Friends Like These by Kimberly McCreight

Friends Like These by Kimberly McCreight

Author:Kimberly McCreight [McCreight, Kimberly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Headline Review
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00


DETECTIVE JULIA SCUTT

SUNDAY, 10:10 A.M.

I’m waiting for the nurse behind the Hudson Hospital reception desk to get me a room number for the John Doe. Feels like she’s been tapping away at her keyboard for twenty minutes, but it’s probably been more like two. The clock is ticking, though, and this entire visit to the hospital could be a dead end.

There are plenty of reasons an assault victim might try to leave against medical advice that have nothing to do with our murder— a domestic situation, debt, some minor outstanding warrant. And Seldon’s already got my team turning to Dan. The only thing that’s going to head that off at the pass is me having a solid suspect, one who’s got nothing to do with Kaaterskill.

“Any luck yet?” I ask, trying to hustle the nurse.

She glares at me— I did hit a little too hard on the yet.

“Does it look like it?” she asks, then goes back to her hunting and pecking.

At least I’ve had Jonathan, Stephanie, and Maeve moved down to the station for safekeeping. It was mostly for their protection. Whoever is our perpetrator could decide to show up at the house and finish what they started. But there are also way too many holes in their story, holes big enough for them to disappear through.

The doors at the end of the hall swing open then, and a man in a white coat and a rubber apron comes through. A morgue guy. My mind flashes back to the night we came down here with Jane’s dental records. With her face smashed, it was the only way to identify her. I’d sat there on the bench between my parents, trying not to fidget with Jane’s ring, already secreted on a chain at my neck. The special one that looked like braided twigs with the teeny sapphire set in between. As soon as we realized she was missing, I’d taken it from Jane’s jewelry box without asking my mom, too afraid she might say no.

I shouldn’t have even been there at the hospital at that age, but ever since Jane disappeared, I hadn’t wanted to let either of my parents out of my sight. We’d be ripped apart before long anyway. Within weeks my dad had switched from the occasional beer with the game to a nightly Johnnie Walker. Soon it would be two Scotches then three, bigger and bigger pours each time. In the years that followed, the man I knew as my father— loving, kind, attentive, and so funny— was replaced by a mean and unpredictable drunk. He died when I was in eighth grade, his car wrapped around a telephone pole on his way back from a client meeting in the city. My mother’s health declined rapidly after that, patchy memory turning into full-blown dementia by the time I was in my second year on the force. The last time I visited before she died, she kept calling me Jane. I didn’t have the heart to correct her.



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