LITMIR.BIZ

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But there was no humor, no sarcastic twist to his mouth. After a moment, she shook her head.

      “No,” she whispered more to herself than to the tall, dark-haired detective with the attitude, “this wasn’t one of those times.”

      The woman looked, he thought, genuinely shaken up and he wondered why. Was she close to the victim? Did she know more than she was saying? Like the popular cult icon from a few years ago, Fox Mulder from The X Files, Tony’s initial approach to a case was always the same: “Trust no one.” Every word needed to be verified or supported before it became a viable piece of the puzzle.

      Tony looked at the small, heavyset man in the dark navy-blue uniform standing beside Dr. Snow White. A quick glance would have had someone labeling the older man a policeman. Only closer scrutiny would have taken note of the differences in uniforms. But there was one unsettling similarity.

      “You have a gun,” Tony observed.

      One ham-like hand immediately covered the gun butt as if to acknowledge the weapon’s existence.

      “I’ve got a license,” Stevens said quickly. “The agency pays more per hour for guards who have gun permits. And there’ve been muggings…” With a sigh that seemed to come from his very toes, Stevens’s voice trailed off as he looked down again at the slain nurse.

      Tony was aware that there’d been reports of people being accosted late at night in the hospital’s parking facility.

      “But none of them were fatal,” he pointed out to the security guard.

      “No. Not until now,” Walter Stevens agreed heavily. Looking at the police detective, he blew out a shaky breath. “It’s my fault.”

      Tony’s eyes narrowed. Confessions didn’t usually come this early in the game and in his experience, never without some sort of prodding and usually in trade for a lessening of the ultimate sentence. Taking that into account, he truly doubted that the guard was about to make life easy for him.

      Drawing on his rather limited supply of patience, Tony asked, “How’s that?”

      Scrubbing a hand over his stubbled chin, Stevens rendered his confession. “I usually make my rounds earlier. If I’d been here five, ten minutes sooner, who knows? The nurse might still be alive.” He looked down at the prone figure. “I might have been able to stop whoever did this.”

      Moved, Sasha placed her arm around the man’s shoulders. At five-seven, she was approximately an inch taller than he was. “You don’t know that,” she said in a comforting tone. “Whoever it was might have shot you, too.”

      One of those, Tony thought, scrutinizing the woman again. A perpetual spreader of sunshine. Someone who felt called upon to lift burdens and cheer people up.

      They had their place, he supposed, but preferably not in his investigations. Frowning, Tony focused on what was important.

      “Why were you late in making your rounds?” The question was sharply asked, pinning the security guard to the proverbial wall.

      If the attack had actually been planned, someone would have gone to a lot of trouble learning the guard’s rounds and when he passed areas of the complex. For the nurse to have been slain when she was, it had to have been an unexpected attack, without any previous knowledge of the security guard’s route. Maybe this was just a crime of opportunity and the young nurse had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or someone could have followed her without giving the guard any thought at all, which meant that he or she was unfamiliar with the hospital’s policy.

      There were a great many things to consider before they could feel that they were on the right path to solving the crime.

      He looked at the guard expectantly.

      “Something I ate,” Stevens told him, pressing his wide hand to his less-than-flat midsection. “Been to the men’s room three, four times so far tonight.” He offered a sheepish smile. “Throws off my timing.”

      “I’ll bet.” Tony cut him off before the man could get more graphic. He glanced toward the doctor. “I didn’t get your name, Doctor.”

      “Sasha Pulaski.”

      “Sasha,” he repeated. “Is that Russian?”

      “Polish,” she corrected. “My parents are Polish.”

      He noticed, even though she still looked shaken, that there was a touch of pride in her voice. He wondered what that was like, to be proud of who you were, where you came from.

      His eyes swept over the doctor and the guard. “I’d like to take you both down to the precinct for a formal statement.”

      Stevens looked a little uncertain about the turn of events. “If I go, there’s no one down here to cover for me,” he protested, concerned. “I’ll lose my job and I can’t afford to have that happen. I have bills—”

      The guard sounded as if he was just getting wound up. Tony put his hand up to stop the flow of words before they started.

      “Henderson,” he called over to his partner. The older man was consulting with one of the forensic investigators. “See if we can get one of the patrolmen to fill in for the security guard here until I get him back from the precinct.”

      “Why don’t you just take a statement from Mr. Stevens right here for the time being? It might save you both a lot of time and effort,” Sasha quietly suggested.

      That caught him off guard. Tony thought about the solution she’d offered, or pretended to. He didn’t like having anyone poke around in his investigation unless he asked them to, but the truth of it was, she was right. The patrolman could be put to better use canvassing the immediate area instead of taking the guard’s place. And unless the guard had something significant to offer, such as having seen someone fleeing the scene just before the body was discovered, taking him down to the precinct would be a waste of time.

      Mainly a waste of his time. In his experience, most security guards with night beats were not overly observant and spent most of their working hours just struggling to stay awake.

      “Does that go for you, too, Doctor?” Tony asked, shifting his attention to her. “Do you want to just give your statement here and then go?”

      There was something abrasive and off-putting about the detective, Sasha thought. And he was doing it on purpose. Why? she wondered. Was he trying to create distance between himself and the people he considered suspects, or was he just trying to keep everyone at arms’ length, in which case, again, why?

      Had he seen too many dead bodies and had that hardened him, or had he started out that way?

      She thought of her father. All the years that Josef Pulaski had been on the job, he never once allowed it to affect him, to influence him once he was home. She knew that her father had made a conscious decision to draw a line between what he did in order to put food on the table and the time he spent with the family he did it for. When he walked across that threshold and into their house, it was as if that other world where he spent so much time each day didn’t even exist.

      She supposed not all policemen could be like her father. And that, she knew, was a real pity because her father was a great cop and an even greater father, the kind who sacrificed his own comforts for his children.

      “That’s up to you,” she told the detective, her eyes meeting his. She sensed that Detective Anthony Santini had no respect for the people he could successfully intimidate. “If you want to question me about what I saw just now, you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of a very short interview because I didn’t see anyone or anything—until I came up to Angela’s car.”

      She’d set up an obvious question and he obliged her by asking it. “And why did you come up to the victim’s car?”

      “Because mine is parked right over there.” Sasha pointed toward the light-blue vintage Toyota.

      He nodded. There was more

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