Leftovers by Chloe Kendrick Read Free Book Online Page B

result, they might assume that all three events were separate incidents. It would just be an awful week for Mariel in their eyes.
    So just to be on the safe side, I headed to the mall, selected one of the few remaining public phones, and dialed the only full number left on my arm.
    A voice answered. The man was cold and distant. It was not a voice I’d like to hear in a dark alley. “What do you want?” he asked, wasting no time on pleasantries.
    “She’s dead,” I said, spitting out the only thing I could think of on short notice. “Hit today.”
    The man laughed. “Don’t call me to tell me that. I saw it on TV already. I told you to only call during emergencies.” He hung up, and I stood there with the receiver in my hand.
    I cursed myself that I didn’t think of a better opening line. It had been effective, but the phone call had been over almost before it began. The man knew what I was talking about and didn’t need me to tell him. I had no idea how I could have kept him on the line, but I wished I’d come up with something better.
    So what was I left with? A dead woman on the square, a concussed woman on the floor of her home and a man who already knew that the first woman was dead. Great clues for a murder mystery, I thought, but it doesn’t make any kind of pattern for me. It definitely spelled out that Linda’s murder was not committed as part of the trial that had just ended. This was something entirely different, and I feared it was only just beginning.

Chapter 5
     
    When I got home that night, I scrubbed down my arm with soap and water. The numbers came off slowly, but I kept at it until my arm was nice and red. I had no desire to go to work again and have Danvers question me about the numbers. I would have to tell him what I’d done, if Land hadn’t already, and admit that I’d taken the woman’s phone for a few minutes to check her phone calls. I’m sure they would figure it out when my fingerprints were on the phone, but until then, I wanted to learn as much as I could from the numbers.
    As I washed, I noticed the third number. It started with 101-. This afternoon, I had just blindly copied what I’d seen, but now I was thinking more rationally about it. This couldn’t be a phone number. None of the telephone prefixes are 101. So the mystery woman had stored something other than phone numbers in her log. I didn’t know what. At this point, I had more questions than answers.
    I was curious why she did this. It would have been easier to add these numbers to the contacts, but then they would want additional information. In the phone log of calls made, people were less likely to scrutinize the information. They would be looking for completed calls and talk times. A call to this prefix would be a bad call, and it would just be recorded once. Enough for someone to find it if they were looking for it, but not immediately noticed as important.
    Of course, I didn’t have the full number, thanks to Land, so I had no way of determining what the full number represented. It was too short to be a bank account number or a social security number, but there were millions of other organizations that used seven digit numbers, which were used because that number of digits could be easily remembered.
    I sighed and looked at the numbers again. I had no idea about other number, the one that had appeared in the middle. It might be a phone number, or it could represent something else. I just didn’t know—and I wouldn’t know without the rest of the digits. For all the work, I hadn’t gotten much out of the phone numbers.
    Without going to Danvers and asking, there would never be another way for me to find out what the rest of the digits were. Even if I asked nicely, I doubted that he would give them to me. For some reason, he was treating this case differently than he had our previous investigations. This time around he was protective of any information and leads and kept me at arm’s length. I wondered