Fire And Ice by JA Jance

Author:JA Jance
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter 11

* * *

I caught up with Mel in Federal Way in time to buy her lunch at Marie Callender’s. She had spent the morning at Denny’s talking to the people who worked there, and she was sick of it. She wanted to eat somewhere else.

“So what did you find out?” I asked over steaming potato soup with a side of corn bread.

Mel shook her head. “It’s one of those places with enough employee turnover that there’s zero corporate memory. Well, maybe not quite zero. One of the cooks thought he maybe remembered someone named Marina, but he wasn’t sure. They evidently had the manager from hell for a while and everyone who could walk away did so. In that regard, Marina was no different from anyone else. She left without telling anyone and without bothering to pick up her final paycheck. That was sent in the mail.”

“To Silver Pines?”

“That’s the address they had,” Mel told me. “That’s the only address they had.”

“Was it ever cashed?” I asked.

“Nope. It came back.”

“But no one bothered to mention that she had disappeared.”

“No one from work. What did you find out?”

“I went to see an old buddy of mine from Seattle PD.” I was going to let it go at that, but then I remembered that Mel and I are married now. And that bit about “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is a good idea if you want to stay that way. “Al Lindstrom and I used to be partners,” I added. “He used to work with Tom Wojeck, too. Big Al claims Tom Wojeck left under a cloud. And that he has AIDS — has had for years.”

“Big Al,” Mel mused, latching on to the part of what I’d said that I would have preferred her to skip. “How big is he?”

“Not that big,” I told her. “There were two Als in his class at the academy. He came out Big Al, the other one came out Little Al.”

“What happened to Little Al?”

“He quit right after graduation. Went to work for State Farm or Farmers selling car insurance.”

“But the Big Al part stuck?” Mel asked.

“Pretty much,” I said.

As far as the partnership deal was concerned, I thought I had gotten off relatively easy. What I failed to understand is that God has a sense of humor about these things, and He was about to show me an ex–partner problem that was a whole lot more complicated than Big Al Lindstrom.

“Anyway,” I continued, “from what Big Al told me, Tom Wojeck had a dark side that caused him to leave Seattle PD in a hell of a hurry. They were about to launch an Internal Affairs investigation. Then he was diagnosed with AIDS before I.A. got around to him.”

Looking thoughtful, Mel said, “And Tom Wojeck just happens to be the same guy who cleaned out Marina’s apartment where there might have been some stray drug–dealing money.”

Sometimes Mel’s uncanny ability to put things together makes me feel like she’s reading my mind, but don’t get me wrong.

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