LITMIR.BIZ

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one who came with you from Chicago…” Detective Baker flipped a page in her notebook, all business again. “What was his name?”

      “Swirsky.” It had meant nothing to him when Quinn had told him. “Pete Swirsky.”

      Her notebook slid from her knee and hit the floor with a crack. She leaned forward to pick it up. When she straightened at last, her face was a deep, unbecoming red.

      “Is anything the matter?” Simon asked.

      “I… No, I…” She fussed with the crumpled pages on her lap. “Sorry.”

      He sat back, fascinated by the sudden change in her demeanor. “Take your time.”

      “I’m fine,” she said, a little too sharply. “He’s missing, you said?”

      “He wasn’t here when Quinn returned. I don’t know when—or how—he left.”

      “Have to be by boat. Someone may have seen him. Anyway, since he works for you it shouldn’t be much trouble to track him down.” Her voice was brisk and practical. But her fingers, as she smoothed the pages of her notebook, trembled slightly. “In the meantime, I’ll need a statement from Mr. Brown and a look at your lab. Has anyone been in there since your…accident?”

      Accident? How about “attack”? Or “assault”? Some other a-word that indicated she’d accepted his story.

      But maybe he was hoping for too much. At least she was going to investigate.

      Which raised another problem.

      “As far as I know, I’m the only one with any reason to go in there.”

      Her brows flicked up. “Really? Who mops your floors?”

      He didn’t know. “A cleaning service?”

      “Right.” She made another note. “I’ll talk to Mr. Brown.”

      Despite her lack of inflection, Simon felt dismissed. Disparaged. Why? Because his memory loss made him useless to her? Or because he hadn’t considered something so basic as the people who must work for him?

      “What will you tell him?” he asked.

      “I’ll want to know who cleans for you. What their schedule is, if they have keys to the house and the lab. Stuff like that.”

      “I meant, what are you going to tell him about me?”

      “About your memory loss.”

      He liked that she met his gaze directly. “Yes.”

      “Well… It’s not a crime to forget things. Otherwise, I’d have to arrest half the population of the Sunset Pines Retirement Community.” He was pretty sure this time she was kidding. “You really think it would hurt your business if it got out you had this temporary amnesia thing?”

      “Yes,” he said baldly. “The value of this company depends on my research ability. Mental aberration is not reassuring to stockholders.”

      “You have bigger worries right now than your investors. Once it gets out that you’re walking around, whoever attacked you is going to worry you’ll identify him.”

      If was the first sign she’d given that she believed he’d been attacked. Something inside Simon relaxed.

      “I was struck on the side of the head, probably as I was turning around,” he offered. “It’s likely I never saw him.”

      “He may not care. He hit you once. Do you really want to risk him coming back to finish the job?”

      “I’ll take my chances.”

      She scowled. “Don’t take too many. You sure you won’t see a doctor?”

      “Sure.”

      “Well, it’s your—”

      He was almost certain she was going to say “funeral.”

      “—skull,” she said. “Concussions can tire you out, though. You should try to get plenty of rest.”

      Her concern, however professional, made Simon feel slightly less isolated. He had been up most of last night trying to find an answer to the puzzles that plagued him. The night before he’d spent lying on the cold floor of the lab. He was strained, exhausted and aching in every muscle.

      But of course he couldn’t tell her that.

      “Thank you,” he said gravely. “I will.”

      She hesitated as if she wanted to say something more and then shrugged. “I left my field kit on the boat. I’ll go get it, and then I’ll talk to your guy, Brown, and poke around.”

      He watched her slim, straight figure climb the stairs and cross the echoing hall. She was leaving. He was alone.

      Simon had the uncomfortable sense he was often alone.

      But this time, this once, he didn’t like it at all.

      Chapter 2

      “I don’t know what to think,” Laura said honestly to her boss when he called her into his office late the following day. It was a Saturday, but they both were working. Chief Denko, because his personal life was admirably organized, and Laura, because it was her shift and she had no personal life.

      “Ford definitely has a bump on the head,” she continued. “But I didn’t find any tool marks or fingerprints to support his claim of a break-in. We don’t even know for sure that a crime took place. He could have emptied the safe himself as part of an insurance scam.”

      She didn’t mention Ford’s claim, that the bump on his head had affected his brain.

      And as for Ford’s suspicion that it was an inside job, that the guard that night had attacked and robbed him before disappearing… Her stomach tied itself in knots. Nope, she definitely didn’t want to go there.

      Not that she had a choice. She had a duty. And Police Chief Jarek Denko would demand a complete and impartial investigation in any case.

      “Has Ford filed an insurance claim?” he asked.

      “No,” Laura admitted.

      Chief Denko regarded her levelly from the other side of his utilitarian gray metal desk, his hands folded on the stained blotter. The Eden town council didn’t believe in spending money on fancy furniture for its public servants. But somehow they’d scraped together enough sense and an appropriate salary to hire Denko, a former homicide detective from Chicago’s notorious Area 3, as their chief of police.

      After the last two Bozos who’d held that the position, Laura respected the lean, harsh-featured police chief enormously. She dreaded letting him down.

      Denko steepled his fingers. “No signs of forced entry, you said?”

      “No, sir.”

      “Who has keys to the house?”

      “No keys. Entry is controlled by magnetic passcards and internal bolts operating on a tiered code system. Only the highest access codes get you into the house itself.”

      “And who has those codes?”

      “I’ve requested a complete list from the security company. But the guy on the phone said the master passcards were reserved for security personnel and Ford himself.”

      Denko tapped the pages on the blotter in front of him. “Your report says the tapes are missing from the security cameras. They weren’t simply disabled?”

      Laura shook her head. “Vandalizing the cameras would have set off the alarm automatically. So either the intruder knew where the cameras were and how they operated, or there was no intruder and someone on the inside swiped the tapes to avoid being identified.”

      “Ford?” Denko suggested. “That would fit your insurance fraud theory.”

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