Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane Read Free Book Online

downward, losing her job, her car, and finally her apartment. Not even the police could ascertain where she’d lived her final two months. Psychiatrists popped up on the news shows to explain that David Wetterau’s accident coupled with her father’s tragic death had snapped something in Karen’s psyche, cut her loose from conventional cares and thought processes in a way that ultimately contributed to her death.
    I was raised Catholic, so I’m well versed in the story of Job, but Karen’s string of bad luck in the months before her death bothered me. I know luck, both good and bad, runs in streaks. I know bad streaks often run a long, long time, with one tragedy perpetuating the next, until all of them, major and minor, seem to be going off like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July. I know that sometimes bad shit simply happens to good people. And yet, if it started with Cody Falk, I decided, then maybe it hadn’t stopped on his end. Yes, we’d scared him witless, but people are stupid, particularly predators. Maybe he’d gotten over his fear and decided to come at Karen from her flank, instead of head-on, destroy her fragile world for siccing Bubba and me on him.
    Cody, I determined, would need a second visit.
    First, though, I wanted to talk to the cops investigating Karen’s death, see if they’d tell me anything that could help keep me from dropping in on Cody half-cocked.
    “Detectives Thomas and Stapleton,” Devin told me. “I’ll reach out, tell ’em to talk to you. Give it a few days, though.”
    “I’d love to make contact quicker.”
    “And I’d love to take a shower with Cameron Diaz. Neither’s going to happen, though.”
    So, I waited. And waited. I eventually left a few messages and bit back on my urge to drive over to Cody Falk’sand beat answers out of him before I knew the proper questions to ask.
    In the middle of all the waiting, I got restless and copied down Karen Nichols’s last known address from her file, noted from the newspaper accounts that she’d been employed in the Catering Department of the Four Seasons Hotel, and left the office.
     
    Karen Nichols’s former roommate was named Dara Goldklang. While we spoke in the living room she’d shared with Karen for two years, Dara ran a treadmill facing the windows as if she were in the final lap of a track meet. She wore a white sports bra and black spandex shorts and kept looking back over her shoulder at me.
    “Until David was hurt,” she said, “Karen was barely here. Always over at David’s. Pretty much just picked up her mail here, did some laundry, took it to David’s for another week. She was moony over that guy. Lived for him.”
    “What was she like? I only met her once.”
    “Karen was sweet,” she said, then followed that almost immediately with: “Does my butt look big to you?”
    “No.”
    “You didn’t look.” She puffed her cheeks as she ran. “Come on. Look. My boyfriend says it’s getting big.”
    I turned my head. Her ass was the size of a crab apple. If her boyfriend thought it was big, I wondered on which twelve-year-old he’d seen a smaller one.
    “Your boyfriend’s wrong.” I sat back in some kind of red leather beanbag thing supported by a glass bowl and base. It may have been the ugliest piece of furniture I’d ever seen. It was definitely the ugliest I’d ever sat in.
    “He says I need to tone up my calves.”
    I glanced at the muscles in the backs of her calves. They looked like flat stones bulging under the skin.
    “And get a boob job,” she puffed. She turned back toward me so I could glimpse the orbs under her sports bra. They were about the size, shape, and firmness of two regulation baseballs.
    “What’s your boyfriend do?” I asked. “Physical training?”
    She laughed, and her tongue fell over her lower lip. “Puh-lease. He’s a trader on State Street. His body is for shit, like he’s got a little Buddha under his abs, stringy arms, ass starting to