The Zero Hour by Joseph Finder Read Free Book Online

before he drove off in his clattering AMC Pacer.
    “What the hell did you do to him?” she shouted.
    “Oh, calm down,” he’d replied. “I threw him a left hook and he forgot to duck, is all. I was trying to show him you gotta use your elbows to absorb the blow.”
    “Forgot to duck? Peter, he’s a child !”
    “Jerry’s got to learn how to take his lumps. It’s good for him.” To Peter, Jared was always “Jerry” or “little buddy.”
    “Don’t you ever do that to him again!” she said.
    “Don’t tell me what I can’t do with my son,” Peter said. “You got him taking piano lessons and writing poems , for Christ’s sake. You trying to raise a faggot?” And he gunned the engine and took off down the street.
    *   *   *
    The microwave beeped, then insistently beeped once more. The milk had boiled over, spilling inside the oven. She mopped up the mess with paper towel, removed the milk skin from the mug with a spoon, and stirred in a little maple syrup.
    Then she put on some soft chamber music (the Beethoven piano trios, which, with the Schubert piano trios, she played more than anything else—something else Peter liked to mock her for) and sat in the La-Z-Boy.
    She thought of Valerie Santoro, not posed on her bed in the indignity of death, but alive, beautiful, and remembered the last time they’d met. She had talked about quitting “the business,” something she talked about quite a lot recently and getting a “high-powered” job on Wall Street. She’d begun to ask for more and more money so she could quit working—realizing that she was near the end of her career as a call girl and the money wasn’t coming in the way it used to.
    Valerie Santoro, rest in peace, was a user who thought she’d finally found her sugar daddy, her ticket out. She affected to disdain the money Uncle Sam gave her, while at the same time angling desperately to get more of it.
    Sarah, for her part, had found her own ticket out, or at least up. A good informant boosted your stock immeasurably, but an informant like Val, with access to some of the high and mighty, the high rollers and the mafiosi, was truly a prized commodity.
    Now her prized racehorse was dead, and something about the murder didn’t make sense. Prostitutes were more prone to be victims of violence, even of murder, than the run of society. But the circumstances didn’t indicate she’d been killed in the line of her particular kind of duty. It was unlikely that rough trade had been involved.
    The cash Valerie had hidden behind the dummy medicine cabinet—the almost five thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills, cut in half—was persuasive evidence that Val had done a job for someone.
    But for whom? If it was Mafia-related, why had the money been left there? Wouldn’t whoever killed her have known about the cash and taken it back? If she’d been killed by elements of organized crime because they’d discovered she was informing for the FBI, where had the money come from? Had she been killed because she’d been an informant?
    The FBI normally doesn’t concern itself with homicide, but a case that involved the murder of an FBI informant was a clear-cut exception.
    Peter Cronin hadn’t called his ex-wife to the crime scene just to identify a body, and certainly not out of generosity. Well, informants weren’t the only ones who did horse-trading. If Peter wanted access to the FBI’s databases, he’d have to pony up some pieces of evidence himself, like the Rolodex and the address book. He’d deal; he had little choice.
    At two in the morning, Sarah climbed the stairs to her third-floor bedroom, got into the extra-long T-shirt she liked to sleep in, and got into bed. Visions of the crime scene flashed in her mind like a gruesome slide show, with snatches of remembered conversation as a disjointed sound track, and not before a good hour of tossing and turning was she able to fall into a fitful, troubled sleep.

 
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    Seven