Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories: 3 by Deaver Jeffery

Author:Deaver, Jeffery [Deaver, Jeffery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, thriller, Crime, Suspense, Anthologies
ISBN: 9781455526796
Amazon: 1455526797
Barnesnoble: 1455526797
Goodreads: 18170281
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-03-04T08:00:00+00:00

“YO, LISTEN UP,” the scrawny little man said. “This is interesting.”

“I’m listening.” Malloy tried to look pleasant as he sat across from Lucius the snitch. Before they’d met, Ralph DeLeon reminded him how Malloy had dissed the man earlier. So he was struggling to be nice.

“I followed Reilly to a Starbucks. And she was there, Prescott’s wife.”

“Good job,” DeLeon said.

Malloy nodded. The whole reason to talk to the coauthor had been to push the man into action, not to get facts. When people are forced to act, they often get careless. And while Malloy had been at Reilly’s apartment, DeLeon was arranging with a magistrate for a pen register—a record of phone calls to and from the coauthor’s phones. A register won’t give you the substance of the conversation but it will tell you whom a subject calls and who’s calling him.

The instant Malloy left the condo, Reilly had dialed a number.

It was Jane Prescott’s. And ten minutes after that, Reilly slipped out the front door, head down, moving quickly.

And tailed by Lucius, who had accompanied Malloy to Reilly’s apartment and waited outside.

The scrawny snitch was now reporting on that surveillance.

“Now that Mrs. Prescott, she’s pretty—”

Malloy broke in with “Hot, yeah, I know. Keep going.”

“What I was going to say,” the snitch offered snippily, “before I was interrupted, is that she’s pretty tough. Kind of scary, you ask me.”

“True,” Malloy conceded.

“Reilly starts out talking about you being there.” Lucius poked a bony finger at Malloy, which seemed like a dig but he let it go—as DeLeon’s lifted eyebrow was instructing. “And you were suspecting something. And making up shit about some police procedures and estate tax or something. He thought it was pretty stupid.”

Lucius seemed to enjoy adding that. DeLeon, too, apparently.

“And the wife said, yeah, you were making up something at her place, too. About a memorial service or something. Which she didn’t believe. And then she said—get this. Are you ready?”

Malloy refrained from glaring at Lucius, whose psyche apparently was as fragile as fine porcelain. He smiled. “I’m ready.”

“The wife says that this whole problem was Reilly’s fucking fault for coming up with the same idea he’d used in a book—bribing a doctor to fake a death certificate.”

He and DeLeon exchanged glances.

Lucius continued, “And then she said, ‘Now we’re fucked. What’re you going to do about it?’ Meaning Reilly. Not you.” Another finger at Malloy. He sat back, smugly satisfied.

“Anything else?”

“No, that was it.”

“Good job,” Malloy said with a sarcastic flourish that only DeLeon noted. He slipped an envelope to the snitch.

After Lucius left, happy at last, Malloy said, “Pretty good case.”

“Pretty good, but not great,” the partner replied slowly. “There’s the motive issue. Okay, she wants to kill her husband for the insurance or the estate and a younger man. But what’s Reilly’s motive? Killing Prescott’s killing his golden goose.”

“Oh, I got that covered.” Malloy pulled out his BlackBerry and scrolled down to find something he’d discovered earlier.

He showed it to DeLeon.

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