14 Stone Kiss by Faye Kellerman

Author:Faye Kellerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

22

Not a whit.

That was how much Decker believed Donatti.

Walking back to the car via Riverside Drive, Decker kept his hands in his pockets as he stared over the parkway. The sun had burned several holes in the cloud cover, casting an intermittent glare over the sluggish Hudson. The streets were a traction nightmare, a mixture of motor oil and ice-chunked water. Cars were splashing sludge and mud curbside, causing Decker to do a two-step to avoid the mess. He touched his swollen face, biting back the pain with stoicism and Advil. He concentrated on his choices, the two very different paths he could take.

The first was to follow the bastard: to find out what was on Chris’s dance card. Five seconds later, Decker nixed the idea. The man was savvy and would pick up a shadow as easy as a firearm. Plus, Donatti knew the city streets, and Decker did not. A tail would not only be useless, but would also alert Donatti to the already known—but as yet unstated—fact that Decker didn’t trust him.

Give the man a round of applause. Donatti had put on a good exhibition. But the shock and outrage meant nothing. Chris was a pathological liar, having stalemated several lie-detector tests given by veterans in the field. He hadn’t been perfect, but good enough to make the experts wonder. The most convincing piece of evidence that Chris had going for him was the “Why bother?” What would he have gained by having Shayndie murdered? No real money in it, and now he had Decker bird-dogging his ass.

C.D. don’t do nothing unless there’s something in it for him.

For right now, it was handy to put Donatti on hold, not to discount him, but to direct the efforts elsewhere. Decker’s second and slightly more viable option was to go back to square one and try to figure out what the hell went wrong. That required another look inside the Lieber family. Help from Chaim and Minda was a lost cause. They hated him with an irrational passion, having converted him into a convenient scapegoat—azazel in Hebrew, the symbolic sheep thrown off the cliff on Yom Kippur that atoned for the community’s past sins. Tackling Minda and Chaim, in such horrendous times, was absolutely out.

But Jonathan was another matter.

Decker thought about Jonathan’s reaction to the news of Shayndie’s death. The surprise and shock were real enough, no debate there, but something about Jonathan’s incredulous response was off, as if he hadn’t even considered Shaynda’s death a possibility. It had been out of character because Jon had been so skeptical during the five days prior to her death. He should have anticipated murder as a possibility, readying himself to help out his in-laws should things go bad. Jon was a clergyman; that was his job. Yet when the news hit, it seemed as if Jon were knocked down even harder than Chaim.

And then there was that irksome suspicion, the tweak in the gut that Decker had had during his shiva call just before his literal runin with Minda.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.