The Angel by Carla Neggers Read Free Book Online Page B

Boston. Tonight, it was the scene of a bizarre, as yet unexplained death. Police lights and the garden’s own Victorian-looking lamps illuminated the scene as detectives, patrol officers, crime scene technicians and reporters did their work. By
    THE ANGEL
    55
    tomorrow morning, there would be virtually no sign of what had gone on here tonight. The swan boats, a popular Public Garden attraction for over a century, could resume their graceful tour of the shallow water. Abigail stopped pacing, grateful, at least, that she’d worn a pantsuit and flats to tonight’s reception. Trees, flowers and grass were still dripping from the downpour. Most likely, it had been raining, and raining hard, when Victor Sarakis ended up in the water. The medical examiner had already removed the body for an autopsy. Anything was possible. Heart attack, stroke, an unfortunate slip in the heavy rain.
    Pushed, tripped, hit on the back of the head. Abigail wasn’t ready to jump to any conclusions. She glanced sideways at Bob O’Reilly, who’d decided, on his own, to interview the two students. Reinterview, Abigail thought, irritated. The responding officers had talked to the students. She’d talked to them. Now Bob was talking to them. For no good reason, either, except that he was a senior detective with decades of experience on her and presumably knew what he was doing. But she wished he’d go back up to Beacon Street and listen to his daughter play Irish music.
    The students—summer engineering students from the Midwest—looked worn out. They could have gone back to their dorm a long time ago—they just didn’t. They’d told Bob the same story, about cutting through the Public Garden from a bookstore on Newbury Street, hoping to beat the storm and get to a friend’s apartment on Cambridge Street. When the skies opened up on them, they debated going back to the bookstore or pushing on to their friend’s place.
    Then they’d spotted a body in the pond.
    56
    CARLA NEGGERS
    “You could tell he was dead by looking at him?” Bob gave them one of his trademark skeptical snorts. “How?”
    “I don’t know,” the thinner of the two students said. He had a scraggly beard and was shivering as his wet clothes dried in the breeze. “It was obvious.”
    “He didn’t look like he’d been in the water that long,” his friend said. He was meatier, and he’d gotten just as wet, but he wasn’t shivering.
    “Long enough,” Bob said.
    The students didn’t respond.
    “You didn’t see him before you noticed him in the pond?” Bob asked.
    They shook their heads. They’d answered the same question before, maybe twice already. Abigail knew she’d asked it.
    Bob gave them a thoughtful look. “How do you like BU?”
    The skinny student didn’t hide his surprise—and maybe a touch of annoyance—at the personal question as well as his friend did. “What?”
    “My daughter goes there. Music major.”
    “We don’t know any music majors,” the meaty kid said quickly.
    Abigail bit her tongue at the exchange, but Bob didn’t mention Fiona by name and finally told the students to go on back to their dorms. This time, they didn’t hesitate. Bob turned to her. His red hair had frizzed up in the humidity and rain, and his freckles stood out on his pale skin. “You look like you want to smack me.”
    “It’s a thought.”
    He obviously didn’t care. She’d never met anyone with a thicker hide. She owned a triple-decker in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood, with him and a third detective, an arrangement that for the most part worked out well, but
    THE ANGEL
    57
    tonight, for the first time, she could see the potential for complications.
    “Press is all over this one,” Bob said, nodding to a camera crew. “Some rich guy from Cambridge tripping on his shoe
    laces and drowning in the Public Garden swan pond.”
    “We don’t know he’s rich, and, actually, it’s called the lagoon.”
    “Lagoon? Lagoon reminds me of Gilligan’s