Taking the Fifth by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online Page B

around for years. With Peters in the hospital, I had temporarily switched to night shift. As usual, Sergeant Watkins, Captain Powell, and a number of others asked about Peters’s progress. The patient had made it clear he didn’t want visitors, and our coworkers had pretty much complied with his wishes. As far as Peters’s condition was concerned, I was the department’s main source of information.
    Closeting myself in my cubicle, I made short order of writing the mandatory report. Hunger was beginning to assert itself. So was a need for sleep. Given my current schedule, eleven-thirtyA.M . was long past my bedtime.
    I stopped by the Doghouse on my way home. The Doghouse is a downtown twenty-four-hour restaurant. Timeworn and unpretentious, with duct-taped patches in the carpet, it’s one of my favorite haunts. Wanda, my usual waitress, saw me as soon as I came in. When I gave her a thumbs-up signal, she went straight to the kitchen to place my order for two eggs over easy. She came back to my booth carrying a cup of coffee.
    “Why so late for breakfast?” she asked. “Working overtime?”
    “A little,” I answered, although compared to Tom Riley’s, my overtime was hardly worth mentioning.
    Wanda disappeared and returned with the crossword-puzzle section of the newspaper. I don’t buy newspapers. It’s a matter of honor with me, and since moving out of the Royal Crest, I no longer had a next-door neighbor to save the puzzles for me. Wanda had leaped into the breach. She usually had a couple of them put aside for me whenever I came in.
    I worked the puzzle while I ate breakfast. I gave myself a pat on the back when I knew that the eight-letter word starting with anM that meant threatening was “minatory” not “menacing.” Real devotees of crossword puzzles are virtual fountains of useless information.
    With the crossword puzzle completed, I sat drinking my last cup of coffee while I thought about Richard Dathan Morris. Riley’s comment about him wanting to be an undercover cop was totally out of character. And then there was that bit about the parties. Riley had said there had been drugs present, but he couldn’t remember Morris actually using any of them. Unable to make sense of the jumble of information, I gave up and headed home.
    It had been only a month since I moved into my new place, and I still wasn’t entirely accustomed to living in Belltown Terrace. Intended to be a building of prestigious downtown condominiums, it had, in the course of near-bankruptcy proceedings, become a mostly luxury rental apartment complex instead. Only a careful reading of the documents would have shown my neighbors that J. P. Beaumont was one of their landlords. I kept a pretty low profile about my belonging to the real estate syndicate that owned the entire building. It was bad enough being the owner of the penthouse.
    The elevator ride from the fourth level of the underground parking garage to the twenty-fourth floor of the residential tower is a long one. During the ride I still found myself wondering if I really belonged there. And I never put the key in the lock without a twinge of regret that Anne Corley would never be there to share the apartment with me. After all, she was the one who had paid for it.
    The place was still brand-new. It still smelled of new paint, new carpet, and new furniture. I had stowed Mrs. Edwards and the girls in a vacant two-bedroom apartment several stories below. When they were home, the two girls delighted in running up and down the intervening stairwells to visit me. When they were around, they always left behind a comfortable clutter of kid stuff that made me feel more at home and less like I was living in a picture fromHouse and Garden .
    With the girls gone, the place was too clean, too neat, too empty for me to feel at home. Fighting the refugee blues, I headed straight for my old recliner, which Michael Browder had grudgingly reupholstered in a handsome, pliable leather. It sat off