Read Online Die for You by Lisa Unger - Free Book Online Page B

Bluetooth actually—a little device clipped to her ear which also had a microphone. From a distance, it made her look like nothing so much as a schizophrenic having a passionate conversation with herself. He’d told her this. She’d called him a Luddite. He kept meaning to look it up.
    Inside the car, the heat was kicking. His partner, Jez, kept it at nearly eighty degrees in the winter. She was small, couldn’t stand the cold. He didn’t complain. He’d been raised to give women what they wanted. You can fight , his father told him. You can bitch. If you’re a real prick, you can overpower. But the pain over the long haul? Just not worth it, son. Surrender young and happily with fewer scars . The old man was right about that. And with three sisters, Grady had occasion to learn early. But it was his wife who drove the lesson home—then drove off in his new Acura. Turns out lip service isn’t enough; you have to live the surrender.
    “So … what happened?”
    Crowe pulled out into traffic, cutting off a cabdriver who leaned on his horn.
    “Crowe?”
    “You talking to me? I thought you were still on your communicator . You know—beam me up, Scotty” He tried to add some electronic sounds to the joke but it came off lame. Jez gave him a smile, anyway. She was cool like that.
    “Very funny. Yeah, I’m talking to you. What’d you get?”
    In the movies, female cops were always hot. But on the real job, to Grady’s eyes, they were generally pretty butch—dirty mouths, pumped biceps, chopped hair. Jesamyn Breslow was the exception, though he wouldn’t say she was hot exactly. She was cute. Definitely on the femme side comparatively speaking. But in spite of that button nose and blond bob, she was tough in a very real way, minus the self-conscious bravado of most cops, male or female. She knew kung fu. Really.
    He relayed the story the victim had told him about her husband not coming home, about the phone call, and the people posing as FBI agents. It gelled with what they’d found, the vests discarded at the scene with the white letters stenciled on. It was a rush job. Someone who hadn’t already been distraught and overwhelmed might have noticed right away that the letters were sloppy, unprofessional.
    “She thinks she’d be able to identify some of the people if she saw them again, but beyond that she doesn’t know anything about what happened, or why,” he said, reaching for the coffee in the cup holder. It was as bitter and stone cold as his ex-wife. He drank it, anyway.
    “You sure? You know you’re a sucker for a pretty face.” They’d seen her picture on Marcus Raine’s desk. Jez had recognized her, was actually carrying a paperback of one of her novels in her bag. Isabel Connelly, her maiden name, on the jacket. Not Isabel Raine, her legal, married name.
    “I’m sure,” he said. “She was a mess.”
    Isabel Raine looked like a doll someone had dropped by the side of the road—bashed up, broken, and abandoned. He’d had the urge to dust her off, tuck her into a little bed somewhere.
    “Where are we going?” she asked.
    “She gave us permission to look around her apartment. Said she’d call the doorman to let us in.”
    “No lawyer?”
    “Not yet. She’s focused on finding her husband. She thinks that’s the major problem, that he’s missing and something’s happened to him.”
    “Maybe she really doesn’t know anything.”
    He gave her a quick glance, raised his eyebrows at her. “I’ve still got my wits about me. Not all your partners fall in love with the victim and go off the deep end.” He was referring to Mateo Stenopolis, her partner when she was with Missing Persons. Stenopolis had fallen in love with a missing girl and pretty much laid waste to his life and his career trying to find her—nearly getting himself and Breslow killed in the process.
    “No,” she said with a laugh. “You’re no romantic, Crowe.”
    “Just ask my ex-wife.”
    He listened as Breslow