The Answer Man by Roy Johansen Read Free Book Online

had enough to get Sabini through the D.A.’s test.
    And then, with an extra forty thousand dollars to his name, he could stop worrying for a change.
    —
    A helicopter crash, a dead convenience-store clerk, and a warehouse fire. A good night by any standards.
    Hound Dog Barrett squeezed off four quick pictures of the fire, finishing off her roll. Way to go. Things had been quiet lately, but a night like this made it all worthwhile. She flipped back her short brown hair as two other scanner geeks drove up. Weirdos.
    Like she was any better, Hound Dog thought ruefully. She and the new arrivals spent their nights roaming the streets, listening for broadcast crime and accident scene info on a portable scanner. They would often get to the scene before the police, snapping away with their cameras. Thoughscanner geeks occasionally made the leap to professional photojournalists, they generally preferred to keep their photos to themselves, showing them only to interested friends, relatives, and other scanner geeks.
    At twenty-one, Hound Dog had seen more than most people would see in a lifetime. Decapitated corpses, mangled automobiles, and exploding buildings greeted her in her nightly adventures. She could only imagine what her parents would say if they knew she did this until at least dawn every morning.
    She wound the exposed roll as she walked back to her motorcycle. Time to leave. She didn’t like to be around other scanner geeks; seeing the socially awkward young men only reminded her that others saw her the same way.
    She zipped her camera into its bag and kick-started her Harley-Davidson motorcycle. She adjusted the scanner headphones beneath her helmet and roared away, leaving the burning warehouse behind her.
    One-ten A . M . If she went home now, it still would have been a good night. But she wasn’t tired. And besides, she was on a major roll. Who knew what the rest of the night would hold for her?
    Scanner geek.
    Sometimes she felt like a geek, without a real life. In some ways, her hobby did isolate her from the rest of the world. Except for the time she spent with her live-in boyfriend, Mark, she had almost no social life. She spent most of her days at PhotoSmith Studios, one of the best-known photography houses in the city. There she made her living by retouching models’ portfolio shots, and she had a standing offer to shoot as a studio photographer whenever she felt so inclined. But she just couldn’t get enthused about telling snotty fifteen-year-olds how to pout.
    She usually arrived home from work at four P . M ., spent some quality time with Mark, then slept for a few hours. At around eleven she set out on her motorcycle, scanner on,searching for those photo opportunities. The time she spent alone, riding the city streets, was her favorite; these nights defined who she was.
    She pulled into the parking lot of a Kroger supermarket, nicknamed by locals the “disco Kroger” for its proximity to a popular dance club. She went inside, bought a croissant and a pint of chocolate milk, and consumed them on the sidewalk outside. She flipped through a newspaper as she ate, reading up on the crime and accident scenes she had visited the evening before. As always, the reporters got many of the facts wrong. How could they be such screwups?
    She was about to trash the paper, when a photo caught her eye. It was on page one of the business section, a beautiful woman with a middle-aged man. Hound Dog studied the woman’s face. She had seen it before.
    But where?
    The caption told her that the woman was an attorney named Myth Daniels, and she was walking with Burton Sabini, her client in an embezzling case.
    The woman’s neck was arched and her face was tense, turned away from the camera in a three-quarter shot, accented with the tiniest hint of motion blur. Hound Dog had seen that pose many times before. It was the classic “avoidance reflex,” the posture people adopt when trying not to have their picture taken. She