Shadow Men by Jonathon King Read Free Book Online Page B

north wall, but I did take extra care to look for prints on the stairway. If an arsonist had wanted to harm me, why wouldn’t he have set the staircase leading to my door aflame? It would at least have forced me to jump. I tied up the canoe and went up. The air had cleared some of the burnt stench from the shack but there was still an odor inside. I coughed on the first lungful, almost as though it had tripped a memory. I started coffee and then stripped naked and stepped back out on the landing, where I showered off under my jury-rigged rain barrel. The barrel was mounted just below the roofline, and the gutter system refilled it with fresh rainwater. A rubber hose clipped above a perforated garden nozzle gave me enough flow to rinse off a film of sweat. I heard the low grunt of an anhinga but couldn’t see it hiding back in the foliage. I dressed, but my clean T-shirt had taken on the smoke smell. I tried to ignore it while I moved one of my straight-backed chairs over to the window, where an early evening breeze was sifting in. I don’t remember finishing the coffee or falling asleep. But I remember the light change and then the burnt odor too, and then the sight of a young woman sitting in a Philadelphia hotel room chair, a pillow held tightly in her arms. The look on her face made her appear both quiet and terrified at the same time. I even asked her a question before I realized she was dead.
    My partner, Scott Erb, and I were working Center City on the two-to-eleven shift and got a dispatch call at 10:45. The security manager had requested our presence at the Wyndham Hotel ASAP. We both winced at the language, and then the dispatcher added her own sardonic, “He reports that discretion is advised.” We were only a few blocks away and had no calls holding. The security guy met us in the lobby, introduced himself and led us straight to the elevators. He waited until the doors closed before saying, “I think we’ve got a murder-suicide, and you’re not going to like the shooter.” We looked at each other while he punched in a code and lit a floor button near the top. Scott took out a pad, checked his watch, and started scratching in notes. The hallway was empty when the doors opened on the eighteenth floor. It was a nice place, less than ten years old and pricey. There were fresh flowers in the foyer, even at 11 :00 P.M. The security man led us to the end of the hall.
    “Honeymoon suite,” he said, unlocking the door. “Guy took it for one night only. A special getaway rate.”
    He pushed the door open and let us go in first. The odor was of cordite and of something else burned. The entry opened onto a large room, the decor ruined by a man’s body in the middle of the floor, a stain growing in the carpet by his head. I stepped over the man’s legs and bent to look at the 9 mm Glock on the floor inches from his hand.
    “Max,” Scott said, and when I looked up, my partner was staring at the coffee table, where a department-issue black leather holster lay empty.
    “I already checked the I.D.,” said the security man, reading our eyes. “He’s one of yours.”
    I stood and stepped farther into the room and started to say, “and where’s the…,” when I saw her in the darkened corner, sitting, her head up against the back of the high Queen Anne chair, her eyes in shadow. I said “Excuse me miss but…,” before I realized I was talking to a dead woman. Her hands were crossed over a white pillow that she was holding tight to her chest. Only close up could you see the small hole in the material where the 9 mm had entered.
    “They registered as Mr. and Mrs.,” the security guy said. “The door was locked from the inside. I had to snap the security chain to get in.”
    “Yeah, thanks. We’ll call it in to homicide,” Scott said, ushering the guy back out.
    “Phil Broderick,” Scott said after closing the door.
    “You knew him?”
    “Worked the Twenty-second. Hung with Tommy Mason and those