Lena Gamble - 02 - The Lost Witness by Robert Ellis

Author:Robert Ellis
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9780230741331
Publisher: Pan Books
Published: 2007-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

24

Lena had been late for her meeting with Art Madina. Fifteen minutes late. Not from the drive downtown, but from an unexpectedly long sleep. A big dreamless sleep so heavy and so blank that she had no idea how she finally broke back to the surface and opened her eyes.

She had gone to bed before the power was restored and fallen asleep before she could reset the time on her clock radio and switch on the alarm.

And it had been late. Long after Bobby Rathbone had given her the bad news and gone home. Long after two glasses of wine and another half a cigarette helped her think it all through.

She had come to a decision last night to leave the bugs in place. Her house would remain hot-wired except for the low-tech bug in the handset. The feel-good bug that she was meant to find. After ripping it out of the phone, she killed it with a hammer on the kitchen floor. And when the electric company got around to turning the juice back on, Klinger and his sidekick would no longer be burdened with loud music. By all appearances, everything would be back to normal, and the dynamic duo could listen in and think that they were outsmarting her.

For Lena, this was the quickest way back to her case and what really mattered. And it was easy enough to avoid Klinger’s camera by using the shower upstairs in her old bathroom.

But none of that was really on her mind as she followed Art Madina inside the cooler and the door snapped shut behind them. None of what happened last night really mattered right now.

Madina switched on his flashlight, checking toe tags in the darkness and rolling gurneys out of the way as he searched through the crowd of dead bodies. The dank air was just above freezing, her breath vaporizing before her eyes and thick as smoke. After ten long minutes, they found Jane Doe resting in the far corner beneath a thin sheet of translucent plastic.

Madina handed over the flashlight and pulled the plastic away. Time, even in a temperature-controlled setting, had a way of changing things. Although Lena’s first instinct was to turn away, she held her ground and looked at the corpse.

“If something was missing, how much would it be?” Madina asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know.”

“What did he do with it?”

“We found a meat grinder in the garage.”

Madina turned and gave her a long look. “You’re not serious.”

“We can’t tell when it was last used,” she whispered.

Several moments passed. Then Madina took charge of the flashlight and panned the beam over the victim’s wounds.

“My problem with all this is that it’s such a neat job, Lena. So surgically precise. This guy went to med school.”

The door opened, the space flooding with light. Two men were peering into the cooler. When they spotted Lena standing beside the pathologist, the man in the lab coat stepped away and the second man entered on his own. He was holding a manila envelope and seemed as uncomfortable by the setting as Lena was.

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