touch.
    I puttered around the apartment, hanging up clothes and putting a week’s accumulation of newspapers into a stack on the back porch where my landlord’s grandson would collect them for recycling. I made myself a salad with cubes of cheddar cheese in it and ate it while flicking aimlessly through yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. At twelve-thirty I went down for the mail.
    When you thought about it seriously, Rosa was an old lady. She probably had imagined she could make her problem disappear by scowling at it, the way she’d made all her problems, including her husband, Carl, disappear. She thought if she called me and ordered me to take care of it, it would go away. When the reality came a little closer after she’d talked with me, she decided it just wasn’t worth the energy it would take to fight it. My problem was that I was so wound up in all the old enmities that I suspected everything she did was motivated by hatred and a need for revenge.
    Ferrant called at one, partly for some light chat, and partly because of questions about Ajax’s stock. “One of my responsibilities seems to be our investment division. So I got a call today from a chap named Barrett in New York. He called himself the Ajax specialist at the New York Stock Exchange. I know reinsurance, not the U.S. stock market, or even the
    London stock market, so I had some trouble keeping up with him. But you remember I told you last night our stock seemed really active? Barrett called to tell me that. Called to let me know he was getting a lot of orders from a small group of Chicago brokers who had never traded in Ajax before. Nothing wrong with them, you understand, but he thought I should know about it.”
    “And?”
    “Now I know about it. But I’m not sure what, if anything, I should do. So I’d like to meet that friend you mentioned—the one who’s the broker.”
    Agnes Paciorek and I had met at the University of Chicago when I was in law school and she was a math whiz turned MBA. We actually met at sessions of University Women United. She was a maverick in the gray-tailored world of MBAs and we’d remained good friends.
    I gave Roger her number. After hanging up I looked up Ajax in The Wall Street Journal. Their range for the year went from 28¼ to 55½ and they were currently trading at their high. Aetna and Cigna, the two largest stock-insurance carriers, had similar bottom prices, but their highs were about ten points below Ajax. Yesterday they’d each had a volume of about three hundred thousand, compared to Ajax’s which was almost a million. Interesting.
    I thought about calling Agnes myself, but it was getting close to time for me to leave to meet Hatfield. I wrapped a mohair scarf around my neck, pulled on some driving gloves, and went back out into the wind. Two o’clock is a good time to drive into the Loop. The traffic is light. I made it to the Federal Building on Dearborn and Adams in good time, left the Omega in a self-park garage across the street and walked in under the orange legs of the three-story Calder designed for Chicago’s Federal Building. We pride ourselves in Chicago on our outdoor sculptures by famous artists. My favorite is the bronze wind chimes in front of the Standard Oil Building, but I have a secret fondness for Chagall’s mosaics in front of the First National Bank. My artist friends tell me they are banal.
    It was exactly two-thirty when I reached the FBI offices on the eighteenth floor. The receptionist phoned my name in to Hatfield, but he had to keep me waiting ten minutes just to impress me with how heavily Chicago’s crime rested on his shoulders. I busied myself with a report