The Same Mistake Twice by Albert Tucher Read Free Book Online Page A

officers leading the girl through the front door in handcuffs.
    “Would you please tell me her name? I can’t come up with it to save my life.”
    “You didn’t know her?” said Tillotson.
    “I don’t think anybody did.”
    “It’s Anne-Marie Kuhlbacher.”
    “Still doesn’t ring a bell. Why did you go to her house?”
    “Just to touch all the bases. We didn’t have a clue it was her.”
    “Just like I told her, only I thought I was blowing smoke.”
    “Blow enough smoke,” he said, “and sometimes it turns real. Happens all the time in my line of work.”
    “Mine, too, I guess.”

Chapter Nine
    Diana had given the Dick Levitt episode little thought in the past ten years. Sometimes she wondered about her ability to put things ruthlessly out of her mind. It was a professional asset, but did it mean she was missing some pieces? Her personal life, or lack of it, seemed to offer more evidence.
    For instance, what other woman would be satisfied with watching Tillotson make himself at home in her kitchen? Or with not knowing his first name?
    Answering those questions would have to wait. Her current problem was Dexter Grogan. She turned pages until she came to the sophomores, but the photo that went with his name was too small to tell her anything.
    Diana found herself groping for the computer mouse. She laughed, because these thumbnails didn’t expand with a click.
    She started looking through the book for other football players. It could be hard to find the right younger boy. A junior she might know, but he might not have known Dexter very well.
    The juniors looked back at her without connecting. Had she really moved among these people for three of her four years of high school? Anne-Marie Kuhlbacher had apparently missed school on the day yearbook photos were taken.
    But then, among the freshmen, she found a Paul Riemenschneider on the junior varsity football team. She had an Otto Riemenschneider among her clients. The name wasn’t exactly Smith. Two local men might be related.
    Diana sat for a moment and looked at her phone on the wall. Calling a client was a bad idea. Using her home phone instead of traveling to a pay phone was worse. But if her plan worked, Otto would find out her real name anyway.
    She was about to risk losing a client, but it would be worth the cost if she could protect the rest of her business.
    Otto lived in Morristown, to the south of Driscoll. His wife had divorced him years earlier, and as of the previous week he hadn’t replaced her.
    Get on with it, Diana thought.
    She got up and thought she was headed for the phone, but instead her feet took her back to the bookcase, where she reached for the yearbook from her junior year. In the kitchen she performed the dust-blowing ritual and set the book down next to the other volume. She opened the book and started paging through it.
    Her destination was Kurt’s senior picture, but she also found him in candid shots throughout the book. His prominence didn’t surprise her. Some boys always got more than their share of attention, maybe because professional photographers had gone to high school like anyone else and knew how to spot the alpha males.
    Now Kurt’s classmates could spend the next fifty years taking the book down from the top shelf at reunion time, or pulling it out of a box that they should be packing for a move to Florida, and tell everyone with a little too much enjoyment, “There’s Kurt Krol. Quarterback of the football team. Everybody thought he was going places. And I don’t mean prison, which is where he ended up.”
    And where he still was, seven years after nearly killing a bank guard in a robbery
    Diana knew which memory was about to replay itself. It wasn’t her favorite, but it wouldn’t ask permission.

Chapter Ten
    The graduation party at Kurt’s house was comforting in its way. It was the same party that the same people had thrown all through high school. The girls danced with each other while wishing their