Sleep of the Innocent by Medora Sale Read Free Book Online Page A

damn, damn,” muttered Lucas. “Never mind. I’ll be out sometime this morning.”
    He dropped the phone back down and cursed the girl, the motel, the phone, everything. “Something wrong?” asked Kelleher, amused.
    â€œI’ve lost the witness,” said Lucas. “I stashed her in a motel last night, showing touching faith in her word that she was going to stay there for a few days, and she took off in the middle of the night.” He omitted the complication, the strange people who came to visit her and apparently destroyed her room, because explaining them was going to be beyond him at the moment.
    â€œBaldy’s going to be pleased, isn’t he?”
    Inspector Baldwin was not pleased. His face became unnaturally still, then reddened slightly, and then paled to white again. There was silence—ominous silence—for at least a minute.
    â€œLet me see if I understand this,” said Baldwin at last. “First of all, you find someone outside the murdered man’s apartment who has come out of it very recently, but you decide, even though this is a very sensitive investigation, that she is not important enough to hold. You drop her off in an out-of-the-way motel of her choice—”
    â€œNot exactly, sir,” said Lucas. “She chose the direction; I found the motel.”
    â€œSome motel in her part of town, then. You still think she’s relatively unimportant. And then you decide when you’re talking to me that she must be an eyewitness to Carl Neilson’s murder, and on that comforting thought you go to bed. Leaving her to skip out in the middle of the night with a couple of accomplices. What made you think she hadn’t killed the man? Do we have a better suspect?”
    â€œHer hands were clean. She hadn’t fired a gun. And we got her right after the phone call went in. For God’s sake, the guy was still bleeding when the constable got there,” said Lucas defensively.
    â€œGloves? Rubber gloves?” snapped Baldwin.
    â€œThere weren’t any,” said Eric Patterson, who had walked into the office without knocking—or any other ceremony—as was his habit. “We’ve combed through the entire apartment. And there’s no place to stash them between the apartment and where the cadet grabbed her. And before you ask—no one’s opened the windows since they were last painted, a year ago, but just in case, we searched every inch of land under them anyway.”
    â€œDid you search her?”
    Patterson looked at Lucas, who shook his head uneasily. “I didn’t. But she wasn’t wearing very much, and it was pretty tight.”
    â€œSo,” said Baldwin. “She could have slipped a pair of surgeon’s gloves in her underwear.”
    â€œThere’s something else,” said Patterson, yawning. “She might have hidden the gloves, but we didn’t find a weapon, either. Harder to miss. Did she look strange to you, Robert? Like she had a Beretta in her bra?”
    â€œListen, she couldn’t have hidden a hairpin in the outfit she was wearing.”
    â€œOr a Colt in—”
    â€œWatch it, Eric,” said Baldwin. “Well, if you’re right, and she didn’t shoot him, then she must know something about the person who did. I want her found. Soon. Today. How far can she have gotten since the middle of last night?” Lucas looked at Patterson and shrugged his shoulders. The answer, of course, was that she could be landing in Paris right now. “And as soon as you get any sort of lead on her, I want to know. I’m under great pressure to find out who killed Neilson. Fielding has already called a couple of times this morning. We need results, and fast.”
    â€œI sure as hell screwed that up,” said Lucas gloomily as they walked back down the corridor.
    â€œDon’t worry about it. She’s probably not that hard to find. You want me