The Sniper's Wife by Archer Mayor Read Free Book Online Page B

the comment conveniently pat. “I suppose.”
    Ogden sighed slightly. “The door was locked from the inside, the window, too. There was no sign of violence and nothing obvious missing. I know this is hard to face, but I think what we see here is what we got.”
    After a pause, still studying Willy’s face, he added, “What’re your plans?”
    Willy didn’t want to lie outright, but he hedged his bets with his phrasing. “I want to find out more about her life down here—what led her to it.”
    Ogden hesitated before asking, “There anything going on I should know about?”
    “I don’t know,” Willy answered truthfully. “I need to talk to some of the people who knew her—if I can find out who they were.” He then steered for safer waters, adding blandly, “I’m not arguing with your conclusions. She was a user. I just…well, you know …I feel pretty responsible.”
    That was truer than Ogden could know, but his choice of words had been kept simple for their manipulative effect. One thing about dinosaurs: In exchange for their experience and wisdom, they often lost the knee-jerk judgmental hard edge they might have had early on. Having seen damn near everything there was to see, they viewed their fellow humans in a more tolerant light. Willy was counting on Ward Ogden’s sharing that outlook, and perhaps on his cutting him a little slack.
    Ogden was apparently having the same internal debate. “You don’t know any of her friends down here?” he asked.
    “Nobody.”
    After another thoughtful pause, Ogden reached a conclusion. He stood up, motioning Willy to stay. “I have to go use the men’s room for about fifteen minutes.” He tapped on a closed file with his fingertip. “That’s what we got on your wife. Make sure you don’t give it a quick read while I’m gone.”
    He leaned forward slightly, resting one hand on the desktop so his face was inches from Willy’s. “Don’t do me dirt here, okay? This is cop-to-cop.”
    Willy matched his gaze. “You got it.”
    He waited until Ogden had left the room before reaching out and swiveling the file around right side up. No one else in the room was paying any attention, so he flipped it open and began to read.
    First on top was the responding patrol officer’s UF-61 complaint report. In dry, unimaginative prose, it told of Mary’s ailing, elderly neighbor’s calling to say that Mary hadn’t knocked on her door in several days to share their ritual cup of morning coffee. Additionally, the super, Mr. Rivera, when told of the same concern, had pounded on Mary’s door to no response, but had noticed a foul odor coming from the apartment. It was the super using his master key who let the officer in, where he found the decedent, an apparent overdose, dressed in her nightgown, lying on the couch, the needle she’d used still in her arm.
    Beneath the UF-61 was Ogden’s own DD-5, or follow-up report, commonly called a “pink” for its color.
    Willy skimmed the pink before moving quickly on to the scene photos and sketches, feeling his face tighten as he saw Mary from every angle, harshly lit, grotesquely exposed, rendered disgusting and foul by her body’s own reactions to the poison she’d injected. General shots of the apartment showed him most of what he’d seen last night, except that the shade was drawn in front of the window and the entire apartment looked neat and tidy, since the pictures predated the search.
    Of the close-ups, he studied the shots of the locked window and door, the syringe dangling from her arm just below the rubber tubing she’d wrapped around her biceps, and the photograph of the plastic bag containing the heroin she’d used. Crudely stamped on its surface in red ink was a simple cartoon drawing of a devil, complete with horns, tail, pitchfork, and leering expression: the dealer’s trademark, as relevant in the competitive urban drug world as any other advertisement. Willy didn’t doubt that if he asked the right